America Needs to Look Inward and Stop Blaming Others (Transcript)

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This is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. Welcome to another edition. And today I’m going to talk about the American character, some of the things that have changed in America that I think is noteworthy. It follows up a show I did, I don’t know, a month or two ago about the idea that everybody in the world is responsible for the fentanyl problem in America. It seems like for some reason 75% of all fentanyl is used by Americans. It goes through many countries, and they don’t have the problem that we have in this country. We blame China, we blame Mexico, we blame Canada, we blame everybody but ourselves.

Same thing when it goes to tariffs. We’re blaming China, we’re blaming Canada, Mexico and all 184 countries of the world for having what our administration is calling trade deficits because these companies are doing unfair things to America. And in many cases that may be true. Again, should we look inwards more than we should look outwards? If this was, for example, 1950, and I used this example before because it’s a great example, the Volkswagen in the 1950s and the 1960s was probably seven to eight hundred dollars, which in percentage wise, which is more important, probably was a third cheaper than the average car in America. And yet nobody bought them because everyone knew in the 1950s and 1960s that the Volkswagen Beetle, for example, was invented by none other than Adolf Hitler. It was the people’s car.

And people, I remember my uncle not allowing his daughter, my cousin, to buy a Volkswagen or a Japanese car for that matter because he fought in the Japanese side of the war. He didn’t fight in Europe. He fought in, excuse me here, sorry, he fought in the battles out in the Pacific Islands and had some harrowing experiences, which he never would talk about. Many times real veterans that have bad war experiences don’t go into parades and things like that. They just don’t talk about it to anybody. They keep it within, not necessarily very good for their health. But he would not allow his daughters to buy a Japanese car or a German car because they didn’t care what it cost. They were going to buy an American car or a car made anywhere but those two countries. And that all had to do with World War II and a long memory. So the idea that Americans are buying Chinese stuff, some of it is unfair trade practices. I will not disagree. But for example, the Chinese has invested trillion dollars or more in their infrastructure of building things, big plants. I was shown some pictures of a friend of mine who was an importer for me of factories. PPG has a factory, many factories in China, a big American company. So does Sherwin Williams, for example, in my industry. So does Exalta, the former DuPont automotive coatings, you know, that was on Jeff Gordon’s car. These all have these huge factories in China. Now, they did not go there, honestly, to escape labor costs or unions. They went there because of the EPA, because of regulations and because of high taxes in America. Yes, high taxes in America and other reasons. I’m not saying that some labor problems were a reason for companies to go overseas as well.

A lot of times, the unions, especially in the 1970s and 80s, they got all kinds of tariff protections from the Democrats in the Carter administration, even in the Nixon and Ford administrations. And what did they do is they just demanded more and more pay. And they kept their competition that could blow them away out of this country from being able to sell. And therefore, the American public was forced to buy inferior cars from inferior companies that could not sell their products overseas anyway, because they were basically no good. They fell apart in two to three years. One of the reasons, for example, it’s not to do with tariffs, that the Americans can’t sell their cars in Europe is because the Europeans have this belief. And I think based on a lot of historical facts that the American cars just do not compete with in quality wise and many other factors and safety quality and also the size of the cars do not fit the need of the European buyer. That’s one thing that people just don’t want to talk about. But getting back to the American of today, tonight is the eve of the great Titanic disaster of 113 years ago.

I know it’s very old in people’s ideas, but it’s a story that raises his head all the time. Since I was a child, the one mystery was, where is the Titanic? And in 1985, when Robert Ballard found it, and then there has been hundreds of missions to the Titanic with these submarines and that can go down to 12,000 feet and all kinds of pictures. And we’re going to have some stories up tomorrow on The Plain Truth of some of the videos now that were compressed into this, what the Titanic looks like, life size that you can see from these big screens. And it’s quite fascinating about what it looks like on the bottom of the ocean. But let’s compare the American of today with the American of 1912. You know, the richest people in the world, the richest American and the second richest American were on board the Titanic when it sunk. And it turned out that because the law did not require enough lifeboats to be loaded for the amount of passengers, that basically once the captain and the crew realized the boat was going to sink, or I should say the ship, was going to sink, they had to then come to the realization they did not have enough lifeboats to help save the lives of upwards of 700 or 800 people. The tragedy is that because they were so not trained and so uninformed about safety and what to do and panic and things like that, that the crew made mistakes that unfortunately some of the lifeboats never got launched, they got lost, and the ones that did get launched oftentimes were not filled to capacity. And so it turned out out of 1,700 passengers and crew people, about 1,500 died and only about 250 or so were saved.

And it’s a tragedy that’s so horrible that movies have been done every single generation. There’s a new movie about the Titanic, the last with DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Every few years you have a new movie about the Titanic, and it gets people because it’s the boat that was supposedly unsinkable, which it was not. And you’ll see this in the video. We’re going to do a documentary on the whole Titanic story on The Plain Truth today, tomorrow, because it’s 113 years tomorrow that it had sunk. But it started tonight, around midnight tonight, 113 years ago is when they struck the iceberg, if they really did, but I’m not going to get into that right now.

But the point that I’m getting to is the American character then versus the American character today.

If the richest and the second richest and the richest people on the face of the earth were mainly Americans or Europeans, were on that ship sailing to New York on its maiden voyage from England. And when they realized that only women and children could be launched in the boats, the lifeboats, and that the men could not go, there are stories of heroism amongst the very, very rich people and many people of the crew that I don’t know today if we have that type of spirit in this country. I hope we do. I’m not, I’m not disparaging Americans. I’m not saying it’s not happening. I might be disparaging some of these liberal, well, wealthy Americans, but here’s the richest man in the world was John Jacob Astor. His grandfather had started the great fur trading with the beaver pelts in the 1830s, I believe, or 40s and became the richest man, I think in the world, but at least in America, he was a passenger. He paid $30,000 in today’s money for two suites on the Titanic.

And he stayed behind because he would not go into a life raft or even try to buy his way into a life raft. But he made sure that his mistress got onto the life raft and women and children could go. Another story is the second most rich man in America, the richest man in America, Guggenheim from New York. And there’s a museum in New York city to this day in his honor, or maybe with his millions of dollars. I’m not sure how it started, but anyway, he was offered a spot on a boat and he made the statement that he and his butler or manservant, whatever they called it then, would dress up in a tuxedo and go down with the ship. As he said, no woman will die on this ship because I was a coward. And he went down like a man. In the boiler room, if the lights had gone out of the Titanic when it was flooding. And remember what kept the lights going on this ship was the steam caused by the, you know, the fires that cut the boil steam and it ran the motors, but it also ran all the generators which kept the power.

Well, they realized it was pitch black. There was no moon that night. It was so black that if the lights went off, it would be impossible to load life rafts into the sea. No one would have seen. And it would have been a disaster upon everybody probably would have died or no more than 20, 30, 40 surviving. And so the people, the firemen that were stoking the fires, they were, you know, they were the lowest of the working element. They were the lowest paid. And it was the worst job, hot, a hundred degree shoveling coal onto a fire. And boiler number six, I believe it is. Don’t hold me to that. Was the one that ran the generators that kept the lights on. And the 36, all the engineers on that ship, 36 of them, high paid engineers who designed the ship and who knew the ship forwards and backwards, they volunteered. They went down and they told the fire stokers, it’s every man for himself, go up and try to save yourselves…they stood there and they stoked that fire until they were killed in the explosion. When the seawater finally hit that boiler, just as the ship was going to sink and they kept the lights on for another hour themselves doing a job that they didn’t do.

Matter of fact, it probably was really hard on them to do that job because they probably weren’t in shape to do that job, but they did it. And they saved the lives of people below them in stature. It’s not really the case in God’s eyes, but it is, especially in 19th and 20th century English eyes, there was this hierarchy of who’s important and who’s not. And they went down there, and they gave their lives so that the lights would not go out until the moment the boat or the ship sunk. Also, the musicians on board, they played, it’s a famous story, everybody knows, Dance Man on a Titanic, that they played Nearer to God Than Thee, a gospel type song with their violins. They didn’t sing it, but they played the music. As the ship sunk to try to calm the people from panic, and they died and went down. And I believe a violin or two was actually found in all this wreckage when they have retrieved things from the Titanic. But can you imagine today, would the richest people in the world not find a way off that ship? Would the richest people in the world find an excuse to let poor people die? That’s a question I have.

I don’t have the answer to that, but I’ll tell you, God probably does. Because according to the Bible, and if you listen to this show long enough, you hear over and over again, probably to some people don’t want to hear it no more, but the United States of America is part of lost Israel that you can find in your Bible. Back in the time after the kingships of David and Solomon and a few after that, England, I mean England, Israel broke into two separate nations. This is not known by most people in the world, and they just, though every Bible commentary will tell you what I’m telling you, every theologian knows what I’m telling you will tell you, that there was two distinct nations for 150 to 200 years after King Solomon that the nation of the North was called Israel and the nation of the South was called Judah. All modern Jews today were part of the nation of Judah. Judah just is the real name for the nickname Jews. All Jews are from Judah. And the other thing, there was 12 other tribes, because there were actually 13 tribes of Israel after Joseph was broken into two, there were 12 other tribes that were not Jews. All of Israel are not Jews, as is believed today by most people listening to my voice, most scholars, most everybody tries to say that Israel, ancient Israel was all Jews. They are not. Only the tribe of Judah is the Jews. The other 12 tribes were Israelites, and Israel’s name always went with the tribe of Ephraim and Manasseh, which were the tribes of Joseph broken into two, which made originally 13, that number 13 is a clue, original states or nations of Israel.

And wherever Ephraim is, the name Israel goes. And according to the Bible, and if you have any knowledge of where the nations went after they were forced out of the Middle East, you will realize that England, Great Britain, America, Canada are part of lost Israel. We own the title of the name Israel. So whenever you see a prophecy in the Bible, you’ll see there’s prophecies against Judah, and you will see there’s prophecies against Israel. Notice they are kept separate. The prophecy against Judah relates to modern day Jews. The prophecy against Israel relates to modern day lost, and it’s not really lost, Israel. And lost Israel is the nations like Denmark, the Mark of Dan, Ireland, Scandinavia, Dan again, England, Wales, Scotland, France’s Reuben, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Australia. These are part, these nations are part of lost Israel, which really is not lost. And whenever you see the tribulation prophecies, any prophecies talking about the return of Christ, the return of Messiah in the Old Testament, and it talks about the latter days or the end times, it’s always talking about Judah separate from Israel. And it’s a very important concept to understand that America is part of lost Israel. And so we know what God thinks of us. This is not Bob Barney speaking what God thinks of this country. This is God speaking what God thinks of this country. As closer we get to the tribulation, and I do not know when that’s going to happen, I have no concept, no clue. There are people today, you go to YouTube, and you say, yeah, it’s going to happen right after this Passover. It’s going to happen next year. It’s going to happen in A.D. 2027 on March 14th.There’s always some wacko out there predicting the end time and when it’s going to be. And they don’t have a clue when it’s going to be, to be honest. And that’s the plain truth. But there is going to be an end time. But before the end time comes, we are told that the nations of Israel, that’s France, Netherlands, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, et cetera, et cetera, are going to go into captivity. Why? Because of our refusal to obey God and be good people.

Now think about that. So when I go back to saying the fentanyl crisis is an American crisis, it’s an American problem, it is not a Chinese problem, it is not a Mexican drug trafficking problem, because if Americans didn’t take those drugs, then we would not have a fentanyl problem, would we? The same thing you can say with every other problem that’s happening with America. As I said, and I’ve said this over and over and over again, like a broken record, there’s seven and a half million able-bodied males in this country not working. Why aren’t they working? How are they surviving? There is, I should say, 38% of the American workforce, this is not people on social security, these are not, these are able-bodied people, male and female, there are 38% of this population not in the workforce for one reason or another. And they’re not counted in the unemployment number, because the unemployment number is only counting the people trying to get unemployment, and that’s it. So you got to realize, why don’t 38% of the people work? Or if they are working, they’re working under the table. I listened to a report last week about Republicans complaining that under the Biden administration, yes, 150,000 people got jobs last year in the 2024, but they all went to foreign workers, illegal aliens, and American workers lost 100,000 jobs. But then you have to ask yourself a question. Did American workers really lose 100,000 jobs, or did they decide they did not want to work, and only the illegal aliens have a work ethic that do want to work? Well, as an owner of a business, I can tell you right now that I don’t know a business in this country that is not looking to hire somebody, even in this bad economy, if they’re looking to hire good American people, and they’re not showing up.

And then, you know, you might hear, well, there’s only 4% unemployment. Well, there’s really 38% unemployment. We already know that. The point that I’m trying to make here is our problems that we’re facing today, that we’re trying to solve, our president is trying to solve, our Congress is trying to solve, and our leaders are trying to solve, our problems are within, not without. We have to get back a spirit of God and a spirit of work ethic in order for this nation to become the world leader in everything again. Back in the 1930s and 40s and the 1950s, the golden age of America, Americans had a work ethic that the world envied. While the world was on vacation somewhere, Americans were working 50, 60, 70 hours a week, getting overtime, living the middle life, middle life, I should say, the middle-class lifestyle that became as an American institution in the 1950s. One man, supporting his family, could work a job and make enough money with regular pay and overtime, with all the benefits the big corporations gave back then, that the wife could stay at home and be an at-home mother, like leave it to beaver days, when the mother stayed home and the father went to work. That’s the American way of the 1950s and a lot of the 1960s.Women really did not get into the workforce until the late 1970s, because of the Carter administration’s failed policies. Women had to go to work in order to support the family, because one income could no longer support the American family. This is an American problem. I am not saying that the president and the Congress should not go after countries that are misusing us with trade imbalances. NAFTA was a disaster. World Trade Organization is a disaster. But until we get our house in order, we shouldn’t go to war with another country and blame them for our lack of morality. And we have a lack of morality. I’m not saying you’re listening to me are evil or you don’t have immorality.

I would say probably 50, 60% of Americans are very moral, decent people. But you’re being torn down. You’re being dragged in under the ground by those 20, 30% of the American people who are into drugs. They’re into illicit sex. They’re into not working. They’re into laziness. They’re into music that absolutely worships a culture of murder and rape and deceit. I read a story just today, looking in my phone, looking at my mail, and I think it was on AOL, because that’s my mail. And it said that, and I don’t even know this statistic can be true, but it must be, I would say. One out of six women in America have either been raped or there was an attempted rape on them. One out of six. You don’t think that’s a sick country? Now you’re going to say, oh, that’s all illegal aliens. No, it’s not all illegal aliens. I will agree. There are many murders and many deaths, many rapes and many attempted rapes by these illegal aliens. But we have those under control. The one thing the Trump administration has done is they’ve stopped the border crossings. Have they not? It’s nearly zero.

And they’re deporting the heck out of all these violent criminals, which I am in favor of. If it’s done legally, I am in favor of it. But the truth of the matter is America is a perverse nation. Not the majority of us, I hope, but enough of us where God basically is turning his head in disgust because we as a people are not calling it out. We want to blame China. We want to blame Canada. We want to blame Europe. We want to blame Iran. We want to blame everybody but ourselves. And that’s the plain truth. And unless we change what we are doing, we are heading for a national calamity. And it’s coming. The Bible says it’s coming. I’m just hoping that it doesn’t come in my lifetime, in the lifetime of my children. And I believe the good news is we can prevent it as a nation.

God is true to his word. God says if you go to him in prayer and you admit your sins to him and you make your national sins to him, he will heal our land and make us prosper again. It’s his word.God doesn’t go back on his word like people do, like politicians do. God is to be trusted. But how many out there today really trust that the Lord God is on their side or listening to their prayers? Well, it’s time that America collectively tries to petition their God and ask their God to take control of this country, put the spirit in our leaders again that they used to have to care about America first, as President Trump is trying to do, and not worry about this minority and that minority and this thing and that thing that is tearing the morality out of America. And that’s the story I have today. It’s a continuation of one I did a month or so ago, but I can’t stress it enough that America needs to find its calling. And its calling is God is calling.

We need to go to God in prayer nationally, maybe fasting and everything, but just prayer and ask God to make this country back in his spirit again. And you’ll see a change. You’ll see the disappearance of drugs.

You know, everybody laughed at Nancy Reagan when they asked her, what about drugs? And she said, just say no. Now there was no tariffs. There was no going after Mexico or Columbia. We did some, but not very much. But you know, the drug crisis, and this is provable. I mean, I’ve read statistics, started to plummet with the just say no campaign of Nancy Reagan. And when she said it, by the way, frankly, I thought it was stupid. I really thought as I was in my thirties, I said, yeah, let’s say no is going to really turn off a drug user. Right.But it started to work with the younger people in school. And by the time of the nineties rolled around and really by the time of the late nineties, drug use started to really decline in this country. And it was all because there was a spirit change in the children of this country, not looking at drugs for everything.

Well, I want to save and end this program by another little brief commercial, a live commercial for the plain truth.com. I believe it’s the only site you can go to where you see God’s perspective in today’s news, what you can do and understand what the Bible is saying about the fate of you, your family, this nation, and this world. It’s all spread out in front of you in the Bible. And you can read it for yourself.

You don’t need some holy roller to hold your hand and send them a lot of money in order to understand what the Bible is saying. The Bible says plainly what it says it’s saying. I get a laugh out of, you know, the Bible says, do not think I come to abolish the law.Red letter, Jesus Christ. Do not think I have come to abolish the law. Theologians say, well, he didn’t mean that.He means he came to abolish mosaic law. The exact opposite, the opposite world. And we have to read the words on the page and believe them.And the Bible calls that faith, by the way. So theplaintruth.com is where you’re going to get that information along with these podcasts, theplaintruthtoday.com. You can go right to these podcasts from there. We also have, which we’re going to have a couple of shows this week about your health today.There are things going on, bad things in our diets and bad things that we do that we can actually prolong our health and our lifespan. If we follow some pure godly principle on eating and on health in general, health comes from God. God wants us to be healthy and prosperous.Same thing with the economy, by the way, following God’s purposes of giving and not greed, you will get prosperous in the long run. The Bible is an economic book too, how to make money, how to invest money. There’s a reason that God is a big believer in gold and silver.And if we’re seeing lately, gold is going through the roof. Whenever the times get bad, people run back to the biblical times of gold and silver.

Never forget that.

So remember, theplaintruth.com and theplaintruthtoday.com will get you all the information you need to understand what God wants you to know, in my humble opinion. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, saying thank you for listening. We appreciate you. God bless you. Goodbye.