Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: Independence Day Show July 4, 2025 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: Independence Day Show July 4, 2025

Hello, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, part of the Plain Truth.com website, and it is Friday, Friday wrap-up, 4th of July Friday wrap-up, and we’re going to get into that right after these words. Hi, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the one place to go to every day to find out what’s going on around you, what it means to you and your family and your loved ones. That’s theplaintruth.com. Go there every day. Thank you.

Well, Friday and the wrap-up, we’re going to go over the 4th of July events. We’re going to go over what’s going on. Of course, the big news still is the big budget deal that was approved by the Senate and by the House with a lot of people giving in, which we knew that was going to happen anyway. They could not pass this bill. I think this is a horrible bill. I think it’s burying us deeper in debt. It’s going to destroy the economy of this country. But if they did not pass this bill and they allowed the largest tax increase on working class Americans ever, then I think we would be catapulted into a depression within weeks, because if people realize that this year they were going to be paying big taxes that they haven’t paid in many, many years, and this tax increase that they did not expect coming, they thought would be bailed out of, the world economy as well as the American economy would absolutely panic. So I think Donald Trump’s in a winning hand here. He understands the people of his party cannot in force deny what’s going to happen. Like I said, if they do, there would be there would be all kinds of problems after the taxes hit and when people found out what they ended up owing Uncle Sam. So that’s the story about that. Well, when I get into both, I did not cover and I did not plan to cover the Diddy trial, the Cohn trial, and I didn’t. The Plain Truth Message Board was covering the Idaho student killer trial over the years, the man who killed those poor children, or I should say students, college students in Moscow, Idaho.

5:10 He pleaded guilty and he pleaded guilty in a way that actually surprised me and surprised other people that I know understand the law. Because unlike most of the times, if he went through the jury trial and he did not cop a plea, he would have the ability to appeal the death sentence if he got it, which he would have. And these appeals would probably go on for the next 20 years. And he always had a slim possibility of escaping through appeal. Appeals sometimes work, even against the people that shouldn’t work. We all know that. We see what’s wrong with the system and how bad people get let loose all the time. But that’s not what this man did. Not only did he cop a plea and agree to killing these students and to try to keep himself from getting the death penalty but knowing he would have life without parole sentence. But here’s the killer. In this plea deal, in the prosecution, they’re taking some heat right now, especially from a lot of these right-wing commentators. They make statements that it’s like throwing meat to the dogs.

8:33 And that’s what they’re doing. They’re throwing meat to the dogs to people who want to hear rah, rah, rah, rah. And they don’t even understand what they’re talking about. This deal that the state of Idaho did is ingenious. It was an ingenious deal. They, in this plea bargain, took this man’s constitutional right away, and it’s not going to be changed because he understands it and signs it, that he can never appeal this case for any reason, even if it turns out he wasn’t guilty. Can you imagine that? And he signed that. I know a few people, a few lawyers even, who are absolutely surprised that his legal team would even suggest that he should sign that, even though he’s guilty as maybe sin. But the idea that he loses all appellant rights, a murder, a convicted murder on Death Road, hasn’t lost their appeal rights. And the way the court system runs in this country, that appeal process would have lasted, I don’t know, 20, 25 years before he would ever face the executioner. And who knows what could happen in those 20 or 25 years. So that was a big shock to a lot of people. Now, what was not a shock to me was the Diddy trial. We covered it, and I’m not going to spend more than one minute talking about it, if that. We didn’t cover it on purpose because it’s a trial that’s just nonsense to be covered. The man’s a pig. But probably the jury came back with the right thing. I don’t think most of these people who are claiming victimhood today probably were victims. But I like to see the guy still, for what they were young girls in many cases, and there were a lot of people maybe they knew what they were doing, and now they want to get on the bandwagon and say they didn’t. But the guy is a pig. The guy deserved to go to jail anyway for all the crimes he did with these young girls and stuff like that. I have no sympathy for this man. I have no interest in following this case, never did. And I don’t really care what happens to him. Don’t sound very Christian, maybe, to some people out there. I don’t care. Now, if he finds Christ in prison, which a lot of them do, I’ll believe it when I see it.

10:56 The problem is presidents, including Donald Trump, just simply do not believe what the Bible says. They can tell you they do. They can wear Christ on their shoulders and their sleeves and sweat Christ’s blood when they talk to you. But the truth of the matter is, if they understood the Bible, they would realize lasting peace in the Middle East is only going to come by the power and the prestige and the will of Jesus Christ when he returns to this earth someday in the future and forces peace upon the people that are still alive. And that’s going to be very few of the 8 billion here today or whatever it will be. There’s going to be very few of those alive. There are many passages of the Bible that suggest that 90% of the world’s population will die during the Great Tribulation. Well, think about what 90% of 8 or 9 billion people means. There’s a lot of deaths, a lot of deaths. And it’s a very shocking, sobering idea. And too many people don’t believe it or they take it with a grain of salt and or they think they’re going to survive through it. Well, I think Christ is on my side and I think I have the love of Christ behind me. Sometimes I wonder, sometimes I wonder if God can overlook my sins, but I believe that God can look over anybody’s sins who asks for it. But at the same time, I do not look ahead to living through the Tribulation, even if I know that God will do something to spare my life, because I’m not even sure of that. Because there’s going to be, according to Jesus’s own words, there’s going to be many, many martyrs that come out of the Great Tribulation or don’t come out of the Great Tribulation except on the other side when they become a spiritual being, the literal children of God, born again into this family of God as spiritual beings. A lot of people are going to die believing in Christ, giving his message out, but become martyrs because that is the plan of God. And the good news about that, the people who will be martyred are most likely, in my opinion, my opinion here, are going to be the ones that are the strongest. The strongest amongst us are the ones that God is going to really require a lot more out of than the weakest amongst us. And many weak people will become strong when God’s Spirit empowers them to become strong and face death and take death however it comes. Look at, in the Book of Acts, look at what happened with Stephen, and in other books you read what happened to James, the brother of Jesus. These people died horrible deaths.

12:30 They were not spared. They did not have a wall of protection because they were leaders of the church or they were Christians and they believed in Christ. But Christ is going to save the majority of his people before returning. He says so in Matthew 24 when he says, for the elect’s sake, for the elect’s sake, those days will be shortened. So if they weren’t shortened, not even the elect would have survived. That is why the thought of war in the Middle East or war with Ukraine or war with Iran always bothers me and people take it too lightly because I understand what would happen in a worldwide nuclear exchange and the suffering and the slow horrible deaths that so many people in this world will face.

And we’ll get off that subject, but hopefully we have in our lifetime a little bit of peace in the Middle East for a while. This world could sure use it and this economy, the world’s economy, could sure use a little stabilization. Hopefully, you know, these tariff situations still not under control by Donald Trump. I think he’s doing market manipulation. I really do believe there’s corruption here. I hate to say this, but there’s just no way that with the knowledge he has and the power that he has forcing Wall Street to go up and down, up and down, that you’re not, somebody on his side is not investing in stocks that are going to go up and selling those stocks they know are going to go down just by what release he puts on Truth Social. And I have a problem with Truth Social. He owns this website. He should not be putting government information. His speeches are all government information. Whenever he gives an answer, it should be public information. And so it should be released to every single public media. It should be not, Truth Social has to be copyrighted here like you always are. Trump said on Truth Social, it should be Trump said on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Truth Social, Joe and Mary’s message board, you name it. It should be everywhere.

It’s public information. He is a public figure. But unfortunately, there’s just seems to be a lot of money changing hands.

14:01 Now he’s selling a cologne for $250 a bottle. You think your president should be hawking shirts, hats and cologne and watches and sneakers? Do you think that’s really proper for a president to do? I know you think if you’re a Donald Trump supporter, it is. There’s nothing wrong with that. He’s making a living, right? I bet you would have a problem with it if it was Joe Biden, if it was Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. You would. And that’s the problem that I see in America today with this polarization. If you like somebody, no matter what they do, you excuse it. Look at what the Democrats excuse with Joe Biden. Here’s a man who didn’t even know if his shoes were on or not. And they cover for him. They lied for him. And now they’re lying for themselves to say they didn’t know it. And on the other side, you had the people who supported Donald Trump, who said they couldn’t stand the lies from the Biden people. They couldn’t stand all the stuff that Barack Obama did. They ridiculed Barack Obama when he bombed Syria, for example, after the red line got crossed a hundred times. But when Donald Trump does it, these same people have no problem with it at all. If Donald Trump wants to sell sneakers or he wants to sell cologne, they have no problem with it at all. Let’s see if they have a problem when the next president is a Democrat and starts doing the same thing and says, well, Donald Trump did it. Because that’s what’s happening here. We are having precedence’s being set by this president and this administration that is going to come back to bite everybody when the next people come into the White House. And they take that precedent and they embellish it and take more rights away from Congress, the Supreme Court, the local courts, and you and me. Because this is the 4th of July weekend. We’re going to end about the 4th of July. This is the 4th of July weekend when there was a document. That’s why we celebrate the 4th of July for all you kids to go to school today. And you’d think the 4th of July was something that we did in 4th of July in 1776, because we were writing a paper on Germany or something. Some of the nonsense that’s taught in these schools today or not taught in these schools today. But in 1776, we had a document.

We had a very important document written mainly by Thomas Jefferson, which did what? It told us that our rights, our liberty, our freedoms, our right to happiness is all controlled and given to us free of charge by God and not by any government or any man. That was revolutionary in its time, and it still is today. There has never been a more important document written by a human being in his own mind. Now, I’m talking about a prophet writing God’s words like in the Bible when God says, Thus saith the Lord. Write that down, Jeremiah. Thus saith the Lord. No, this was written by a man who was somewhat of an agnostic. He did believe in God. He did not believe Christ was divinity, by the way. People don’t know that about Thomas Jefferson. He denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. And Jefferson actually wrote his own Bible. I got a copy of one in my library. Jefferson wrote a Jefferson Bible where he cut and pasted out parts of the Bible that he liked and he threw away the parts he didn’t like because it didn’t hold up to his standards of what he thought the Bible should say. But at the same time, this man was about, I think he was like 25, 26 years old at the time or a really young man at the time.

16:22 And he just did a phenomenal job writing what liberties are and how every single person born in the world, honestly, not just America, have the right to the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because that right comes from their creator, not from any government, not from any dictator, not from any man, not from any church. Think about that. And that’s what we are celebrating. I know most people today think it’s a day off from work and it’s a time to have hot dogs and hamburgers around the fireplace and to be with your family and play sports or go fishing or hunting or all kinds of different things, play baseball or go to a baseball game. I remember in my day, the big thing on the 4th of July was to go to a baseball game, either the Mets games or the Yankee games. And there was always, a lot of times there were double headers on those games if they were home that year, playing for the 4th of July in the home stadium. So it’s very easy to understand. It’s a great holiday to have and all of this nonsense, but I shouldn’t say nonsense, but all of these festivities of the 4th of July and the fireworks. By the way, the fireworks just symbolize the rockets that is used in warfare. And that really comes from the War of 1812, which was our second fight for independence because 30 years or so after the Revolutionary War, when we won our right to be our own nation, it almost got taken away from us in the War of 1812 when England decided to attack us, declare war on us. And their whole intention, they burnt Washington DC down to the ground, they burnt the White House out. The White House had to be rebuilt, had to be redone because it was burned down by the British soldiers.

19:40 And the only thing that stopped these fires, by the way, we have this on the Plain Truth if you go search for it, the only thing, a hurricane, a hurricane hit Washington DC during the invasion of Washington DC by the British in the War of 1812 and it put out the fires. And everyone at the time knew it was the will of God and the protection of God for this new nation because this nation is the first nation since the ancient Israelites that understood that it was a nation under God, the God of our Bible. The God we know is Jesus Christ, number one, that’s the truth, that’s the Lord of the Bible, the Lord is Jesus Christ, and God the Father is above all. God the Father is not even basically mentioned in the Old Testament, people don’t even believe that. They think the Old Testament God had called people out for their sins and ordered the execution of a person who just went out and picked extra manna on the Sabbath day, that was a harsh God, he had no forgiveness in him at all. Well that was Jesus Christ, that was the God who became Jesus Christ that ordered Sabbath breakers to be killed, ordered entire pagan peoples to be butchered, women, children, and the fighting men, old people, to be killed by Israel when they conquered the land. Yes, that’s the God of the Old Testament, is Jesus Christ. People don’t want to believe that. But this country needs to go back to God and look at God and what God expects from us if we want to slow down this decline that our nation is in.

19:56 We are in a national decline, our power is waning, and we feel great about ourselves because we as a people are very ignorant of world affairs, of what other countries are, what other things are going on, we are very ignorant. We watch one or two news stations, we watch the local news, and we watch Fox, or we watch the local news, we watch MSNBC, or we watch the local news, we watch CNN, or we don’t watch any news on TV, we get to news from the one newspaper that comes, or worse yet, we get our news from Facebook, right? And we get the news we want to see, because Facebook knows exactly what news to feed you by what you like, and so they’re going to only feed you the news you want to see, and so we have today the most ignorant people in this country that we ever had. I know we look back at the colonials, or we look back at the people who moved west, and we said, oh, they had fourth and fifth grade educations and one-room schoolhouses, I got news for you. There is not a college person today who could pass the 19, I think it is 08, test of an eighth grader had to pass back then, the knowledge they had to have. The people that came out of these one-room schoolhouses were far, far smarter than the people we have today who are voting, and they’re voting out of ignorance. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not just these kids coming out of college today talking about global warming who don’t know who even fought in World War II. You see these man-on-the-street interviews all the time, who did we fight in World War II? England? This is what we have, our school system, but this is not just our school system. You have people in their 60s and 70s who watch one source of news. They believe whatever they see on that station they’re watching. They never question a thing. If they’re anti-Trump, they only listen to MSNBC, and they only know the things that Trump’s done wrong. Ninety percent of the time, what’s being told about what Trump did wrong is wrong, and they’re not even accurate. And then the other side, the people who watch Fox News, I’ll give you an example. The other day, and we put this up on the Plain Truth message board, there was a study on what Americans thought about America, and the headline of the study is Americans are most pessimistic about the future of this country ever.

22:28 Fox News had that same poll, and the title of that is, when we come back, we’re going to talk about the latest poll that shows Americans are the most proud in 50 years of this country. That’s not what it said. If you go and you actually read the article, I believe, I forgot what newspaper it was that they linked to from the website I was on.When you actually read the article of the actual questions and the results of the questions, their headline was accurate, that the United States has lost, the average citizen polled in this poll, had lost faith in this country, in its leaders, in its president. And it was, I’ll give you an example, 74% of the people were proud to be Americans in 2009, and I think it was 54, 55, and now. Who was president in 2009? Barack Obama.If you can’t beat Barack Obama on being patriotic and loving this country, there is something drastically wrong. That’s all I got to say. You go back in the 1950s, especially, and you would have that poll, it would be 95% of Americans thought we were the greatest people on the face of the earth, the powerfulest people on the face of the earth, and the most religious people on the face of the earth. And you want to know what? They were right. They were, we were, and we’ve lost it all. And we lost it all very, very quickly as time goes by. And we’re going to pay an awful bad price because of it. We are watching the decline of modern Israel, and that’s us. I’m not talking about the Jews living in the Middle East.

24:35 Modern Israel is the United States of America and England and the English-speaking places like Canada, Australia, and England, Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland. And we are watching a decline that you have to go back in the book of Kings and Chronicles and see the decline of ancient Israel following the same route we’re following today. We are as much of a Baal-worshiping nation today as we’ve ever been. We love our traditions. We love our religion the way we want to follow religion. We don’t care what God thinks about what we want to do or what we should do when it comes to obeying him. No, we want to follow our own way, and God will forgive us if we’re wrong. That’s the thing you hear all the time. Oh, God’s gonna, you do your best and God will forgive you if you don’t. Well, there’s some basic truth to that if your heart is in the right place. But unfortunately, the people doing this most of the time, their heart is not in the right place. Their heart is, they’re playing games with God, bargaining for their salvation, just in case that God’s real, because they think maybe he’s not either.

27:32 And that’s going to land these people in a lot of trouble. And there’s a lot of false teaching going on. I have to admit, there’s a lot of false teaching going on, even in the churches of God who do follow the Sabbath and who have many of the right points, that everybody’s going to be saved in the end. Well, that’s not what the Bible says. I know you heard that from Herbert Armstrong, and if you’re an Armstrong follower, you heard it from these other off branches. You heard it from even his son, Garner Ted Armstrong. But the truth is, not everybody’s going to be saved in the end. The Bible says so. Read it for yourself. There are going to be people who are absolutely burned up and destroyed on that great judgment day. They’re not going to have a second chance, at least that’s what the Bible says. Now, if God can change his mind, and Christ did one time say, one time, by the way, who can be saved? And Christ said, man, it’s impossible. With God, anything is possible. And so people cling to that by thinking everybody’s got a second chance. Well, the people who have a second chance are the people who really never knew the gospel, who never understood it, never maybe even was taught it if they live in Africa, China, places like that.

28:03 But the people who absolutely know that God exists and then denies God, it’s called the unpardonable sin, and they are doomed, absolutely doomed according to the word of God. If God is going to do what he promises or change his mind, that’s up to God. That’s not up to you or me. But if I was one of those people playing that game with God, I would not feel very good about my chances. Let’s put it that way. I would not feel very good about my chances at all. Well, I do hope that everyone has a very good 4th of July, a very good one. We’re in the middle of it right today. Our parent company, I will give one plug. I don’t plug our company other than I say that TAMCO pays for all of this. I never ask for money. I will never ask for money. You will never even be able to send me any money. The only money you’ll ever get from me, if you buy our Bible, the Plain Truth Bible on Amazon, and they get all the money and I get two bucks a book. But anyway, TAMCO Paint, if you are in the paint world and you paint cars or paint equipment or tractors or whatever, we’re having a big sale again this weekend, as we did Memorial Day weekend, and it’s a patriotic 25% off sale, and the money I get from that is what sponsors this show. So anyway, that’s the only plug you’ll ever hear. You’re never going to hear a request for money. Everything you find, you can get free.

29:01 You can email me for any comments you have or any question you want me to answer. All I want to say before I go off today, all I want to say is don’t look to me as a replacement of some other human being that you used to follow. You should be following no man. You should be following no woman. You should be following Jesus Christ. Do as I do by following Jesus Christ. That’s what Paul said. Paul said, don’t follow me, really. He said, follow me as I follow Christ. And I’m saying, if you ask me a question and I respond to you, I’m going to tell you the same thing every time. This is provable in the Bible, and here’s the proof, or this is my opinion, and my opinion is my opinion. It’s not coming from God. I am not a prophet of God. I don’t speak with God. I wish I did. I wish God would come to me. I honestly do, but he doesn’t. And so I’m left to do this on my own, but I’m hoping God is inspiring me with a lot of these words. And if so, I’m happy. But always go and prove it to yourself with your own Bible from the words of Christ. That’s all I can say. Have a safe, blessed Fourth of July weekend. Until Monday, Bob Barney, the plain truth. Bye-bye.