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Columbus, Korea, and a Crossroads- with Bill Federer
A pastor jailed, newsrooms warned, and global power pressing in—when we sat down with Bill Federer, the story out of South Korea sounded less like headlines and more like a playbook. We walk through raids on churches, lawfare against dissent, and how technology vendors, rare earths, and diplomatic gaps create a pressure cooker most outlets won’t touch. The pattern will feel familiar: intimidate the press, criminalize opponents, and move fast before anyone can organize a response. That’s why we talk openly about leadership pipelines and why equipping young people and citizens with constitutional literacy and moral courage isn’t optional—it’s survival.
From there, we pivot to a Columbus most people have never met. Not a caricature, but a navigator shaped by Marco Polo’s Travels, a misread of Arabic miles, and the closing of overland routes after 1453. Bill takes us from the Mongol court to a Genoese prison cell, from hurricanes that destroyed fleets to a slow gold ship that changed a reputation, from Arawak hospitality to Carib cannibalism, from political jealousy to chains, from the naming of Trinidad to a predicted lunar eclipse on a stranded beach that bought another chance. It’s vivid, human history—messy, consequential, and resistant to propaganda.
What ties Seoul’s silence to the fight over Columbus Day is the struggle for narrative power. If you can sour a people on their past, you can sell them any future. We push past the one-note takes to hold competing truths at once: genuine indigenous suffering, undeniable transformation across hemispheres, and the constant tension between greed and the gospel. Listen, share with a friend who loves real history, and if the conversation moves you, leave a review and subscribe so we can keep bringing you candid, well-sourced stories that sharpen your mind and steady your heart.
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Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of Faith and Culture. This is the WallBuilders Show taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. And we're gonna get some history today. And Bill Federer is with us to give us some of that background. I'm Rick Green. Bill Federer love you, brother. Appreciate your time today, man. Thanks for coming on.
Bill Federer [00:00:22] Hey, Rick. Great to be with you.
Rick Green [00:00:24] Yeah, man. Well, I know we're gonna talk Columbus Day today, but I gotta ask you about the South Korea thing. Because I know you and Charlie and and Rob had been over there, and Rob just went back. I don't know if you went back with him on that on that recent trip, but this is such a big deal that nobody's talking about it's so underreported. And and some of our audience they're they they're so familiar with you in the history and the books and everything, and they're not necessarily familiar with how close you are to Charlie and the things you were you were doing with Charlie. So let's start there and then we'll go to Columbus Day. But I guess just give us a little bit of the background of what you were doing with Charlie and and why you guys all went to South Korea and then and then we'll jump into C Columbus Day.
Bill Federer [00:01:03] Right. So Mina Kim organized build up Korea. It's sort of a turning point equivalent over there for the last five years. And she has worked hard. For those not familiar, there is communist China and they have ambitions. And of course, they got Taiwan promising to have freedom, but now we've know that that that's not the case. They crack down on dissenters. We know that the communist China wants Taiwan, and they're always threatening to invade and they're spending money over the different countries in the Pacific, they come in with money and they buy politicians and they set up businesses and then they influence the elections through people that are living there. Of course, the whole China Silk Road initiative, it's the bribe of the bullet. They come into a country, so you you play our game and we'll bribe the politicians. If you don't, bad things will happen. They do the same thing in Africa. Why? Out of the 15 rare earth metals used in phones, computers, missiles, automobiles, eight of them China has a monopoly on. Oh wow. So they have global ambitions. The Panama Canal, these different na naval choke points around the world, building deep water ports in the Bahamas and the Dardanelles. And anyway, there's a communist Chinese company named Huawei. It's a big computer company, and they have election computers. And for some reason, South Carolina decided to use Huawei computers for their elections. And lo and behold, a pro-communist Chinese person got elected president. Due to the polling showing that this wasn't supposed to happen, the previous president decided to secure the computers to have them checked before they were erased. And the left over there accused the previous president of wanting to seize the computers to avoid the election outcome and keep himself in power. Sound familiar. And they impeached the previous president, put him in jail for three months. The they let him out, the new president gets sworn in and puts him back in prison with his wife. And she's supposedly down to ninety pounds. I don't know if she's gonna survive. And then he raids the naval and military bases that have been working with the Americans and seizing their computers and and then he begins to send a delegation over to communist China for their big military parade. This has never happened before and reaches out to North Korea and then the person that was talking to us said, Yeah, he's friends with Bill Gates and wants to force millions of vaxxes on the country mandatorily, even though COVID is over. And and then he's pushing the trans agenda all really fast. And so the pastor, son, S-O-N of Seguro Church in Busan. It's the largest church in southern area of Korea. And he's the only church in the entire nation not to shut down with COVID. And he's very courageous, former special forces, and he organizes a million Koreans to protest the trans bill. And there's drone footage of four kilometers of Koreans in the capitalist Seoul protesting the trans agenda. We're we're sort of over the the hump when it comes to the trans agenda. I spoke last week at an event with Chloe Cole. She's the young girl, 12 years old. They brainwashed her into cutting off parts of her body, and then she grew out of it, and she's like, Why didn't you stop me? Oh, we're what a courageous yo, man, she's incredible. Yeah. And so we're sort of getting over the trans agenda, realizing that it's a false thing. But in Korea, they're pushing it. And so the current president raids Pastor Son's house and seizes his cell phones and computers and files 22 lawfare charges against him. And they even raided the house of the pastor of the largest church in the world, the Yojo full gospel church, started by Paul Yanghi Cho, but he's since passed away, so there's a new pastor. But they rated his house and they're rating we met with some of the big businesses there in South Korea. Some of them are global businesses, and they've been supporting Mina Kim the last five years, but they said we can't touch you this year because this government is coming up with fraudulent charges and wanting to throw CEOs in prison. And so anyway, we're meeting with this pastor in the back room, right before you go out on stage to speak. And there's Charlie and Rob McCoy and Mina Kim, and then Pastor Son, and he's saying that they're threatening to put him in jail. And Charlie says, if they put you in jail, I personally am gonna call President Trump. And then he pulls out his phone, he starts texting away to Marco Rubio and Marco Rubio at the memorial, even said, My last text from Charlie was in South Korea, and there's some very disturbing things I need to talk to you about. That's a hefty Rolodex. And and two days after we left, they arrested Pastor Son and he's in jail right now. And and they're also arresting the people that were doubting the election this last time around and they're putting being put in jail. And and none of it's making the news. Why? Because they're threatening to put the news people in jail if they do report it.
Rick Green [00:06:25] It's amazing how similar the game plan is, right, of of these communists it there, what they tried to do here, the the the guy in Bolsonaro in in in Brazil. I mean it's it's almost like they're running the same playbook in in all of these countries that are teetering.
Bill Federer [00:06:41] Yeah, and I said, Well, what about the American ambassador to Korea? They go, Oh, it's a Biden holdover. It's one of those confirmation that's being held up. You know, the whole thing with the Democrats and Senator Thune and and not get confirming people and and and so this is happening quickly, and they don't want it to get international news. And so God bless Rob. He said it he tells Pastor Sawan, if they arrest you, I personally will fill your pulpit. And Charlie Turns and says and if they arrest Rob McCoy, it'll be a three hundred percent tariff on South Korea.
Rick Green [00:07:15] Wow. Well, it's it's it's going to be it just seems like a a battleground that we can't ignore. It's too important. And and I didn't even realize the rare earth materials you were talking about, that battle and and you know the role that South Korea plays in so much of that. I definitely gotta hear your take on Columbus Day. On the history of Columbus Day, there's all these efforts always to get rid of Columbus Day and do Indigenous People Day and all that kind of stuff. So I know David and Tim have their book American Story, and they go really deep into this, but nobody better, Bill, than you, to give a 10 minute in one breath. You only get one breath. Seriously. So so Bill, give us some history on today, which we celebrate as Columbus Day.
Bill Federer [00:09:04] Right. Well, 1206, Genghis Khan conquers from Korea to Hungary to Russia, has the largest contiguous land empire in world history. And between the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, believe it or not, the Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, writes a letter to King Louis IX of France saying, Hey, you attack the Muslims by sea, we'll attack the Muslims by land. Evidently, those letters got either lost or destroyed or whatever. But but nevertheless, it was between the Seventh and Eighth Crusades that Mateo and Nicolopolo are chased out of Constantinople because they're deciding to drive the Venetians out, and they settle on the Black Sea in an area controlled by Genghis Khan. And then Matteo and Nicola Polo decide to go east five thousand six hundred miles. It's a six-year journey, and they make it to the court of Kublakan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, who's now ruling China and what's called the Yuan Dynasty. Kubala Khan sends him back to Europe and says, Bring me a hundred teachers of the Christian faith and a flask of oil from the empty tomb in Jerusalem, that church there. And so they get back to Europe, and they in 1271 bring along young Marco Polo on their return trip trip to China. Instead of a hundred teachers of the holy faith, the Pope had just died, and they elected a new one, Gregory the 10th, but he was busy with wars in Europe and only sent two preaching Dominican friars instead of 100 teachers of the Christian faith. And they get scared going through Armenia because the Sultanate of Egypt wiped out like tens of thousands of Christians in Armenia. And so these friars get scared and go back. You wonder how history would have been different had they gone, being that they had an open door to evangelize China. So Marco Polo goes over there and the the Kublakan likes him and makes him an envoy. He works for him for 17 years. Finally they go back to Europe and Marco Polo is caught in a war between Venice and Genoa, and he's put in a prison in Genoa for a couple of years, 1298, 1299, and he recites his travels to his cellmate, Ruto Cello de Pizza and he writes it down and it becomes a bestseller in Europe, the travels of Marco Polo, which is quite an accomplishment because the printing press had not been invented yet. And so every copy was hand copied. You know, probably some extra stuff was added to some of the different versions. And but nevertheless, Marco Polo, his travels, being imprisoned in Genoa, and guess who was born in Genoa? But Christopher Columbus. Christopher Columbus had a copy of Marco Polo's travels. And so when the Muslim Sultan, Mammoth II conquers Constantinople in 1453, it ends the land trade route to get from Europe to India and China. The China Silk Road, the Gobi Desert, and and so the Europeans are scratching their head, thinking, well, how can we trade with China? Mar Marco Polo brought back the news that the Chinese had invented noodles. The Chinese invented paper from tree pulp. They invented paper currency. They invented a compass, a wheelbarrow, eyeglasses, ice cream, wine from rice, a Pony express, plates that we call China, porcelain, right? And then India, Marco Polo talks about naked holy men and a house covered with dung and and people worshiping rats and cows, and so his travels of Marco Polo was nicknamed Il Millione, the Million Lies. People said this really didn't happen. But nevertheless..
Rick Green [00:13:02] It was literally unbelievable.
Bill Federer [00:13:04] Yeah, and so Christopher Columbus grows up hearing about the Grand Con in China. And he for seven years tries to get funding to go west. A little trivia. He was using the longer Arabic miles rather than the shorter Roman miles. So he thought the earth was about 6,000 miles less in diameter. Had he known the real distance, he may not have attempted it because it would have been possible to bring fresh water all that far. But so he sets off sailing west, and he runs into some islands and he thinks they made it to India, so he names the people he meets Indians. Think of it, we never would have called Native Americans Indians had it not been for Islamic Jihad cutting off the land routes to India in fourteen fifty three.
Rick Green [00:13:51] I never thought about that.
Bill Federer [00:13:53] And so he took he takes four journeys, and even till his last, he thought that China was this close. He knew it was just right around the corner. He's trying to fit the geography of you know, Indonesia, and he thinks that you know Cuba's the tip of you know Japan and all this. And so his first voyage, he discovers these friendly Indians called Arawak, and they have some gold, and he goes back to Europe. He did find some young Indian men that had their private parts cut off being in a cage being fattened up to eat. And on the second trip, they find out they're a Carib. These are cannibals, and they would go island to island and sodomized and impregnate the the non-uh Carib women and eat the kids. I mean, it was it was they called it the cannibal sea or the Caribbean Sea, the that means cannibal sea.
Rick Green [00:14:52] Oh wow, I did not know that. Wow.
Bill Federer [00:14:55] And so this the second trip, Columbus is the victim of racism. You're like, what? Yeah, he's Jino and he's not Spanish. And so there is a jealous bishop named Fonseca, and he tells the king and queen of Spain, what did you do? Make in this Genoan, this Italian admiral of the ocean seas and governor of all new lands discovered. And so on the second trip, Columbus is wanting to get fast ships so he can discover China. Instead, he gets saddled with 17 slow ships and 2,000 get rich quick Spaniards. And now he's tasked with colonizing, which he doesn't want to do. He lands at a settlement called La Isabella and it gets destroyed by a hurricane. And the this the sailors are getting malaria, and then they go on to islands and they find, you know, human bones cooking in pots and gnawed human bones and skulls and bones, and then these are the Carib and the Spaniards are like, Columbus, you told us this was a paradise. You didn't tell us it was like this. Columbus is constantly having to deal with them not wanting to obey him. He leaves his his brother in charge. He founds a city called Santa Domingo, Saint Dominic, and they dedicated on the feast of Saint Dominic. And since Columbus's dad was named Dominic, they think it was his veiled way to name the city after his dad. So he leaves his brother in charge, goes back to Spain. And he has a third journey. This time he comes along the equator and he runs into the doldrums. And this is a stretch of the equator where there's no wind for weeks. They later call it the horse latitudes, because if you had horses on your boat, the first thing you do is shove them overboard because they they would use up food and water and you needed food and water. Columbus prays that if the wind picks up, he'll name the first land he sees after the Trinity. And he does. It's called Trinidad, still to this day. He makes it back to Hispanola, which today is Haiti, to Santa Domingo, and finds that the Spaniards had rebelled against his brothers, went up into the mountains, and were raping the women and were making them fill up buckets of gold with their earrings and so forth, or they would kill them. And and so Columbus is trying to subdue these Spaniards that don't want to obey him because he's an Italian. And so Columbus pens a letter to the king and queen of Spain asking for help. He says, This is not like trying to govern a town in Sicily. He said that this is a whole other set of dynamics on this side of the world. That letter is intercepted by Fonseca, and he goes in and says, I told you, king and queen, this Columbus is inept. He doesn't know how to govern. And so they send over a replacement governor named Babadilla. And he comes over and throws Columbus and his brother in chains and sends them back to Spain as prisoners. The captain offered to take off the chains, and Columbus said, No, I want to leave them on so the king and queen can see how badly I'm treated. King and queen order the chains taken off, but they're not in a hurry to send Columbus on another voyage. So he's sort of laid up for a year. He goes through all the scriptures in the Bible that talk about taking the I the gospel to the islands of the sea, to the lands yet unknown, that the gospel we will be preached to them, the preached to all the world. And he writes a book called Libro de las Profesias, Book of the Prophecies, and he talks about how his voyage is helping to fulfill these prophecies of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. The king and queen said, Okay, we'll send you on if on a fourth voyage, but do not go to Santa Domingo, the city that you founded. And so he's coming across and he sees the sky looking like a hurricane brewing. And he said, okay, I had a settlement on La Isabella wiped out. He he risks it, he goes to Santa Domingo. And he says there is a storm of intensity that you have you cannot even imagine. And the the governor, the new replacement governor called Aviendo, and and he ignores Columbus, and Columbus like leaves, he rows back to his boat, gets in, he doesn't even take time to pull the rowboat back into the main boat. And he and his couple ships take off, go to the other side of the island to try to have some shelter against the storm. The hurricane hits, it wipes out Santa Domingo. And all and all the ships that were being filled up full of gold to go back to Spain. All of them get destroyed except for one. It was the slow ship carrying Columbus's portion of the gold. The king and queen still honored the fact that Columbus would get a portion. And it had not yet cleared the mangroves. And so it's after the hurricane's over, it all by itself goes back to Spain. It's the only ship that shows up, and it's got the gold marked with Columbus's marking on it. And so it sort of redeemed Columbus's character. Meanwhile, Columbus is driven around the Caribbean with these storms and hurricanes for weeks. He said that they finally just, you know, the sails were destroyed, and they just put themselves at the mercy of the wind. He talks about a water spout passing between the boats, like a tornado that was coming between them, and he takes out his sword and he makes the sign of the cross and he circles his fleet and he reads from the gospels where Jesus commanded the storm and it went quiet. And and then he finally he gets shipwrecked. Well, he go he goes to Panama, and little does he know he's only 50 miles from the real ocean to take him to China. But he by this time he's ill, he's got arthritis. He has one of his ships caught by some Indians and and the tide was the wrong, and so now he he and then the other ships are worm eaten, these barnacles will get attach themselves to the wood and eat in there and it gets spongy and starts leaking. And so he shipwrecks on Jamaica for a year. And the natives are at first nice, and then his sailors was go off and want to sleep with the women and so forth. And so the native says, Well, let's kill these Spaniards, and Columbus gets wind of it this whole time. Columbus is an excellent navigator, keeping track of the stars on the other side of the world, his other hemisphere. And he predicts a lunar eclipse on February twenty ninth, eight fifteen oh four. And and he's so confident of this. That he calls the Indian chiefs to his shipwrecked boat and says, you better be nice to me and keep taking care of me, or I'm gonna pray and God's gonna blot out the moon. And he goes into his cabin and he's like praying and looking up, and sure enough, the moon starts getting red and then it goes black, and the Indian starts screaming, and then they bring him food, and that buys him some time. And then Columbus has a captain who goes on a a canoe and canoes across from Jamaica all the way to Haiti and goes into the the jungles and finds this Aviendo, the the new replacement replacement governor, and tells him Columbus is still alive, and he's like, oh, great, I thought we were done with that guy. Anyway, he like waits months and he finally sends rescues Columbus. Columbus sees Santo Domingo for the last time, goes back to Spain, finds out that Queen Isabella died, she was his friend in the court, and then he puts his house in order. He does set aside money for priests to minister to the Indians on the island, and then he dies. But he was a the best dead reckoning navigator in history, which means that you navigate without a compass, just you just can sort of look at the stars and all the rest. And he but he was not a good governor. And but to blame Columbus for the Spaniards that and then the diseases that wiped out Indian tribes and so forth, it is is not historically correct. The people that want to blame Columbus need to turn one chapter back in the history book and see the reason Columbus set sail in the first place was Islamic Jihad, cutting off the land routes to Indian China. That's why he set sail. So fascinating history. I do have a book. It's called The The Treacherous World of the 16th Century and How the Pilgrims Escaped It. But it picks up because Columbus was 1492, and then you have the the the 1500s, and then it gets into the pilgrims in the 1600s. But it's it's a really good book to give you the setting of the world in that time period.
Bill Federer [00:23:16] Ted, tell me in the right before we have to have to close this out, just from all the efforts to try to you know, erase Columbus and point out any of the bad things that he did and zero in on those and half of that stuff I think is actually made up, but you know, what's your take on that? Like obviously no perfect human beings in history, and here's a guy that made such a significant difference. How do you respond to people when they say we shouldn't be celebrating Columbus?
Bill Federer [00:23:42] Yeah, so the socialist tactic of taking over a country is you destroy the history. You say bad things about the country's founders so that the people get repulsed by them, then you get them into a neutral where they don't remember where they came from, and then you brainwash them into the future you have planned for them. It's a socialist takeover tactic. It's a sales technique. If I was a toothpaste salesman, the first thing I do is I tell you a bunch of negative things about the toothpaste you're currently brushing with. You're still brushing with that stuff, haven't you read it? It'll eat the enamel off your teeth. Ooh, you're repulsed by it. Now I have you in a neutral, you're open-minded. What are all the toothpaste out there? Then I give you my pitch for this brand new tartar-controlled breast fresher toothpaste. So they go into the classrooms and they intentionally tell the kids negative things about the country's founders. They took land from Indians, they sold people into slavery. They were bad. Forget the fact they gave you a country where you're in charge, and you get to decide what you want to do with your life, and then all of us together decide what's going to happen in the country. Forget that. All the founders were bad and everything they did was bad. And so this kids are like, oh, those founders were bad and everything they did was bad. So then you get them into a neutral and you have a comparative religion classes and you study all the, but and you just don't have time to get around to Christianity. And then you give your push for socialism or transgenderism or LGBTQ or Islamism, right? So it's part of this tactic to take over a country. And they've been doing it in America. Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is one of the main books, the 1619 project, which you and David and Tim have have combated so excellently. That's part of that tactic. And so so when you see that in perspective, but when you get down to it, Columbus did have the longest voyage out of the sight of land. It was courageous and it did change the entire world. By the way, the Indians it was not a peaceful paradise for those airwax that were being eaten by the Caribbean. Cortez in the 1530s, in Mexico City. His men write about seeing towers of skulls and theaters filled full of skulls and and they thought it was just made up, the liberal historians until 2015. They were shoring up the foundation of some buildings in old Mexico City, and they uncovered the rooms with tens of thousands of skulls and infants and and women, and they say they're not captives from war. These are women and children. These were ritual sacrifice where they take them to the top of the pyramid, rip out their beating heart to the sun god. It was not a paradise to those people that were getting their hearts ripped out. And and so there's this narrative that needs to be it's it's human nature. There's two threads that trace through history greed and the gospel. You always have people motivated by greed and you always have people motivated by the gospel. And and so we wanna be the ones that are motivated by the gospel.
Rick Green [00:26:28] Amen. So good. Bill Federer, American Minute. Love you, brother. Thank you for coming on for Columbus Day.
Bill Federer [00:26:33] Thank you, Rick.
Rick Green [00:26:34] Of course there's a lot more at our website, wallbuilders.show for all of our other radio programs and then wallbuilders.com for all the other information. Appriciate you listening today. You've been listening to the Wallbuilders Show.
