Why I Can’t Vote For Ted Cruz–Conclusion

by Al Benson Jr.

Just a  little further background. In his comments on March 10th Pastor Chuck Baldwin noted several things about the Bush Dynasty. He said: “The Bush connection to the fascist state of Germany goes back to Prescott Bush (G. W. Bush’s grandfather) and Herbert Walker (father-in-law of Prescott)…The (London) Guardian has obtained confirmation  from newly discovered files in the U.S. National Archieves that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.” There’s more, but I’d invite folks to do a little research on their own.

I mention this in light of Pastor Baldwin’s  commentary, which I quoted in the previous article where he noted: ” “…presidential candidate Ted Cruz has taken up where G. W. Bush left off. He is pushing the ‘war for Israel’ button HARD. And don’t forget that both Ted and his wife, Heidi, are ardent disciples of G. W. Bush…”

From there Pastor Baldwin went on to explain why Cruz and his wife are pushing the ‘War for Israel’ button so hard. He stated: “By tapping into the commonly taught (albeit misguided) religious doctrine that the modern state of Israel is the same as Biblical Israel, neocons discovered a brand new resource for promoting war:  fighting to protect and/or expand the Zionist state of Israel. Christian Zionists such as John Hagee, Pat Robertson, et al., have rallied millions of evangelical Christians into a perpetual war fever–all under the rubric of protecting Israel (which again, they falsely believe is Bible Israel).

I ran into a personal example of this a few years ago with a man whose acquaintance I made at a Southern Heritage conference. The subject of the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty back in 1967 came up, and he said that has been an accident. Knowing differently, I corrected his assumption and told him, quite frankly that it had been deliberate. Big mistake on my part!  At that point he started castigating me for not totally supporting the Zionists, and he told me that, as Christians, we had an obligation to support the state of Israel no matter what they did or how underhanded it might be, or where they might have come from because even those not born in the Middle East (Khazars) were still the “chosen people” no matter what simply because they were Jews! In his thinking the Christian Church was only “plan B” and the main duty of Christians was to support the state of Israel without qualification! It seems that the Christian Church only existed, in his thinking as some sort of spiritual appendage for the support of national Israel. For him that was its main significance.

At that point I ceased trying have a rational conversation with this man. And I have run into this ultra-dogmatic mindset on several occasions. I was once informed that a minister I knew who refused to accept the Scofield Bible’s garbled definition of the “end times” was an apostate. Having known this minister personally, i can attest to the fact that he was NOT an apostate just because he refused to accept Scofield’s Israel first agenda. And to be honest, I can’t accept it either. Forty seven years ago, before I knew better, I did. But if you look for the truth, with the passage of time the Lord gives wisdom, and I, by God’s grace, walked away from Scofield and his agenda. As I stated in the first article, I realize some good folks will get ticked off at me, and for that I am sorry, but that’s how it is. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend that any Christian be a Zionist! You are a Christian or a Zionist–one or the other. I do not believe you can be both at the same time. “No man can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24).

Part of the reason, apart from this, that I can’t support Cruz  is his and his wife’s political connections. Ted is not the “outsider” most folks have been programmed to think he is.

Author Roger Stone noted in an patriotsunited.com article that: “There is no better example of this than Calgary Ted’s actions surrounding the big Wall Street banks and their secret funding of his political ascension.  Cruz has been gorging at the table of the ultimate insider of all insiders–Goldman Sachs and Citibank…At the same time Ted’s bulging 2016 campaign accounts and supporting Super-PACs are stuffed with big oil and gas money. He knows how to play the game…his wife, Heidi, has been employed by Goldman-Sachs since 2005…Heidi is a proud member of the lefty Council on Foreign Relations, advocates of one world government and the New World Order.” seems that Goldman, at one point, put out a cool million to fund Ted’s senate campaign.

What all this amounts to is that, despite all his Christian credentials, Ted Cruz is an ultimate Establishment Insider who will, like so many other RINO’s put Israel’s interests before those of his own country for badly misplaced theological reasons. All these good Christian folks that feel that politics and theology have no relationship need to grasp the central truth that there is a great deal of theology in politics–and often it is faulty theology.

For those willing to do a little reading to understand some of the Scripture pertaining to the end times I will recommend two short books here. You can probably read both in about two days. The first is Why the End is Not Near by Pastor Duane Garner, available from Athanasius Press, 205 Roselawn Ave., Monroe, Louisiana 71201. Last time I checked the price was $6.00. The other one is The Church Is Israel now by Charles D. Provan, published by Ross House Books, P O Box 67 Vallecito, California 95251. The copy I have is marked $5.00 but you might want to contact them and check. It might be more now as I’ve had mine for awhile.

 

 

Why I Can’t Vote For Ted Cruz–part one

by Al Benson Jr.

I expect this column will make lots of sincere folks mad at me and I debated whether or not I should write it and finally felt that I had to. I hope some of the good folks whose first reaction may be anger will step back and think about what I’ve said with some sober reflection.

Over the past months I’ve watched the presidential candidates from both parties scream, shout, posture, and generally do whatever they seem to think it will take to get elected. I’ve watched some of the “conservative” websites on the Internet and have concluded that many of them are little more than political shills for certain candidates. The political process in this country is a charade, geared to fool the gullible public into thinking they really have a say in what their government does and the direction it goes in. It’s what the Bible refers to as a “cunningly devised fable.”

Maybe a year and a half or so ago I did an article for this blog that still gets more views than anything I have done since–one on why “Hillary the unindicted”  will end up being the next president.  Unless someone in the top echelons of the Establishment gets ticked at Hillary for some reason and she ends up getting indicted, I’m not ready to change my mind of that. I’d dearly love to be wrong. The prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency does not thrill me. But let’s wait and see.

Recently a sincere Christian gentleman stopped to talk with me and was curious about where I stood on the Republican candidates involved in this year’s presidential dog and pony show.  I told him that I had been watching Trump and leaned somewhat toward him for the simple reason that almost everyone of consequence, both left and right, seemed to hate his guts. Trump makes them all mad. He has this disconcerting habit of saying things that need to be said and that strikes a chord with the American people who have begun to realize that the politicians and the government have been shafting them for generations now.  Though some outfits are now in the process of trying to tell us how much the public disapproves of Trump, and you can skew your polls however you want, but that’s not what I’ve seen so far.

At any rate, this man wondered if I had considered Ted Cruz as a votable possibility and he told me someone, I can’t recall now, in his family, had heard Cruz was a committed Christian, that his father was an evangelist. I don’t for a minute doubt his sincerity.

But I’ve watched presidential races since the late 1960s and all the aspirants for the office of president have claimed Christian credentials–mainly because they want the votes of Christians who don’t have the first clue about how the political process in this country works, and who, quite frankly, are not interested in learning. All most of them want is a “feel good” candidate who claims he is a Christian and waves his Bible around so they can feel like they voted for a Christian. Even the current occupant of the White (Red) House claimed at one point that he was a “committed Christian” and I wonder, in view of his performance in office, how many still buy that bit of bovine fertilizer. Way too many, I’m afraid. There is a world of difference in spouting about your Christian faith on the campaign trail and then governing like one if you get elected and I haven’t seen a president in all the years I can remember back to Roosevelt, that remotely tried to act like a Christian once he got in office. Oh, they will use the gullible Christians to get themselves elected so they can then govern exactly like the One World Government pagans that most of them really are. Of course, in this context, most of us also realize that the president doesn’t really “govern” much of anything. What he really does is to work to forward the ungodly agendas of those who wanted him in office for just that reason–to move their agendas forward regardless of the will of the American people.

One Christian pastor that I do follow quite regularly is Chuck Baldwin from Montana. I’ve watched him over the years and he does seem to have a lot more on the ball than most Christian preachers when it comes to the political arena. Most Christian pastors have been brainwashed into ignoring politics like the plague. They know nothing and want to know nothing. And that’s part of the reason we have so many scumbags in government–willful Christian ignorance.

Anyway, Pastor Baldwin had some interesting and revelatory commentary about Ted Cruz in a March 10th column on NewsWithViews.com  Pastor Baldwin observed that: “In current politics, presidential candidate Ted Cruz has taken up where G. W. Bush left off. He is pushing the ‘war for Israel’ button HARD.  And don’t forget that both Ted and his wife, Heidi, are ardent disciples of G. W. Bush–and Heidi was also a long-standing member of the quintessential neocon organization the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Ted’s preacher father is an outspoken leader in ‘Greater Israel’ prophecy circles.  He (Ted’s dad) goes to churches all over America preaching the idea that God has called Ted to ‘save Israel’ and usher in the Second Coming of Christ.”

So here we have a presidential candidate whose wife has been a CFR member, among other things, and whose father thinks he should be president so he can “save Israel” and by so doing usher in the Second Coming. I submit that it’s not up to any human being to help speed up the Second Coming.  That event is in the Lord’s hands and He will decide when, not any of us.

To be continued.

Getting Ready For Another Round of Cultural Cleansing?

by Al Benson Jr.

The article on http://www.nytimes.com for March 14th had a headline that read: “Momentum to Remove Confederate Symbols Slows or Stops.” The article, written by Alan Blinder, noted the well-synchronized push last year to get rid of Confederate symbols (he didn’t call it well-synchronized, I did).

Then Mr. Blinder wrote: “But that was last year. Now, not even nine months after the massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the momentum to force Confederate symbols from official display has often been slowed or stopped. In some states this year, including Alabama, lawmakers have been considering new ways to protect demonstrations of Confederate pride…the pendulum has gone in the other direction…” Mr. Blinder almost seems saddened about this. Well, after all, he does write for the New York Times–no friend of  Confederate symbols at any time.

He notes movements in at least 12 states to try to ensure that Confederate symbols and monuments are preserved and recognized. Blinder contends that “The actions that did materialize, though, emboldened defenders of Confederate heritage displays.” Speaking in Mississippi, Greg Stewart, executive director of Beauvoir, which was Jefferson Davis’ last home, stated that “Our strength right now is the result of their (the cultural Marxists) overreach.” Steward noted that many Southern folks are quite reluctant  to allow state officials to decide how to commemorate the region’s history. He said:  “We knew in Mississippi that the trick is always to keep the decision in the hands of the public.” Southerners have learned over the past couple decades how their “elected representatives” have betrayed them when it came to protecting Southern heritiage.  You just cannot trust the politicians, who are usually out to pander to the politically correct and who will sell out the heritage of their states for either votes or campaign contributions, especially if they might be harboring “presidential aspirations.”

A member of the political class noted that “we should take into account the sensitivity of all of our citizens on all issues.” What he was really saying was that you should take into account the “sensitivity” of all citizens except those wanting to preserve their Southern history and heritage. He didn’t quite say it that way but if you have watched the politcal doublespeak as I have over the years, you know that’s what he meant. Everybody should get a say but Christian, Confederate white folks. I realize that may be putting it bluntly for some, but that’s the way this game usually works. Everybody is supp0sed to have a say but us and we are just supposed to sit back in the corner and continue to feel guilty over a slavery or whatever that has been gone for 150 plus years now.

They continue to tell us we should just forget about the Confederacy and “move on.” Well, how about them following their own advice and forgetting about the slavery issue and just “moving on?” Ahh, but you see, they can’t do that–because pushing the “it was all about slavery agenda” is part of their game, part of the class struggle technique, part of the “divide and conquer” plan they have for the different races in this country, part of the agenda to destabilize both country and people, so they can continually fan the flame of “racism” so people don’t forget. Without all this Marxist class struggle baggage people might even learn to get along with each other and actually put the past in a proper perspective and move on, and that is the absolute last the Marxist agitators in Washington and around the country want. They don’t want peace and quiet–they want agitation and violence because it plays right into their program.

So I asked myself–why is this guy writing this particular article now? Nine months after the fact, things have quieted down. Why now? Is this supposed to be “marching order” for some radical Marxist group to start fanning the flames again? Are we soon supposed to be subjected to yet another round of cultural Marxism, ethnic cleansing, and whatever else the Left has decided is best for the country now?

Years ago I had a friend and mentor that was a pastor. He followed Communist activity and was, probably, in his own right, an expert on it. He made the statement once, and I never forgot it,  that when the Communists promoted a particular project, they did so for a certain amount of time and then they stopped–and if you waited about six months you would then see the Communist project promoted in the major media in this country.  On the two or three instances that I checked his timing on this he was right on the money!

So I am wondering if this current situation isn’t an extension of that same game.  We all know, or should know, that the cultural Marxists are not about to let the issue of Confederate history and symbols rest for any period of time. They haven’t been able to get rid of them all yet and they have met resistance. So why would they quit? You have to know they will be back again–and again, until they get what they want–ethnic cleansing on a grand scale, starting in the South and then working West and North. The reason they backed off was that they started to get pushback and it would have been counter-productive to continue at that point, so they backed off.  Is it getting close to the time they are supposed to renew their offensive this year? We had better keep our eyes open and exercise discernment because our adversary, like his father, prowls about “like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

Were Tariffs Indirectly a Redistribution of the Wealth?

by Al Benson Jr.

Those who are in a rush to paint slavery as the one and only cause of the War of Northern Aggression do not care to talk about the tariff issue. Like the presence of the Forty-Eighters in the Union Army and in the Republican Party, tariffs, as a major cause of the War is a non-subject. They’d prefer not to talk about that because to do so deflects attention from the slavery issue, and all good cultural Marxists realize that nothing, but nothing, must detract from the slavery issue.

Years ago I did an article on the War for the old Sierra Times website and mentioned how the tariff issue had affected it. I got back a sarcastic email from a typical Yankee/Marxist type that said: “Tariffs are a dead letter–period!” Suffice it to say that he and I disagreed, but I think he was more interested in influencing those who read my article than me. The thought that anyone would dare to consider any other cause for the War than slavery really ticked him off.

However, much to his chagrin, there were other causes. One of the major ones was the tariffs.

In his authoritative book The South Under Siege–1830-2000 author Frank Conner made some very good points concerning the tariff. In mentioning what Northern manufacturers wanted the federal government to do for them, Frank noted that, from the federal government they wanted “a taxpayer-funded national transportation network.”  They also wanted taxpayer subsidies and they wanted the banking laws changed so that industry would be given preference over agriculture. Frank noted that they wanted lots more than that, but those were the main items. As you can see, corporate fascism was alive and well in the 1860s and before.

Frank observed that: “To get what they wanted, the Northern capitalists  would have to transform the U.S. into a nation-state with a federal government that had enough funds to build the transportation network, and enough power to run roughshod over a recalcitrant South. The power would have to come (eventually) from a majority in Congress and a presidential administration sympathetic to the capitalists. The funding would have to come from protective tariffs on goods imported into the U.S….The Northern capitalists demanded an extremely high tariff rate covering most imports, for three reasons.  First. with a high tariff in place, the Northern manufacturers could overprice their goods in the firm knowledge that the competing low-priced British goods–with the tariffs added–would then be more expensive than theirs.  Second, the Southerners bought most of the manufactured goods imported from Britain, largely because they sold most of their cotton to Britain; thus–by paying the tariff–the Southerners paid most of the cost of running the U.S. government. (In 1860, for example, just four of the Southern states paid 50% of the total import-tariffs collected in the U.S. that year, and all of the Southern states were paying about 85% of the cost of running the federal government). By increasing the tariff rates, the North could force the South to pay most of the costs of the U.S. government’s industrialization program–a program which would benefit the North tremendously, and the South not at all.” Seems to me that a program benefiting the North at the expense of the South is, indirectly, a redistribution of the wealth. To sum up, Frank observed: “Under a government policy of high tariffs, the Northern capitalists could not lose and the South could not win.” Sort of on the idea of you being responsible for paying your neighbors property taxes for the next hundred years!

This truth that Frank so forcefully brought out was just recently reinforced in an article by Tom M. Root which appeared in Confederate Veteran magazine for March/April of 2016. The name of Mr. Root’s excellent article was Admiral Semmes and “Those People.” Mr. Root noted, on page 26 of the magazine that: “…the North was not fighting to end slavery. The Yankee was fighting to enforce involuntary union in order to continue the egregious policy of plundering the South through high protective tariffs. Despoiling the South to enrich the North was the manifest economic program of the nationalist Lincoln and the Republican Party…The inconvenient truth was the Yankee could not bear to give up his addiction to the sweets of a high tariff which had nourished Northern infrastructure for more than forty years. Secession meant economic independence and free trade for the South, but economic calamity for the North, no longer able to fatten on the imposts.”

Rabid abolitionist Charles Sumner from the great state of Taxachusetts was once asked if Massachusetts could govern Georgia  better than Georgia could. To this he responded without the least hesitation “That is Massachusetts’ mission.” That one statement alone give you more than a slight hint as to where the Yankee?Marxist mindset was really at–and Sumner wasn’t alone in that sentiment. Do you begin to see now why I call them Yankee/Marxists?

So, did the tariff contribute to redistribution of Southern wealth to the North? Of course it did. Redistribution of the wealth was and is a Marxist concept–they plot your destruction and hope you are stupid enough to be willing to pay for it–and their public education system is there to guarantee that you are.

A question people need to start asking themselves is–how influenced by Marxism was the North before the War? If you can answer that question correctly then you will be well on the way to understanding what the War was really all about.

 

The Hidden People

by Al Benson Jr.

Some folks who have read Donnie Kennedy’s and my book Lincoln’s Marxists have intimated that we were blowing a lot of hot air when it came to the Forty-Eighters we wrote about–those socialist/communist revolutionaries from Europe that came over here after their revolts failed in Europe in 1848-49. After all, it was something they’d never read about in their “history” books, and it went against their grain to read what we said about their secular deity the Great Socialist er, sorry, I meant the Great Emancipator.

I have to admit,  the history of the Forty-Eighters has been pretty well kept out of the “history” books, and not altogether by accident. This was brought home to me recently by a friend in Georgia, L. L. Barfield, who has been both a teacher and an author. She’s on my email list so she receives all the articles I do on most anything.

Some of what I have written about the Forty-Eighters on this blog has really caught her attention because she had a Confederate ancestor who was a POW during the War. I will let her speak to this: “Today, my old friend, Al Benson, sent documented information about the Union army of the War Between the States that I had hardly known about! Grandpa Barfield (her Confederate ancestor) was twice a Union prisoner. At Fort Delaware, he was left for dead by the Union, but friends held him up and walked him away from the prison in an exchange, leaving the Union to declare in their official records that he had died!  Grandpa Barfield said that Germans were their guards and shot at random as they pleased,killing whomever they aimed at.” That sounds about right. German guards, not American guards–and the commandant of the POW camp at Fort Delaware was Albin Schoepf, one of the Forty-Eighters who was a Hungarian socialist.

Barfield has been a teacher and she said: “You should believe that I have been familiar with almost every ‘Civil War history book’ that Georgia school children have been taught from the 1950s…in the 60s…and years later in the 70s!  None of the information that Al has written in this essay was ever, ever taught or published for school children, in primary, secondary, and even on the college level, where I received a degree in Secondary Ed, majoring in history. I had heavy doses of Civil War history! I know for certain that none of this is in present public school material.” So here is a lady that is familiar with school history books in her state, at all levels.  She majored in history in college and she never saw anything about the Forty-Eighters in any of her history books. I don’t know about you but that makes me wonder. Also, another lady, awhile back sent me her old college history book and it was the same story–Nothing about the Forty-Eighters  and their influence on the early Republican Party and in the Union armies during the War–and their influence was considerable. For the general public the Forty-Eighters are the “hidden people.” You are not supposed to be aware they even existed let alone influenced one of your major political parties and that they were present during the War of Northern Aggression. If you knew that, it might change your whole outlook as to what was really going on during that war–which was hardly a “noble crusade” to free the slaves. If you do happen to find out about them, then all you are supposed to know is that a small number of them fought for “freedom” in Europe before they came here.

And Barfield has credentials. She has had five books published and at present is the chairman of an important foundation’s research and history committee, so she knows whereof she writes.  Yet she recognizes that she was never told the whole story and she did not connect her grandfather’s comments about German guards with anything until she read some of the articles on my blog spot. At that point she began to connect the dots, and the German guards at a Yankee POW camp began to make sense.

I have often said that you get more history out of biographies than you do from history books. A friend in Illinois told me this years ago and I found it to be true. The same holds true for books written about a particular subject. They go into depth in areas the history books just can’t or won’t cover.

Years ago I bought a book called Germans for a Free Missouri which dealt with articles from radical leftist papers in St. Louis, Missouri from 1857-1862. In the introduction Steven Rowan noted, quite accurately, that: “The Forty-eighters were largely religious  skeptics or freethinkers at a time when many Germans still took their confessions quite seriously.” In other words, they were unbelievers who held the Christian faith in contempt. Rowan also observed: “For better or worse, the Republican Party would be the chief channel by which the Forty-eighters entered the mainstream of American politics. Their contribution to the formation of the radical wing of that party is a story that has not yet found its historian.” He wrote that in 1983. Lincoln’s Marxists was first published in 2007, and then a second and enlarged edition was published in 2011 by Pelican Publishing in Gretna, Louisiana.  Donnie Kennedy and I have sought to make up for that history of those “hidden people” that had never been published with our book. Lord willing we have a least made a start that others can carry further.

The goal of the Forty-Eighters was to complete the socialist/communist revolution in this country that they had been unable to complete in Europe,and the Republican Party was the main vehicle that enabled them to do that. And if you think they weren’t successful just take a look at what you have in Washington today.  And as much as current Republicans claim they don’t like it, they are more than willing to go along with it, which tells you where they are really at. So start learning the history. You won’t be able to connect the dots and put it all together until you know the history–at least more of it than the “history” books will ever give you.