Being Watched Over? Or Just Watched?

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

On May 30th Tyler Durden had an informative article up on https://www.zerohedge.com that was written by a former Green Beret on http://www.SHTFplan.com

It was definitely food for thought and something we should be aware of.I am going to quote a bit of it here and urge folks to check it out on their own.

The author wrote: “We have been watching the shift of society and all of its components to collectivist thought and action in preparation for the step into a full-blown totalitarian state. Already the Constitution and our rights enumerated within it have been relegated to impotency and  practically abrogated.”

And he continued: “The key to this has not been the use of force, but the molding of thought and behavior over the decades within the schools, with the fostered predictive programming of pop culture and television, and within the lying, Marxist, mainstream media.”

With the article is sort of a poster, showing a line of kids with the tops of their heads open and something being poured in.The poster reads Education is not a right. Knowledge is power. Power is dangerous. Keep them stupid.

The author observes the increased police presence in schools and then he says: “…as we have seen with the school shootings this year, they certainly aren’t there to protect the students. Police are in schools to enforce conformity and submissive behavior: they’re managing the ‘troupe’ of juveniles, driving the herd. Collective, community thought is the mantra…Gone is  personal development, let alone fun, the latter being archaic and non-utilitarian. In the past 3 to 4 decades, this collective ‘consciousness’ has become the norm. Creative thought is discouraged unless it is directed…directed by authorities or ‘approved’ controllers/managers…”  You might label such people as change agents   because that’s exactly what they are. They are there to change your kids’ mode of thinking from what you taught them to what they want them to “learn.”

One thing this author notes is our “fostered dependency” on electronic gadgets where many, if not most people, think that they absolutely cannot do without them, especially the latest models of most of them. He says “Every week a new report or story surfaces that shows just how far the government and the corporate interests are pushing this electronic dependency, while the schools are shaping the consciousness of the public and  making it ever more malleable. Toward what end? Toward the one that recurs throughout history. We have been warned by Orwell, by Solzhenitsyn,  and many others. Whether we will heed those warnings and take preventive measures remains to be seen…”

The Deep State is all about power (holding onto and expanding it) and money (stealing all they can from the public while telling us it is all for our own good).

No matter who sits in the White House, this continues to go on, and I am not sure any sitting president can really do all that much about it, well intentioned though he might be.

One thing some folks can do, though, is be aware of just how much your pubic school system contributes to all of this and take steps to get your kids out of it and into private Christian education. The public (government) school system is a major contributor to all of this and you need to be aware of that–and act accordingly.

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Clapper Thinks Orwellian Doublespeak Covers the Multitude Of His Sins

 

By Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

 

Over the past several days I have been reading internet articles pertaining to some of the Deep States efforts to destabilize the Trump presidency. The Deep State swamp dwellers are all cultural Marxists, which means they pull some really dirty tricks and then proceed to accuse their enemies of doing exactly what they have just done.

Like regular doctrinaire Marxists, who are their spiritual second cousins, they are also adept at twisting language around so their filthy deeds appear somehow noble and chock full of virtue.

One case in point is Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who has been caught numerous times in various stages of prevarication in front of congressional committees. To just accuse him of lying would be a gross insult to all the honest liars in the world. Clapper has the ability to verbally take a sow’s ear and transform it into a silk  purse—one made out of solid gold—provided you don’t look too close!

There was an article on https://www.zerohedge.com for May 25^th  where Mr. Clapper duly noted that the FBI wasn’t really spying on Trump. All it was doing was practicing “benign information gathering” in regard to those scores of Russian agents they seem to think were infesting the Trump campaign. Clapper went so far as to criticize Trump for complaining about any FBI spies, claiming Trump should have been grateful to the FBI that they were spying on  him. If you were foolish enough to believe what the Deep State denizens said you’d think everyone but Putin’s third cousin was knee-deep in the Trump campaign.

So let’s get this straight. Stefan Halper, who was just recently outed as the FBI’s informant after he infiltrated the Trump campaign wasn’t really a “spy” against Trump. In reality, he was merely a “benign information gatherer” against the Russians and for the FBI and Trump ought to give him a gold medal for what he did. Anyone believing a word of this cockamamie pile of cow chips, as much of the media seems to have, has to have horse feathers for brains. “Benign information gatherers” my foot! These people (and it now turns out Halper may not have been the only one) were spying on the Trump campaign plain and simple. Now they are playing the Orwellian doublespeak card because they are beginning to realize, in spite of their own insufferable arrogance, they could be  in deep  trouble because Hillary didn’t steal the presidency and therefore, they risk exposure for their illegal activities.

Then there was the Washington Mullah, John Brennan, who was duly noted in an article on https://spectator.org on May 18^th. The Spectator article observed: “But make no mistake about it: that the FBI and the CIA, on little more than the say-so of a virulent Trump hater like Brennan were meeting to spy on the campaign of Hillary’s opponent makes Watergate look like a tenth-rate burglary. Nixon, at his most Machiavellian, wouldn’t have thought to form a ‘working group at Langley’ against McGovern. But Obama, via Brennan, did the equivalent for Hillary.  For all intents and purposes, Crossfire Hurricane did not begin in July 2016 but at the moment Trump emerged as Hillary’s rival.  Brennan, shortly thereafter, was bringing CIA agents, FBI agents, NSA agents, and an assortment of Obama’s political aides together in one room at CIA headquarters to bat around ideas on how to smoke out the campaign of   Hillary’s opponent. Out of these meetings came the plot to infiltrate the Trump campaign.” And you have to understand, Messrs, Clapper and Brennan and the rest of this assemblage all did this solely for the purpose of “benign information gathering.” No harm intended toward the Trump campaign at all—they just wanted to smoke out all those evil Russians Trump had in his campaign—even though no one had even brought up the subject at that point.

I  haven’t said hardly anything about  Operation Crossfire Hurricane up to this point and it would make for a long article to try to fit it in here, and I have already had a few complaints about my articles being way too long for some folks. So to deal with this subject I will give you a link to a blog spot that does have an article about it up—back on May 20^th. The blog spot is https://lamecherry.blogspot.com and it has an article, almost ten pages long on Operation Crossfire Hurricane that explains what it was and lists all the usual suspects involved with it, FBI agent Peter Strzok and his paramour Lisa Page among them. It is worth checking out. Part of the Lame Cherry expose is an article from July 11, 2015, the title of which is Bill Clinton Tells Jeb Bush, “This Trump Thing Will Be Taken Care Of.”

Seems like they are still working on that and it hasn’t gone quite as well as they had hoped.

I Don’t think it would be out of line for Christians to actively pray that the bottom would fall out of the Deep States “benign information gathering” effort and that their efforts to get Hillary into the White House no matter what would be exposed. In order for the Deep State to succeed, the will of the American electorate must be thwarted, whatever the cost and whoever gets hurt.ill H

Is Jeff Sessions “playin’ possum”?

 

By Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

 

That may sound like an odd question to you if you have not bothered to follow Mr. Sessions’ almost total lack  of any constructive activity in regard to what the Deep State has been doing to Donald Trump.

An article on www.yahoo.com  for 11/9/17 noted:   “Special counsel

Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign assisted Russia in its effort to interfere in the 2016 election amounts to an attempt to overthrow the government,  (emphasis mine) Republicans have argued. ‘We are at risk of a coup d’etat  in this country if we allow an unaccountable person, with no oversight, to undermine the duly-elected President of the United States,’ said Florida Congressman Rep. Matt Gaetz from the chamber floor.” Correct assumption by Mr. Gaetz, except we are not “risking”  a coup d’etat. The coup is already in the works. It has been ongoing for some time now. It is just taking a little longer than the coupsters had planned on because there has been some resistance to it, and that resistance,  thank God, seems to be getting stronger and more aware of the implications for “Spygate” on the whole country.

An article on http://freebeacon.com for April 3, 2018 has noted that “Momentum is building on Capitol Hill for the Trump administration to reopen an investigation into former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her connections to an anti-Trump dossier that served as the basis for an ongoing investigation into President Trump and collusion with Russia during the 2016 election, according to lawmakers who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.” All this has resulted in Mueller’s ongoing “Russian collusion” probe, which has produced nothing except a huge cost to the American taxpayer. And let’s face it, folks, the entire thing is a sham—intended to cover up the sins of Obama and Clinton and blame Trump for what they, themselves, have been doing—the classic cultural Marxist approach—condemn others for what you have been doing and thereby elevate yourself to a position of moral superiority. It usually works—this time it seems to be having more difficulty. I’d like to think the American public is finally starting to wake up. We’ll see.

I have noticed through all this that Attorney General Sessions has been precious little  help to the Trump administration.  He recused himself almost as soon as he took office, from anything to do with the Russia situation. Several congressmen have been pressuring him to appoint  a second special counsel to check into what the Clintons have been and are still doing, but Mr. Sessions ain’t having any of that. No way, Jose!  He did, under pressure, appoint another investigator to look into some of this, a man named Huber from Utah, but exactly what he will do if he comes up with anything isn’t spelled out. The Inspector General of the Justice Department is also investigating, but he can’t prosecute  anyone no matter what he comes up with. All he can do is pass  the info along.

For May 23, 2018, there was an article on https://americanmilitarynews.com about how Rep. Lee Zeldin  and other congressmen have again called for a second special counsel to investigate the Clintons, their email scandal, the Russian “probe” and other things. They have  introduced a House resolution “detailing the misconduct of the Department of Justice and FBI that calls for the appointment of a second special counsel. They are “encouraging” Speaker Ryan to introduce  the resolution onto the floor for a House vote. Most of us realize that Ryan is on the other side, so we will have to see what pressure they can bring to bear on him. But they were all interviewed today (5/24). I watched the video on www.inforwars.com and they were pretty straightforward. They told about how they had been trying to get Jeff Sessions to do something about this for months and all they have gotten from the Justice Department has been lots of stonewalling.

They have asked for documents dealing with all manner of illegal things the Clintons have done, stuff the Justice Department has,  and their  requests have been mostly ignored—for months! Zeldin said, in a  press release,” In just the past few days, we learned that  the DOJ, FBI or both appear to have planted at least one person into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to infiltrate and surveil the campaign. This action alone reminds us of just how  necessary this resolution is as well as the appointment of a second special counsel.” It was noted that the resolution will also go into some detail about the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One. You can bet that’s one little item Hillary would  just as soon not see any exposure on. Better if we don’t know about that one!

All of  this really needs to be exposed so the American public will realize just  how much previous administrations have shafted all of us “deplorables.”

But, if we ever do get a second special counsel it needs to be someone chosen by somebody other than Sessions, Rod Rosenstein or Christopher Wray because all any of  these people will do is give us yet another Deep State version of Mueller, who will then “investigate”  and come back and tell us, “Hey folks, don’t fret. The Clintons are all as pure as the driven snow. They would never dream of selling out the country for  filthy lucre or of defrauding the public.  They’ve not done anything wrong. You’ve been watching too many of these alt.right news sources. Get your heads on straight and just tune  in to CNN if you want the straight dope.”

Supposedly, an objective investigation will restore the integrity of our  justice system. That will be a major miracle, because,  right now, I find it hard to believe our justice system has any. I wouldn’t trust the FBI and the DOJ as far as I could throw the moon. And as far as I am concerned, Jeff Sessions has, in some way, been co-opted and all he is doing is playin’ possum and staying  out of  the line of fire. The Deep State can probably depend on  him to “just shut up and sit down.” If, somewhere down the road, I find out I was wrong about him I  will admit it. But as of now, he is looking more and more like  just another pawn of the Deep State.

The Crumbling Deep State Facade

 

By Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

 

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have never  liked  former head of the CIA, under Comrade Obama, John Brennan. He reminds me of a perpetually angry third rate political thug who’d enjoy breaking your legs if the union bosses told him to do it. On top of that, he is a convert to Islam—an Irish Muslim—and that hardly enthralls me either. Mr. Brennan is  up to his eyeballs in the plot to overthrow Donald Trump’s legitimate presidency, which shows what he thinks of the American public (not much).

An article by George Neumayr via The Spectator appeared on https://www.zerohedge.com for May 22^nd. It said, in part, “As Trump won  primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had  alerted him to an  intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign. The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish. Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC: that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an ‘inter-agency task force) on the Trump campaign which he was running right out of CIA headquarters.”

He tried to assure all and sundry that it was “beyond my mandate as director of the CIA to follow on any of these leads that involved US persons…” That was pure bull and he knew it. Mr Neumayr observed, quite accurately in his article, “But if his role had truly been passive, the ‘inter-agency taskforce’  wouldn’t have been meeting at CIA headquarters. By keeping its discussions at Langley, Brennan could keep his finger wedged in the pie.  Both before and after the FBI’s official probe began in late July 2016, Brennan was bringing together into the same room at CIA headquarters a cast of Trump haters across the Obama administration whose activities he could direct—from Peter Strzok, the FBI liaison to Brennan, to the doltish Jim Clapper, Brennan’s errand boy…”

Well, the bogus Estonia tip (you have to wonder who sent that to Brennan) led to the FBI dispatching agents to poke around the computer server that was connected to Trump Tower. That effort turned out to be a total flop and so ”Brennan’s group had to go back to the drawing board (on the electronic  intelligence front, it had already hatched plans for national security letters and FISA warrants). These people really wanted to deep six Trump.

Enter Stefan Halper, what Neumayr called “…a swampy old CIA source and Hillary supporter.” You have to realize that all these people doing this stuff were Hillary supporters. This really had nothing  to do with national security and everything to do with shooting down any opposition to Hillary. Turns out Halper was the son-in-law of Ray Cline “whose work for the CIA was legendary.” Halper’s job was to connect with three people in the Trump campaign to see what dirt he could come up with on Trump.

And Neumayr noted that: “A veteran of the intelligence community tells…that Brennan’s CIA was full of Hillary supporters, some of whom decorated their desks with her campaign paraphernalia…The members of Brennan’s working group at Langley ‘we’re just a bunch of out of control idiots’ says a former high-ranking CIA official…” Sounds like Brennan was a pretty out-of-control head of the CIA, which under him seems to have been thoroughly politicized—at least from the Far Left!  But, then, in a “transparent”  Obama regime what else could you expect?

In yet another Zero Hedge article, this one by Tyler Durden, we are told that “Republican  consultant and former Trump campaign aide  Michael Caputo claims that a different spy working for the Obama administration approached him in an attempt to infiltrate the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election.”  Caputo continued “And the FBI is not the only Obama agency who came at the campaign. I know because they came at me. And  I’m looking for clearance from my attorney to reveal this to the public.” Caputo says this is just the beginning  and “…when we finally find out the truth about this, Director Clapper and the rest of them are gonna  be wearing some orange suits.” I wish I shared Mr. Caputo’s optimism in this area. Having watched this totally corrupt Leftist bunch get away with so much for so long, I really begin to wonder if there will be any comeuppance for them before the Final Judgment! Whether there is or not, that will be one verdict they can’t lie their way out of.

In yet a third Zero Hedge article the headline reads After Spying on Trump Campaign, Halper tried to Infiltrate the State Department.  If the Deep State couldn’t stop Trump from being elected they at least planned to infiltrate his administration to the point where they could neutralize his efforts to Drain the  Swamp.  Remember, these people are all slimy swamp dwellers. They don’t want the swamp drained. If it is then their sins will be exposed and that’s the last thing they want. They want the evidence of those sins permanently submerged in swamp water, so deep they will never be exposed. That’s why they so desperately wanted Hillary elected. She would have, in the name of self-preservation, prevented the Deep State sins from ever being exposed.

But  you know what the Scripture says—Have no fellowship  with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. That’s what we need in this current situation—exposure!  Lord, hasten the day!

You wonder, if Comrade Obama knew about all this (and I think he did) is it an impeachable offense? The head of Judicial Watch seems to think that  is a possibility. Would that be poetic justice or what?

It’s NOT On His “To Do” List

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

There was an interesting article on https://renewedriglht.com over the weekend. I will quote briefly from it. “Americans were outraged to learn in reports that the FBI deployed a spy to inform on the Trump campaign. The Obama administration and the FBI colluded to run active measures against their political opponents.” is anyone really surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Deep State has not, and will not, stop at anything to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump For many Deep State operatives this is what they live for.

They’ve had it all their own way for so long, and now along comes Donald Trump, and he tips their little RED wagon over, and they have to make sure he atones for that. Their final solution for Trump–totally destroy him–and do it in such a way that no one coming after him will ever dare to upset their cultural Marxist apple cart again–ever! I wonder if there is any kind of jail sentence possible for those Obamaphiles   who ran active measures against Trump in order to help Hillary. But then, with our two-tiered “just us” system there probably isn’t. You know how it is–“different strokes for different folks!” Many of our Deep State people are simply too big and important to go to  jail. That’s just for us serfs, not them. And please don’t tell me we have a government of laws and not men. That went out with Abe Lincoln. If you don’t think so, read the American Bastille.

And now we have a “Just Us” Department whose real ruler is a man named Rosenstein. His name is not on the bosses door but it might as well be because he’s the one really running the show. The man whose name is on the door might as well have  been on vacation for the last year. All he is  interested in is civil asset forfeiture. He lets Rosenstein handle everything else.

As far as Trump “colluding” with the Russians so they would swing the election for him, we have Herr Robert Mueller “investigating” that for us. His attitude toward Donald Trump is that of a chicken hawk that has spotted a rabbit he wants for lunch. He has assembled a list of truly “impartial” lawyers to help him bag–er, I mean investigate Trump’s many and varied ties to Putin and Russia. As for those ties to Russia, after a year and a half, he hasn’t been able to  locate any of them, but  hey, don’t worry–just give him another $20 million and three for four more years and he’ll be able to put something together–true or not won’t make any difference.

In the meantime, there is all manner of evidence out there tying Hillary and Company to real Russian collusion, from the Uranium One deal forward. So why isn’t  Mueller checking  some of this out? You’re kidding right?

The only thing on Mueller’s “to do” list is to make sure he finds something, anything, to make Trump look bad. As far as the real Russian collusion of Hillary and Company with Russia, forget that. No one is interested or wants to know about it so let’s just all forget about it. Hillary and Company are way too important to pay for their sins anyway. Mueller knows  that! His “to do” list will never, never, never include any of Hillary’s “indiscretions.” She’s far too important to the Deep State to ever have those brought up–and those who do bring them up will have to be censored off the internet because they are promoting “hateful” ideas about Hillary. The  thought that she should be prosecuted for her crimes is absolutely hateful to her, and so the Deep State needs to censor all internet sites that might even look like they might lean in that direction. After all, it’s for the “good of the country” don’t you know. And to paraphrase the quote from the crooked banker in the old movie Stagecoach “what’s good for Hillary is good for the country.” Right???

So, don’t ever  think that Mueller will deal with Hillary’s Russian collusion, folks. That ain’t on the agenda and never will be. And if you know what’s good for you, you better start ignoring that. Remember, in this Deep State occupied country, our “Just Us” system can best be described as “Hillaryous.”

Another Golden Opportunity For Hogg(wash) In Texas?

 

By Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

 

Well, here we go  again. Yet another school shooting in another gun free zone. If you get the feeling that you have heard it all before, it’s because you have—on many occasions in the past few years. I have said before that the shootings will continue until the general public has gotten the “correct” attitude on the Second Amendment (total gun confiscation) because that is  what these shootings are really all about—a bloody prelude to grabbing the guns. And if hundreds of students have to be shot in the process, the gun grabbers couldn’t care less! It’s just the collateral damage necessary to achieve their agenda.

In this most recent case in Santa Fe, Texas the shooter is a 17-year old student that they have actually captured instead of killed. That doesn’t happen often. He is supposed  to have killed 10 people and wounded more than a dozen others. He was a student at the school he shot up.

According to https://www.zerohedge.com “CNN shared a screenshot of the shooter’s Facebook page before it was taken down. According to Cassandra Fairbanks, Dimitrios Pagourtzis was a ‘Columbiner’: he had the same button that Dylaln Klebold wore on his shoe during the columbine massacre.” I wasn’t exactly sure what a “Columbiner” was so I looked for a definition. I found one on www.urbandictionary.com that said: “Someone who has a profound interest in the April 20^th Columbine High School massacre. They may also be obsessed with two of the victims that committed suicide, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris…”

Whatever this kid was, he admired all the wrong  people. Zerohedge continued: “The Daily Caller reported that social media pages…reveal he was obsessed with guns, knives and animal torture. They also show that he owned a trench coat with USSR and Nazi symbols on it…His Facebook page also appeared  ‘to suggest an obsession with Satanism’.”

Supposedly the shooter wore a black trench coat and carried a sawed-off shotgun. Can you hear the new cries now for “shotgun control?” No AR15 for this kid—he did it the old-fashioned way—which will probably trigger a new call for ALL guns of any kind to be banned!

I wondered as I read about this—where will David Hogg(wash) fit into this situation? I’m sure they can find a spot for him somewhere. With the shooting  in Parkland, Florida Hogg(wash) had his “15 minutes of fame” well, maybe 14 & ½ minutes of it, and now he seems to  be on the downside of that. Maybe this new shooting in South Texas will give him another chance at yet another 15 minutes of fame; one more chance to excoriate us “old dumb (expletive deleted)” because we didn’t have the good sense to do what needed to be done  and left it to his generation to ‘’’save” the world. I expect more of that  sort of drivel from Comrade Hogg in this current situation. It’s my fervent hope that he will just stay seated and keep his trap shut, but I think he is too enamored of his leftist talking points to grace us with his silence!

And this current shooter, with the communist and fascist medals on his coat—well—would you believe the useful idiots on the left are quickly blaming the NRA for him! Somehow,  it’s the NRA’s fault this guy is out there! Can they really be that stupid? Some can, but many of them, as you get to the  upper levels of their organizations, really know better and they hope we don’t!

If this new shooting ain’t a false flag, it’s the second cousin to one and before we are done with this we will again be subjected to the classic “pressure from above and pressure from below” scenario that I and others have written about so often. When it comes to contacting your “elected representatives” about opposing new and upcoming attempts at  gun control measures,  you all know what to do.

Update–5/21–David Hogg(wash’s) latest commentary on the Texas gun free zone school shooting is to encourage all graduating students across the country to paint their graduation caps orange. This will, somehow, magically increase the gun control sentiment among graduating high school seniors nationwide. And if it doesn’t, you can bet the farm the prostitute press will make it sound like it did.

There is an interesting article up on http://www.infowars.com for today, 5/21, that details how George Soros funded that Women’s March that ended up supporting Hogg(wash) and his radical anti-gun buddies. Check it out. And I ask again–is anyone really surprised???

Texas

 

By Al Benson Jr.

 

When I was a kid I was fascinated by the map of the United States (and Confederate States). Having grown up in the East, the idea of Texas, way out west, fascinated me and I wanted to see it, to go there, to experience it myself. Looking at photos is one thing. Seeing something in real life, being there and experiencing it is something else.

You can look at a million pictures of the Grand Canyon and that’s great—but being there, even if only once, and standing there yourself on the South Rim and looking at it beats all the photos in the world.

It’s the same thing with Texas. The photos are great, but the personal experience is infinitely better. The first time I was in Texas was in 1960, eons ago for you younger folks. Just a few years before that Texas had suffered a horrible drought that lasted around seven years. You have to understand, in Texas, a drought doesn’t mean it never rains. What it means is that when it does rain, it doesn’t rain enough to get you through until the next time it rains—and you repeat the same  process all over again. If you want to read something really good about that time period in West Texas, read Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained.  Kelton was born on a ranch in West Texas. His father was a ranch foreman so  Kelton knows  what he is talking about.

At any rate, 1960 was my first venture into Texas (thankfully not my last). Another man and I went through Texas from north to south on our way to Mexico. Looking back at the journal I  kept of the trip, I marveled at how many of the small towns in Oklahoma and Texas resembled some of the western towns you saw in television programs. That was then. I doubt much of it is that way anymore, although back in 2001 my wife and I visited some good friends that lived just outside of Saint Jo, Texas, not far from the Red River that borders Oklahoma and the town of Saint Jo looked pretty much like the towns I remembered on my first trip to Texas.

There are some things you remember on a trip like that. We were looking for Lockhart State Park near Lockhart, Texas to camp for the night. Signs pointing you to the state park were rather scarce but we got on what we thought was the right road and continued on. By then it was getting dark and you couldn’t see  your hand in front of your face. Finally we came to a big stretch of grass that seemed to go on aways. By that time it was ten thirty at night and we were both beat and we assumed that we must be at least at the edge of the state park so we pulled off the road and set up our tents in the grass and just went to sleep.

Came “the dawn’s early light” and we rolled out to see what the park looked like in daylight. Only problem was, there was no  park. Turned out we had pulled off the road onto someone’s big front lawn and we could see his house way back in the distance. His driveway was about 200 feet the  other side of us and here he came down the driveway in his car. We thought, “boy, is he going to be ticked at us for camping on his front lawn” (even though it was a big front lawn). Didn’t seem he was, though. He just stuck his hand out the window and waved at us and off he went. We wondered if other people looking for the state park had done the same thing and he was used to it. We never did find the state park. It’s still on the Texas state maps so I assume it’s there—somewhere! I hope they have better signs pointing it out today than they had in 1960.

Getting into San Antonio, we wanted to see the Alamo. San Antonio was a pretty good-sized city even then and we had to park aways away from the Alamo and walk. This the only time I was ever there, never had the opportunity to go back, but I never forgot it. We went through most of it, no guided tours in those days. I don’t even recall if we paid admission or not There were several  old guns and other relics on display and one thing I noticed—not many people were there besides us, but no one spoke loudly or made unnecessary noise. It was like a shrine and you unconsciously spoke softly and reverently in there. This was where Crockett, Bowie, Travis and the other 180 plus gave their lives for Texas independence. They had the chance to get out when they knew no  help was coming. They stayed, all but one man I am  told. I remember even today, the old song Tex Ritter sang decades ago and the chorus—“Hi-up, Santy Anna, we’re killing your soldiers below, so the rest of Texas will know, and remember the Alamo!” I often wonder today how much we remember—not enough I’m afraid.

I have often wondered—how many of us today would have the  courage to cross Travis’ line in the dirt, knowing if we did, we were not going to get out alive. In this age of rampant political correctness (cultural Marxism) I really wonder. And I wonder, in many cases, if we are really worthy of what our ancestors fought to preserve for us—God-given liberty. Only the Lord knows.

Oklahoma Reminiscences

 

By Al Benson Jr.

Recently, I picked up a book at one of the local libraries called Killers of the Flower Moon—The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,  written by a David Grann. Mr. Grann is a staff writer at the New Yorker  so there would probably be some things he and I would not agree on politically, but he did write an interesting book about how a group of people in Osage County, Oklahoma killed off  several Osage  Indians in order to get the headrights to their oil leases and  make lots and lots of money from that.

It interested me because, back in the late 1960s I had briefly lived in Osage County, Oklahoma, which had been the old Osage Indian reservation. It is still listed that way on some maps.

My Dad had sold his home in the East and bought a trailer and we went West, so wherever we set the trailer up at night, that was home, at least for that night. We got as far as central New Mexico, looking for work, of which there was very little. At the same time I was trying to make a little selling my paintings. The art market in New Mexico was pretty competitive and I wasn’t nearly as good as most of those artists around Taos and Santa Fe, so we headed back east from there.

We recrossed the Oklahoma panhandle, part of the area covered by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s,  and we checked work possibilities all the way back across Oklahoma. Just about nil! We ended up in the eastern part of Osage County and spent part of the rest of that year there. Had we been able to get any kind of work, we would have stayed. We even checked into employment for the state park service and my Dad and I went down to Oklahoma City to see about that, but no possibilities even there that would do us any good. And while there, we visited the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, which at the time was having a large exhibit of the work of Western artists, and I wanted so see their work; see how they painted some of those things so natural to the Western scene—rocks, cactus, sagebrush, etc.

Oklahoma is an interesting state—all the way from the hill country in the eastern part of the state to the high plains of the Oklahoma panhandle—where the wind never stops blowing, day or night. I remember one  place in the panhandle we stopped for something and I asked a man in front of the store there “Is it always this windy here?” To which he replied “Hell  no. Sometimes it gets windier.” After having camped two days at Black Mesa State Park and seen the wind blow about 40 mph 24/7, I wasn’t about to disagree with him!

Anyway, Osage County was also an interesting mix, part of it in what they call the Osage Hills and part of  it tall grass prairie. They have what they call bluestem grass there, which is really good for cattle.

There used to be several oil boom towns in Osage County, mostly gone now, but there was one we went through several times called Burbank. It wasn’t the most scenic place around and it looked pretty much like a ghost town, almost no sign of life at all and it had been a rip-roaring town in its heyday. Interestingly enough, we went through there in 1971 so I could show folks we were with what a ghost town looked like, and instead we found a town in the process of being revived, much like what we saw in Virginia City, Montana years later. Some ghosts don’t stay dead!

Oklahoma had its share of interesting characters. The second time we were in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which is in Washington County, right next  door to Osage County, we saw an old man with white hair and a handlebar mustache. He just looked interesting and so we asked about him. Come to find out, in his early days, he had been a train robber and had ridden with the Al Spencer gang. Seems he had gotten caught after a robbery and did jail time. The locals in Bartlesville thought  he must have had loot from a robbery stashed somewhere because they said he always had money and no one ever heard of him working.

Another interesting character I got to know was an old trick roper named Raymond. He had some sort of back injury that prevented him from doing rodeos anymore, but boy, could he still do tricks with that rope! He lived in the back of a pawn shop in Bartlesville, a  pawn shop that, interestingly enough, was willing to display my Western artwork in its front window. I sold a few pictures because of his display, and I found out an interesting fact. When a lot of Oklahomans buy something off you they want to dicker over the price. In the East that almost never  happened.  You put a price on something and folks either paid it  or walked off. In Oklahoma they wanted to dicker over it. If  you had a price of $15 on a picture they’d walk around it, stand back for a few minutes and say “I’ll give $7.50 for it. So if you really wanted to sell it, you learned to dicker with them. You also learned, becoming aware of their horsetrading  propensities, to ask a little more for a picture than you really expected to get in hope of coming out of the dickering process  with something near what you really wanted. All told, this was an interesting experience.

The time finally came, though, with the austere work situation in Oklahoma, we had to go further east in order to find work to be able to survive. Sad as I was to leave Oklahoma, the Lord knew what He had planned for me. Had we stayed there I never would have married my wife. So in the end, the Lord knows what’s best for each of us.

As our kids got old enough to travel, I wanted my wife and kids to see the places in the West I  had enjoyed so much in  earlier years and so when the kids  were younger we went all over the  place out there. My wife loved it like I did. We both still do, though we can’t go anymore. The kids didn’t always appreciate some of the places we took them when they were younger. Now they do. They realize they got to a lot of places that not too many tourists get to.

And through it all, Oklahoma still remains one of my favorite spots—a mixture of West and South—with lots of friendly folks. For any interested in travel, I’d definitely recommend it.

Karl Marx—Deadbeat Daddy

 

By Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

 

On May 5^th of this year many celebrated the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. You’d think from some of the articles  I read, mostly on the internet, that  Marx was a daring, bold economic visionary who had come up with a new economic system that proved to be a boon to mankind. Of course that’s the line today’s current crop of Marxist professors have been programmed to parrot. Unfortunately they parrot it to a whole batch of college students who, thanks to inadequate economic education at the high school level, really don’t have a clue and if the professor is good enough he can,  as they say, “baffle them with his BS.”

Supposedly, Marx’s economic vision was put forth for the benefit of the  poor working  people. That that idea was a total charade has been proven by the millions of poor working people that have  perished under various Marxist regimes around the  world. Anyone who believes that hogwash truly has to have spiritual and economic blinders on.

Steve Byas, writing on https://www.thenewamerican.com for May 5^th wrote: “While Marx is certainly a central figure in the history of communism, he was by no means the lone originator of communism. And his background demonstrates  that communism did not  spring from the toiling masses of the working class. The reality is that Marx, like almost all socialist revolutionaries, was a product of academia and self-proclaimed intellectual secret societies.” It has been reported that Marx didn’t write The Communist Manifesto on his  own, but rather he wrote it for a group called The League of the Just  (Illuminati) and his name does not even appear on the cover of the first edition.

Donnie Kennedy and I, in our book, Lincoln’s Marxists, noted that Charles A. Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune hired Marx to write columns for the paper, which was owned and published by utopian socialist Horace Greeley. From 1851 to 1862 Marx contributed about 500 articles to Greeley’s paper—his associate Friedrich Engles probably wrote about a quarter of them. He was more well versed in English than Marx was, and besides, Marx was a bit on the lazy side. It seems, though, that he had no trouble taking pay for the articles Engels wrote.

Leopold Schwarzschild, in his book The Red Prussian published in 1947 by Charles Scribner’s Sons noted of Marx that: “In all this there was nothing to indicate that from now on collections, subscriptions and charity were to be this brilliant young man’s sole means  of support. Nobody could have imagined it, and yet so it was. With the collections and subscriptions of 1844 he embarked on a life which was never again, in all the long decades, to have any other basis.” In other words, for all his supposed economic prowess, Marx and his family mostly lived on charity—and a lot of that came from his friend Engels.

Recently I ran across an article from 2010 on https://hubpages.com entitled Karl Marx Lived in Filth and Neglected His Children. The article observed that: “When an educated man chooses to live in poverty , and raise his children in poverty, that is abuse. When Marx and his wife and children were living in London, a visitor wrote a description of  their lifestyle in their 3-room flat. Not only did the Marx children have to endure the hunger of  poverty, they were raised in filth, or what his friend described as ‘a pig-sty’….Both Marx and his wife came from comfortable homes, hers more prominent. Her father was a Prussian baron. And she, Jenny, was an educated woman when she married Marx. Together they had seven children. Four of those children died young. Only three survived to achieve adulthood. Every biography of Marx reports that his four children who died  young died because of the poverty they had to endure…Marx occasionally wrote articles for newspapers and he wrote his long papers and books full of his philosophies about the ‘struggle’ of workers, but he never worked a day in his life”

He also fathered an illegitimate son, but you don’t hear much about that little indiscretion. The hub pages article observed, in closing, that “By any standard, Marx’ life was a failure, as a husband,  as a father, as a provider.” But, hey, Marx didn’t have time for any of that bourgeois stuff.  He and his fellow socialist revolutionaries/terrorists had  an agenda to push onto the world. They just didn’t have any time available for being good fathers and good providers and good husbands. That was for the plebes, not them. They were above all that!

So all those useful idiots that want to enthuse over Karl Marx should take a step back and realize that, when push came to shove, Marx was little more than just another Deadbeat Dad!

So What Does Civil War Look Like in America In the 21st Century?

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Actually, civil war in this country has a lot of manifestations, some of which we are seeing right now.

Some say it will be a struggle between “progressives” (those on the Left and their Deep State financiers), some currently in government and the folks we refer to as patriots, of which there are many stripes, (many of which, unfortunately, refuse to get along  with one another). There are more patriots than progressives, but many patriots have yet to come to grips with the fact that, in several forms, the civil war has already begun. By the time some of the patriots decide to pick up their guns and fight, the real struggle may well be beyond them and their ability to make a difference. Unfortunately, they could have earlier made a difference had they been willing to pick up their Bibles and then their pens (which are still mightier than the sword if rightly used). Cultural conflicts are not always won with firearms, though that is a last resort.

Back before the War of Northern Aggression the North had been waging a cultural war against the South for decades. Mostly the South ignored it, paid little  attention to those Northern people (and those who backed them) as they horrendously slandered the South and its people. Many Southerners did not feel it was “gentlemanly” to reply to gross Northern slander. Good folks they were–but they were wrong. If the Lord is the source  of all truth, which He is, then you need to defend that truth wherever you have it!

Some say the civil war will commence when rational discussion can no longer be had. Sad to say, we are long past that point. All you have to do is look at Black Lives Matter, Antifa, or the NAACP to realize rational discussion is out the window. Those  people are there to destroy your culture and history and they don’t give a flip about “rational discussion.” That’s not on their agenda. Never will be!

You have to admit that, in a sense, a state of civil war exists between Trump and his supporters and those who supported St. Hillary in the last election. Hillary, Soros, Obama, and the rest of the Deep State apparatus have never gotten over Hillary’s stinging defeat in that election and the proof that  a variation of civil war exists is the  fact that they are all actively working to overthrow the results of the last election constantly.  The Deep State has never stopped trying to destroy Trump (and by extension those who support him) since he took office. They have been trying, illegally, immorally, or any way they could, to unseat him constantly–and they actually think we “deplorables” are too stupid to notice. They are not only at war with Trump–they are at war with US! Trump is trying to run the government as best he can and the Left (composed of many congress critters who are Republicans as well as Democratic socialists) is trying to wrest control from him and his administration and I think they’d actually hand it over to Hillary if they thought they  could do it, against the will of the American electorate. Maybe that’s why they want our guns so badly right about  now. When two opposing groups contend for control of the  same government that’s a definition of civil war!!!

Mueller’s witch hunt is a main campaign in the Left’s civil war against America and her people. We are already at war (a spiritual war first and foremost) and it  would be helpful if the Christians and patriots could, in larger numbers, begin to realize that the war is already upon us, both culturally and in the streets, as well as in the vaunted halls of congress.

A good place to make a beginning is to get on the internet and read None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen. Although written back in 1972, it will give you valuable insight as to where we are in our day and why.