What Goes On Today In Public Schools Is Not Stupidity–It Was Planned That Way By The Messiahs Of “Education”

by Al Benson Jr.

Recently I read an article on http://www.newswithviews.com by Pastor Roger Anghis. He commented about much of the educational fertilizer being spread abroad in public schools, and he was correct There was only one place I disagreed with him. He noted that “We are seeing stupidity reign in our seats of power. Things that you would never even think about fifty years ago are gong mainstream now.” I maintain that this is not a result of stupidity. It has been planned that way. It is all on purpose. Those people now promoting what goes on, at least most of them, know full well what they are doing and why.

Pastor Anghis observed, and correctly so, that “The absolute perversion in our schools, with drag shows and porn in the libraries, and the character of the teachers that…are allowed to teach our kids is appalling…Our teacher’s unions have taken the stand that parents have no right to determine what children learn…”

The idea there is that, at bottom, the kids really belong to the state and parents are only the surrogates that the state lets help them in raising the state’s children. Sorry to say, but this is not a new concept. I’ve been studying, and writing for over fifty years now, and I can remember that idea being put forth by public educrats over fifty years ago now–and it wasn’t new then! It really stretches back, in some form, into the late 1800s, when a few states made it a crime for parents to criticize their kid’s teachers in the presence of the kids! The idea back then was, though not explicitly stated, that the teacher’s word was law instead of what Mom or Dad said.

All they’ve done now is to take it to a higher level. The educrat’s agenda would have been, fifty years ago, what it is today if they felt they could have gotten away with it. But they were astute enough to know parents would not have stood for it, so they bided their time, two generations of it, all the while working to radicalize the students in those two generations. And while they weren’t completely successful, they felt they had made enough progress so that they can promote the educational offal they are currently turning out.

They tried promoting this educational tripe in Kanawha County, West Virginia back in 1974-75, and the parents revolted against it. It went over like the proverbial lead balloon. I wonder if the parents would turn out now to resist it in the numbers they did back then–almost fifty years ago. And I don’t say that to knock West Virginians by any means. I think the West Virginia situation was a public school experiment to see how much they could get away with, how much the parents would put up with. Once they figured that out, they knew how to plan for a more radical plan for public school kids. Once they found out, they could adjust their schedules accordingly.

If you wonder today why so many kids hate their country, look no further than what they were taught in public school history and economics classes. Look at the obvious leftist slant of some of the teachers picked up in the leftist colleges they attended, or even worse, in some of the schools they went to high school in! Much of what passes for “history” in high schools anymore is little short of overt leftist propaganda. I’ve seen quotes from some public school teachers that would cause Karl Marx to blush! And, no, I am not indicting all public school teachers. I’ve known a few good ones, but there are those among their number that are bad news for the kids they indoctrinate (not educate).

I read an article on http://www.americanvision.org for 11/2/2020. In it, the late Gary North said of a book by theologian R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education that “The philosophy of the statists who designed American public schools was messianistic…goes through the primary sources of three dozen of these social experiments …These men were open about what they were attempting to do: reform the American people and American society through tax-funded education. They disagreed with each other on pedagogical methods, but they were united in their argument that the state, not parents, should be in charge of the education of all children. The state would then become the redeeming agent of society. It would replace church and family as agents of redemption.” And the public school was to be the seminary for this statist “redemption” in open (now) competition with the church. This is nothing more than a breaking of the Commandment “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Public education was to be the state’s attempt to create a god in its own image.

Once Christians can grasp and understand this, there is no reason for them to support public education any longer–in fact they should separate from it and find other methods to educate their children. The public school is a competing deity, a false god that cannot save, only destroy. All you have to do to grasp that is to look where it came from (Unitarianism and socialism) and look where it has taken our children up to and including now!

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Abraham Lincoln–Hero Of The Left–And Unfortunately The Right

by Al Benson Jr.

Those who have done research on Abraham Lincoln and his socialist proclivities realize he has been embraced by socialists, communists, and other left-wing types. This is common knowledge among many people. What is not always common knowledge, though, is that Lincoln, with all his socialist connections, is somehow still an icon of the right. That fact displays the large probability that those on the right have been taught bad history and had their historical understanding tampered with, which weakens their position.

Lincoln’s love affair with the left has been noted in an article on 2/20/23 on http://www.jacobin.com which notes that Abraham Lincoln is a hero of the left. The article states: “From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists, leftists have regarded Lincoln as a pro-labor hero who played a crucial role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as part of the great radical democratic tradition.” If what this writer says is true, then Lincoln would have loved China Joe Biden and what he is doing to the country now.

The writer does not claim Lincoln was a socialist, but nonetheless, he grasped the “general concept” of socialism: the primacy of labor over capital and of liberty over property. The article continued: “Proclaiming ‘communism is 20th century Americanism’ leaders increasingly paired Lincoln with black abolitionists including Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, and Sojurner Truth…” If only those people had been aware of Lincoln’s racist turn of mind they might have taken a different tack. Their “hero” would probably have balked at being placed in the company of black abolitionists.

In actuality, Abraham Lincoln never freed a single slave. His “Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves in the Confederate States and it left slaves in slave states still in the Union in bondage. There were five slave states in the Union, including West Virginia, that the proclamation did not apply to. The slaves in those states were technically not freed until the passage of the 13th Amendment, which came months after Lincoln departed this mortal coil. So Lincoln was not really opposed to slavery–unless it was Confederate slavery. He was okay with Union slavery. All the hype about him being the “Great Emancipator” is something we could label as “specious humbug.”

Most on the left, and many on the right, don’t like to hear the truth about Lincoln. In an article on http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org for 3/14/22 Dr. Boyd Cathey observed: “Since then (1981) criticism of Lincoln is not acceptable, not tolerated by mainstream conservatives. Instead the conservative establishment now heralds such neo-Reconstructionist historians as Allen Guelzo or even Marxist Eric Foner (a favorite of Karl Rove). Any dissent from the virtual cannonization of Lincoln with contemporary American society comes from mostly Southern traditionalists and their allies…”

Dr. Cathey is right. When I wrote for the old National Educator newspaper back in the 1980s and 90s I did a series of articles on Lincoln and his socialist connections. The people that complained the loudest were patriotic conservatives who were ticked off at my telling the truth about their patron political saint. They didn’t want to be exposed to the blemishes of their “conservative” hero! They refused to be confronted with the facts! Many staunch conservatives today still think today he actually freed the slaves!

In an article by Claude S. Fischer on 4/5/2011 on http://www.madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com it was noted that “During just one term (plus 45 days) Lincoln managed to do the following, ‘socialist-communist acts: taxed the wealth creators…exploded deficit spending…led a federal takeover of currency and banks…forced people to work for the federal government…indulged in government giveaways to special interests…expropriated private property for redistribution…”

Joe Biden would have loved him except for his party label. But, you have to remember that in the mid 1800s the Republicans were socialists and the Democrats were conservatives. Today, both parties are socialist–Council on Foreign Relations socialists!

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Apostasy, Transcendentalism, And Illuminism

by Al Benson Jr.

You can’t say that what the Unitarians were doing in this country in the early 1800s was totally unknown to people. By the early date of 1805 the Unitarians had taken over Harvard College, in what has been called “the most important intellectual event in American history–at least from the standpoint of education.”

Samuel Blumenfeld, in his book Is Public Education Necessary? has observed that: “Harvard became the Unitarian Vatican, so to speak, dispensing a religious and secular liberalism that was to have profound and enduing effects on the evolution of American cultural, moral, and social values. It was, in effect, the beginning of the long journey to the secular humanist world that now dominates American culture…It made Harvard not only the seat of liberalism, but also, by necessity, the seat of anti-Calvinism.” Blumenfeld wrote that back in the late 1970s. It’s even worse today.

Oddly enough, when it comes to apostasy, the church itself has been part of the problem. James Turner, in his book Without God Without Creed that I mentioned in an earlier article noted that some of the problems with apostasy were within the churches themselves. He observed that: “The church played a major role in softening up belief. Theologians had been too unwilling to allow God to be incomprehensible, too insistent on bringing Him within the compass of mundane human knowledge, too anxious to link belief with science, too insensitive to noncognitive ways of approaching reality–too forgetful, in short, of much of their own traditions as they tried to make God up to date…One might say that most theologians had lost faith long before any Victorian agnostics.” In other words, much of the theological leadership, most especially in the North, had come to embrace the heady doctrines of what is called : “the wisdom of the world.” They were going to “explain” God, first to themselves and then to everyone else, and what they could not explain and rationalize, to them, became the stuff of legends, superstition, mysticism, not to be trusted. If their “great minds” could not accept it then it must not have been real!

In that frame of mind they were easy candidates for Transcendentalism, which was kind of an offshoot of Unitarianism. Arthur R. Thompson in To the Victors Go the Myths and Monuments dealt with this when he wrote: “Transcendentalism was a rational, or reason-oriented philosophy seeking truth, but as a reality a transition from Christ to anti-Christ. The early influence came from Voltaire, Rousseau. and Diderot. It was then influenced by Victor Cousin, Fourier, and German Illuminism. Some of the American leaders early on, were George Ripley, an editor at the New York Tribune, William Ellery Channing, John S. Dwight, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Theodor Parker, henry Thoreau, Bret Harte, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Henry Channing.” You may recognize some of these names as being people whose writings you had to read while in high school. Most of them were Unitarians. So if you were like me in high school you were force-fed literature produced by Christ-denying Unitarians. Of course no one bothered to tell you what those people really were. You were just made to read their stuff. If you wondered if this was a subtle form of propaganda you would have been right.

Mr. Thompson continued: “Early adherents of Transcendentalism included Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Bancroft. They were very close to Theodore Parker. He had a disbelief in the miracles of the New Testament and said that Jesus was not the Son of God but a great teacher. This belief has been propagated by many secret societies and occult organizations, but not all. Parker began to deny the traditional teachings of Christianity as a student of German liberal theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, who had tremendous influence on Illuminists , a free lover who held the same basic belief about marriage as Robert Owen, that it was an unnatural bond; …Parker went further. He compares Scripture with the works of Newton, Descartes, the Veda and the Koran. He denied sin and the atonement. He summarized God as goodness, and ‘each man as his own Christ’. His sermons echoed the socialists of Europe in the 1840s.” Parker was both a Unitarian and an abolitionist. So apostasy in this country led people to the point where they embraced the sermons of the devotees of socialism.

Mr. Thompson also noted something I’d not heard before. He wrote: “It is interesting that the Christian socialists have used the doctrine of the second coming for their own purposes since the 1780s and a great deal of their teachings has permeated mainstream Christianity, without the Christian community realizing it, thereby neutralizing opposition to socialism.” Now that is something I have noticed over the years in evangelical churches–a soft peddling of Christian opposition to socialism and communism. A willingness to overlook what the Communists and socialists do while mildly castigating those that point out the sins of socialism and communism. Christians that attempt to point out those sins are told they are not “loving” enough to their adversaries.

So we live today with the results of the apostasy of the 1700 and 1800s and most fail to realize it, and what’s more, some get disturbed if you even mention it. They don’t want to hear it. Which all goes to show that their faith has been tampered with and many are quite comfortable with a tampered-with faith. And the socialists, communists, and Illuminists of our day love to have it so. The Christian Church is their main enemy and they have mostly neutralized it–something we all need to think about.

Unitarian/Socialist Influence On Public Schools

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

The recent June 21st issue of The New American magazine is a special report on education in America. The people that publish The New American realize that the major problem we have with education in this country is the public school system. An informative article by Alex Newman in this issue is entitled Government Schools vs. Christianity. Among other things Alex Newman noted: Despite the myth of religious ‘neutrality’ and ‘secular’ schooling perpetrated by the government school establishment and its apologists, all education is fundamentally religious in nature. That is just as true in government schools across the United States as it is in Islamic madrassas of Pakistan. The only question is what what religion and what worldview is being taught.” This is a cogent truth that most people, Christians included, never seem to grasp.

Newman goes on to observe that “non-Christians and anti-Christians with communist leanings were primarily responsible for the government takeover of education in America beginning in the mid-1850s…The gradual replacement of Christianity in the public schools began early on in the history of government-run education. It started with Communist Utopian Robert Owen, the first serious advocate of a total government takeover of education in America. In Owen’s view, only government training of children in collectivism from a young age could produce people ready to dispense with private property and live for what he viewed as the greater good of the collective.

Owen’s collective colony in New Harmony, Indiana went belly-up after only a few years, as most of such socialist experiments did in the 1800s. And there were a lot of them here in the 1800s, from Brook Farm to Fruitlands to New Harmony to the Shaker towns in several states, although the Shakers lasted longer than some of the others.

After his dismal failure at New Harmony, Owen teamed up with Orestes Brownson to promote a “secret society modeled on the Carbonari, an early 19th century Italian secret revolutionary society to work toward that goal.” And Newman tells us that the object of this society was “…convincing the public to support a government takeover of education. The second was to get men elected to the legislatures who would help advance that mission. But there was an even more ambitious goal: setting up a national system of compulsory government schools that would exclude all religion.” Brownson said that “The great object was to get rid of Christianity.”

And Unitarian Horace Mann “wanted to get the Bible out of education under the guise of stopping ‘sectarianism’.” Mann was totally opposed to the Calvinist church schools in Massachusetts. Mann was totally opposed to Reformed theology–indeed he had apostatized from it and formed his own creedal statement of how he felt life should be lived and he wanted to foist that apostate world view on the children of Massachusetts.

All of this happened in the early to mid-1800s–not the 1900s! Our problems with public schools go way, way back to their beginnings. You are not going to reform them by going to parent-teacher meetings or running for the local school board or throwing more public money at the public schools under the fallacious guise of “quality education.”

The public school system will not be reformed because it is doing what it s founders intended it to do. Those who say public education has failed do not understand what this system was created to do. Actually, the public schools have been a howling success at what they were created to do–propagandize your children into accepting and embracing the socialist, anti-Christian worldview.

This should be apparent to anyone who engages in serious thought when you see what is being taught in public schools in our day. Our public schools are teaching concepts that Lenin and Mao would love and endorse. Why do you think that so many of our kids are so sold on communism and socialism? Because they are getting it taught to them in school, that’s why. Oh they don’t call it communism. They give it nobler-sounding names like Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project and a host of others. But what it amounts to is socialist doctrine and propaganda. If you choose to use public schools your kids are being indoctrinated in this stuff.

The articles in this latest issue of the New American advocate that you remove your kids from public schools and work to defund them and I could not agree more. Every new bond issue for public schools that comes up should be voted down. And they would be if only parents started to grasp the agenda of these brain laundries in sufficient numbers.

This Chinese virus that kept so many kids out of school last year allowed parents to get a look at at least some of what was being taught in schools and lots of parents did not like what they saw. Enrollments in public schools are down this year in many states, even here in Louisiana. Home school enrollment is on the rise–and that is good. We need to continue this trend.

More parents need to begin to grasp what the public school system is really all about, particularly Christian parents. Their primary goal is robbing your children of their faith and turning them into good, compliant little collectivists. Despite the efforts of some good teachers, that is the objective of the public school system and those that promote it, and people need to start figuring that out.

When a Socialist Became the Secretary of the Interior

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

I have noted in recent articles the impact that socialists and communists had in the history of this country well before the twentieth century–going all the way back to the 1840s. Lots of historians–so called–will seldom, if ever, acknowledge this. Even less will they make mention of the basic socialist foundations of the “conservative” Republican Party. This is history we are not supposed to be taught. And mostly, we aren’t. We have to find this out for ourselves by doing the homework.

One thing that does aid us is that more and more, the socialists are not bashful in admitting their impact on our earlier history. Where the historians ignore it, the socialists brag about it. Donnie Kennedy and I, when we wrote our book Lincoln’s Marxists, the first edition of which was called Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists found this to be true. Incidentally, the first edition of our book is still available.

I just recently came across an article entitled https://worldhistory.us/american-history/impact-of-the-forty-eightors-on-the-amer… that was quite frank in what it admitted. It was published in August of 2018. In part it noted: “For the German-American Forty-Eighters, the best political instrument to ply their revolutionary ideals was the new Republican Party…As a result, the German Forty-Eighters became a significant voting bloc in the Republican Party.

Another German Forty-Eighter, Carl Schurz, a farmer and abolitionist from Wisconsin, helped pave the way for Lincoln’s presidential victory…Schurz mobilized a large part of the German-American vote for Lincoln in the general election…Unfortunately, the German-American reputation as fighters suffered during the course of the war. Schurz, who was awarded with a command by Lincoln, led German-speaking units at the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. His soldiers retreated pell-mell in those battles.” Germans supplied around 750,000 of the Union’s 2.5 million soldiers. That was in the neighborhood of 30%. Not all of those were Forty-Eighters, but a fair number were.

The article opines that the War of Northern Aggression would have happened whether the Forty-Eighters were there or not but it says “…the outcome might have been a bit different.

As for Carl Schurz, his propensities for socialist activities continued and he ended up becoming the Secretary of the Interior in the Hays administration. Pretty lofty position for a German socialist to occupy in the federal government. In our book Lincoln’s Marxists we provided a bit of information about Schurz and his time in the Interior Department. It was not Schurz at his best.

But even more harm was done by his wife, Margarethe Meyer Schurz. It was she who introduced the idea of kindergartens into America. She was a disciple of Friedrich Frobel, the founder of the Kindergarten movement. It is worth noting that, when the socialist revolutionaries were driven out of Germany and legitimate government was restored, kindergarten were banned in that country. When I first started this blog back in November of 2011 I did an article dealing with the socialist origins of the kindergarten movement. Like so many other socialist agendas it came into existence in the 1800s, not the 1900s in this country. And our children are not the better off for it. Yet, along with the rest of the public school movement we seem to have embraced it.

Now, with Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, along with the whole transgender movement some are beginning to see what the public schools have been doing to their children and lots of them don’t like it. Let us hope they realize they need to get their kids out of those indoctrination centers we call public schools.

It should, by now, have begun to dawn on people that a lot of the problems we have in this country were introduced here by European socialists of one stripe or another. And when they arrived they found home-grown American socialists who were more than willing to aid them in the destruction of our God-given liberties. That’s what socialism is really all about.

Communist and Socialist Influence In the “News Media” Since the 1840s

by Al Benson Jr.
Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

How many think the “news” media has only been a problem for the past few decades, from sometime around the 1950s until now? If this is what you believe then you have already swallowed half of their lie. In fact, the “news” media–so called–has been a propaganda organ of the Deep State from sometime in the 1840s. And always with a leftist slant!

If you are doing the homework you can begin to notice this in the late 1840s with some of the coverage given to the 1848 socialist and communist revolts in Europe by Horace Greeley’s paper the New York Tribune. Articles by Charles A. Dana for Greeley’s paper purported to cover what was going on at that time in Europe. What they didn’t tell you was that Dana was actually participating in those socialist revolts and then sending back “news” that made them look good. This is a tactic that has been used by the Left ever since then and it must work because lots of naive people seem to buy into such gobbledygook

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This was particularly noticeable in the left-of-center coverage given to abolitionist/terrorist John Brown. The book John Brown’s War Against Slavery by Robert E. McGlone observed that: “To call the role of abolitionist correspondents in Kansas is to compile a list of John Brown’s admirers and disciples: James Redpath, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Addison Williams, Richard J. Hinton, Richard Realf, John Henry Kagi, and others. Just twenty in 1855 when he came to Kansas, Scottish-born James Redpath was a correspondent for three Republican papers, including Greeley’s New York Tribune.”

And he continued: “Englishman Richard J. Hinton, another reporter for Eastern newspapers, arrived in Kansas in June 1856. He soon joined Brown’s ‘army’ and later claimed he would have been at Harpers Ferry had he been properly informed on the date of the attack. Richard Realf reported for Eastern papers and rode with (James) Lane before volunteering to serve under Brown. John H. Kagi, Brown’s second in command at Harpers Ferry reported on Kansas for the Washington National Era..Kagi was the associate editor of the Topeka Tribune…”

Then there was leftist Unitarian Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man who was “always ready to invest money in treason.” McGlone tells us that “His ‘letters from Kansas’ ran in several Eastern and Midwestern newspapers over the signature ‘Worcester’.” Do you begin to get the idea that John Brown was top-heavy with “news” correspondents? Obviously the political and theological Left had big plans for Brown and his agenda or he would not have rated this much “news” coverage.

But McGlone hasn’t told you everything. Whether that was on purpose or not I can’t say, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. To fill in some of the missing bits of info, we need to go to Arthur Thompson’s book To The Victors Go The Myths And Monuments. Mr. Thompson can always be depended on to give some what most of the rest leave out. He notes, of Brown that: “Brown also had veteran 48ers Charles Kaiser, August Bondi, and Charles W. Lenhardt who rode with him in Kansas, and the Chartist (English socialist) Richard J. Hinton. Many short histories of Brown leave out any reference to the majority of the aforementioned men. Brown was admired by Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, Dr. Samuel Howe, and Frederick Douglas Frederick Douglas was close enough to Brown that Brown confided in him the location of what would become the raid on Harpers Ferry. After the raid, Douglas also fled temporarily to Canada for fear that he would be prosecuted for abetting. The official story is that he was worried about guilt by association. Actually, evidence captured at the time in the possession of John Brown implicated Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings, and Douglas…The membership in a wide variety of conspiratorial organizations just among the men who rode with Brown indicates a broad-based influence within the Left.

So you can see that the Left had plans to use Brown and his agenda for their own purposes. Brown was the cannon fodder for part of their leftist revolution in this country. So please, you folks on the left, please don’t continue to bleat about how communism was no problem in this country until Roosevelt. You are trying to defraud us of 100 years of your active agenda in this country in the hope that we will not pick up on it. Sad to say, for you, it isn’t working anymore.

When a Communist Was the Assistant Secretary of War

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Many may look at the title of this article and complain that “this has never happened in this country.” Sorry to disappoint you, but it has–and it wasn’t in the 20th century when we had a carefully orchestrated “Cold War.” It was in the 19th century, back when they try to tell us that communism didn’t exist here. They lied to us. It did exist here, but we are not supposed to realize that fact. It doesn’t bode well for the fake historians.

The man this article is about was not a Communist Party member. But he was a communist in this worldview and he ardently supported what they were doing.

By now, those of you that have followed history know who I am writing about–Charles Anderson Dana–the assistant secretary of war under Edwin M. Stanton in the Lincoln administration. Dana was a promoter of the communist worldview going back to the days before the socialist revolts in Europe in 1848.

An interesting article on https://djdnotice.blogspot.com for October 1, 2014 said of Dana that: “Brigadier General Joseph Weydemeyer of the Union Army was a close friend of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels in the London Communist League (Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, close friend of Marx, published with Joseph Weydemeyer a number of Communist journals and also ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ commissioned by Karl Marx. As a member of the Communist/Socialist Fourier Society in America, Dana was well acquainted with Marx and Marx’s colleague in Communism, Fredrick Engels. Dana, also, was a friend of all Marxists in the Republican Party, offering assistance to them almost upon their arrival on the American continent.) So there were Marxists in the early Republican Party. Reading most of our current “historians” who would’ve guessed?

Dana was also an author of some note (all the better to propagandize you, my dear). He is reported to have written a book Stanton’s Reporter: Charles A. Dana in the Civil War. He also wrote Proudhon and His Bank of the People,: Being a Defence of the Great French Anarchist,… There’s more to the title but I am not going to print the rest out here. It’s long enough for a short paragraph.

Another book mentioned in the research I located was written by Carl J. Guarneri and is called Lincoln’s Informer: Charles A. Dana and the Inside Story of the Union War. I don’t know where this author is coming from but his book shows there is still interest in Dana. The book Horace Greeley And Other Pioneers of American Socialism by Charles Sotheran notes, on page 291 that “Horace Greeley selected the best managing editor the Tribune ever had, from among the Brook Farm Socialists. This was Charles Anderson Dana, the present editor of the New York Sun. For those who may not know, Brook Farm was a socialist experiment in communistic living that eventually went belly-up as most socialist experiments do. It has been described as a “Unitarian, Humanitarian, and Socialistic experiment.”

Arthur Thompson in his informative book To The Victors Go The Myths And Monuments has noted on page 198 of that book that: “Charles Dana was a vice president of the National Convention of Associations. He was a member of the Proudhonian Club, nicknames the 48ers of America, composed mainly of Americans who had participated in the revolution of 1848-49 in Europe. In 1848 he spent eight months in Europe covering the revolutions for the New York Tribune, and he shared Marx’s views. Dana wrote that the purpose of the uprisings was ‘not simply to change the form of government, but to change for form of society.’ He did more than report. Dana is but one example of reporters who participated in revolutionary activities and then posed as impartial observers…This has long been a tactic of the Left, and continues to this day.” In other words, Charles Dana was part of the 19th century’s “Fake News” media. And let us never forget that it was him who hired Karl Marx to write for Greeley’s newspaper.

So here we have Charles A. Dana, writer, socialist revolutionary, and eventually Assistant Secretary of War under Edwin Stanton. And if you think Stanton was not aware of all this then you gravely underestimate Mr. Stanton. He knew! As sharp and shrewd as Stanton was he would have known all of this and still he pegged Dana as his chief informant. That should tell you something about Stanton as well as Dana. Dana was the perfect example of communist infiltration of the US government in the 19th century. We had plenty of that in the 20th century. I begin to wonder how much the 20th century infiltrators learned from Charles A. Dana.

Communism in America? Go Back to 1850

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

I recently came across an article on https://www.historynet.com that was not new, but was interesting. It was originally published back in 2012, in June of that year, in Civil War Times. I used to read this magazine, but it had been my experience that it did not deal overly much with issues like this, as that was not politically correct at the time (and still isn’t).

Sarah Richardson wrote the article and it dealt with an interview it seems she had with Robin Blackburn, the author of the book An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Blackburn is a British historian and former editor of the New Left Review so no one can accuse him of being a paranoid right winger. He brought out some interesting points about Lincoln and Marx. Richardson noted of Lincoln that “Up until the age of 21 he was working without payment for his father. On some occasions his father would hire out his son’s services and even then didn’t hand over the wages.” Blackburn seemed to think this may have affected Lincoln’s views on slavery. It’s possible but it’s hard to say for sure. Although we know from some of Lincoln’s later comments on slavery it was not a major issue in his invasion of the South. He claimed to be preserving the Union (though it was going to be a preservation by force). But he said at one point that if he could preserve the Union by freeing some slaves and not others, he would do it and if he could preserve the Union by freeing none of the slaves he would do that. And his “Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 freed only slaves in Confederate territory. It freed no slaves in Union-held territory.

But the American connection to Marx goes further than Lincoln. Richardson’s article stated: “Marx himself was only 30 when he was caught up in the 1848 revolution, and he edited one of Germany’s main revolutionary newspapers. At that time, he was visited by Charles Dana, an American journalist and managing editor of the New York Daily Tribune. Dana later hired him as the Tribune’s European correspondent, A lot of his research for the Tribune ended up in his famous book Das Capital, published in 1867.”

Donnie Kennedy and I, in our book Lincoln’s Marxists, the first edition of which is still available under the title Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists dealt with Mr. Dana and his communist proclivities at some length. Mr. Dana was a prime mover and shaker in the movement to promote communism in this country in the 1850s. Arthur Thompson, author of the very informative book To The Victors Go The Myths And Monuments also deals with Charles Dana on page 198,givng more info on Dana’s leftist background.

The Tribune published, over the years, something like 450 of Marx’s articles, with at least 300 published under his name, though some researchers claim his helper, Engels, wrote quite a few of these because Marx was just too lazy to write when he often needed to, so Engels stood in the breath often while Marx was daydreaming about ways to save the world (for communism).

After the revolts of 1848 ended, thousands of the leftist revolutionaries involved fled to this country. Many of those kept in contact with Marx and continued their leftist activities by writing for German-language papers in this country, which, over time, eventually influenced many Germans here toward a Marxist point of view.

Richardson noted that “There were about 200,000 German-Americans who fought for the Union, and about 40,000 were in units that had the Germain language as the medium of command.” So these people were over here, supposedly to help the North “free the slaves, and they couldn’t even speak the language. Bet your “history” books never mention any of this! And besides, the idea of leftists fighting to “free” anyone from anything is just ludicrous All you have to do in our day is look at the countries that were enslaved under communism and you begin to understand the communist concept of “freedom.” You are “free” to do what the communists tell you to do or they shoot you or put you in a “re-education” camp” until you see things their way. And if you don’t, then they shoot you!

Richardson then notes that Dana, who had been responsible for getting Marx to write for Horace Greeley’s paper became the assistant secretary of war in 1862. He remained in close contact with good buddies of Marx like Joseph Weydemeyer who later became a general in the Union Army. And also mentioned “Another member of the Communist League in Germany in the 1840 was August Willich, who became a Union general.”

And she made another interesting point from her interview with Blackburn She said “Worth noting, too, that Marx and Lincoln were both influenced by German philosophy–in Lincoln’s case, as transmitted by such writers as Theodore Parker.” Parker was a noted Unitarian. And all the stuff I have read about him never mentioned anything about any German connections–but it now seems there were some.

We have got to begin to realize that communism in America was alive and well in the early 1850s here and that we have been lied to by those faux-historians that tell us you never had a problem with communism in America until the Roosevelt years. Let’s wake up and begin to do the homework ,lest we be victimized even further in our own day.

Critical Race Theory and The Local Public School

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

In March of 2021 writer Christopher F. Rufo did an article for Hillsdale Colleges’ publication Imprimis in which he dealt with Critical Race Theory and its origins. I can’t deal with it all here. It is long and informative and you may be able to find it on the internet–if it hasn’t been censored off by now. For my purposes here I will give you a brief quote. Mr. Rufo noted that: “Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions.” One of those public institutions is the public school system and Critical Race Theory is, regardless of what some try to tell us, alive and unfortunately well in our public school systems in America.

I read an article for May 24th on https://www.thegatewaypundit.com which observed: “In Cherokee County, Georgia there was a grassroots victory at the school board level as concerned parents convinced their elected school board members, on the spot, to prohibit the implementation of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project based on their concerns. .According to (a) reader, interest in the topic of CRT and the 1619 project was intense and concerned citizens overfilled the building where the school board meeting was held and many had to be out in the parking lot:..The school board voted 4-1, with two abstentions to approve a resolution to prohibit implementation of critical race theory and the 1619 Project..from being taught in Cherokee schools. Groups of concerned parents , teachers, students, and other concerned citizens around the country are organizing similar resistance to the Marxist teaching style and learning aids called CRT, with lobbying efforts at their school board and local government levels, seeking similar resolutions to have it banned from public schools.”

Now, let me ask a question here–have any of you older folks ever seen a situation similar to this? To some of us who have lived in West Virginia, this is a carbon copy of the beginning of the Kanawha County Textbook Protest that took place in that county in West Virginia during the mid-to-late 1970s. The Kanawha County school board, with the exception of the one honest lady on it, Alice Moore, tried to foist off a set of really raunchy textbooks on the students in that county. The parents in Kanawha County protested, picketed the schools, marched, and contacted their political leadership at the state and local levels–and no one could, or would, help them. And there was no help forthcoming at the federal level because it is the federal level that is responsible for what your kids are spoon-fed at the local level. Anyone trying to tell you different is either naive or a liar. Everything in public schools is filtered through the grid of the federal Department of Education, except maybe the times the kids are allowed to have recess. Local control of public education is a vaunted myth that should have died out after the feds put down the textbook revolt in West Virginia , using whatever methods they needed to.

So I will say this to the good folks in Cherokee County, Georgia. You have put off the implementation of Critical Race Theory in your public schools–for now! However, if you don’t keep your eye on your local school board, and think you have won this fight for good and all, then somewhere down the road, this “educational” Marxist construct will resurface once the parents quit watching out for it. It may come back with a different name to throw parents off track but it will be back–just as sure as the turning of the earth!

In order to prevent your kids from again facing the probability of being subjected to this Marxist drivel posing as education you would be better advised to remove your kids, if at all possible, from the public school system and either find a good Christian school or teach them at home. For those willing to make the sacrifice this can be done. It means learning to accept the responsibility for your own kids’ education rather than leaving the job up to local school educrats who may or may not have your kids’ best interest at heart. This is not a blanket indictment of all who teach or have taught in public school. We have a niece who teaches in one. Rather it is a warming to be alert because there are many in the educational bureaucracy at all levels who view your kids as cannon fodder to the leftist propaganda they intend to shove down their throats as part of the destruction of your culture and history.

Christian parents especially need to hear this, but I fear not many of them will listen. A lot I know never did and they were anxious to even avoid this discussion. Being forewarned, however, is to work toward being forearmed. To all but leftist parents–understand this-the public school system ain’t your friend–it is the culture destroyer of your heritage.

Critical Race Theory and “Woke” Evangelicals

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

I can recall, back in the 1980s, which seems like ancient history now, that one of the evangelical authors that got lots of attention was Os Guinness. Evangelicals raved about his work. At that point I had not read much of what he wrote. At that point he seemed rather apolitical to me and that seemed to be what evangelicals back then liked–someone that was either apolitical or leaned slightly to the left. It was considered in some evangelical circles to be rather avant-garde to lean to the left politically. What many evangelicals did not seem to realize was that all politics is, at root, theological and that politics is only someone’s outworking of his theology. Therefore, if your politics leaned to the left, so did your theology.

Many evangelicals, even today, still have not figured this out.

I have wondered if the evangelicals who loved Os Guinness back in the 80s would still love him today, but I have doubts about that due to a column on https://www.wnd.com/2021/05/evil-critical-race.theory written by Art Moore. Mr. Moore says: “One year ago, few Americans outside of higher education had heard of Critical Race Theory, which contends the concept of race is not biological but rather a culturally invented category designed by white people to oppress people of color. Now, having leaked from its academic lab, CRT is spreading exponentially to school boards, corporate offices the military and governmental agencies…But it’s urgent that citizens of this nation realize that CRT is not merely ‘erroneous teaching’ and that the ‘leak’ was no accident, warns Os Guinness, an Oxford-educated scholar with an unusual cultural and political vantage point. Born to Christian medical missionaries in China where he was a witness of Mao’s communist revolution, Guinness contents that CRT is part of an intentional, systematic, revolutionary movement in America stretching back to the 1930s that intends to replace this unique experiment in ordered liberty with a system responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million people in the 20th century…The so-called ‘cancel culture’ and Critical Race Theory are ‘the fruit’ of what has been described as the ‘long march through the institutions’ and ‘the triumph of cultural Marxism, or neo-Marxism,’ Guinness said in an interview with Eric Metaxas.”

And Moore observed that “Guinness noted that the term ‘long march through the institutions’ was coined by communist student activist Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s. It was popularized by German-American Marxist scholar Herbert Marcuse of the so-called Frankfurt school of critical theory in his 1972 book Counterrevolution and Revolt.”

So this entire thing we have been fed is a communist construct. Moore noted that “The sexual revolution and cultural Marxism, Guinness told Metaxas, are ‘the heirs of the French Revolution.” And Guinness tells us “The tragedy is today we’re switching from the American Revolution to the heirs of the French Revolution, and that switch is disastrous.” Guinness is right on the money here.

Moore noted: “Guinness, a British citizen who has lived in the United States since 1968, said that many evangelical leaders are ‘incredibly naive’ about what is happening today because they don’t see the big picture. He recalled the many Zoom calls with evangelical pastors in which he has participated amid the cultural upheaval following the death of George Floyd. Many of these pastors speak of ‘social justice’ Guinness said, without understanding they have ‘drunk the kool aid’ of cultural Marxism.”

Guinness tells us that “The way of the cultural Marxist, the radical left, is only power, and it makes the problem worse, not better.” Those that understand Marxism know that this is intentional. not coincidental.

As I worked over this article, the thought came to me–where were the Christians when all this has been happening? Sad to say, they were probably out to lunch–a long, prolonged lunch, which is probably where they drank the kool aid of cultural Marxism!

Unless evangelical pastors start waking up to what’s going on and warning their congregations about all this the future of the church in our day is bleak indeed. I know the Lord will win the victory in the end, but I think he wants to use His people to help win that victory. If His people have been put to sleep with cultural Marxist kool aid that victory may take longer than it otherwise would have.