Author Archives: Jeffrey

The Cost of Southern Cultural Genocide (2019)

The destruction of Confederate monuments and the slandering of all things Confederate is in vogue in contemporary mainline media, academia, and the political establishment. The destruction of Confederate monuments by radical mobs is similar to the radical Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist monuments and the Soviet Union’s denial of public expressions of native culture in the Baltic states—all are examples of cultural genocide.[1] Standard American history as written by the victors in the so-called “Civil War” supports and encourages Southern cultural genocide. As noted by Southern historian Grady McWhiney, “What passes as standard American history is really Yankee history written by New Englanders or their puppets to glorify Yankee heroes and ideals.” Continue reading

Harmon: Grade Inflation and Informed Citizens

With this post, we begin the process of posting from our archives. The whereabouts of the author of the following column is unknown at this time. Theresa Harmon was a long time contributor to the early edition of the Federal Observer. Keep in mind that seventeen years have gone by, but in reality – little has changed. ~ Ed.

January 7, 2002 ~ We are constantly told that the state of “public” education is improving and that the test scores prove this is so. If you look at ACT and SAT scores, you might be inclined to believe this propaganda. If you check into the percentage of students taking “honors” classes in your local high school and receiving A’s, you might also be inclined to believe the rhetoric however, if you take the time to check into grade inflation and when and why scoring curves on tests such as the ACT and SAT were redrawn, you might be forced to an entirely different conclusion.

For instance, SAT scores have dropped 73 points since 1960 but, due to a little subversive maneuvering on the part of the educrats, the American public is blissfully unaware of it. You see, in 1985, every SAT test taken automatically had 100 points added to the overall score. That”s right, automatically added! Continue reading

A Perfect Solution to the Statue-Toppling Problem

Schools ought to teach history, not protest it.

A number of teachers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have pledged to withhold more than 2,000 grades in protest over the university’s plans to house “Silent Sam” in a separate on-campus building. Silent Sam is a statue of a Confederate soldier that stood in the quad at the university until students illegally toppled it earlier this year. Continue reading

Allsup: What Teachers Need And Aren’t Getting

This is the big issue in education that nobody is talking about. I wrote this Post for Scary Mommy in September of 2017 about public school teachers losing professional autonomy. ~ K.A.

They will be extinct by 2033 if the current rate of loss continues.

Like most endangered creatures, their habitat is threatened. When you were a child they were present in every city and town in the United States, but now their world has changed. They can be found only in rare, hospitable environments.

I’m not talking about polar bears, the red wolf, or the pygmy rabbit. The endangered ones I speak of here are not four-legged animals, but an important category of educators: teachers with a high level of professional freedom. Continue reading

Lincoln the Dwarf: Lyon Gardiner Tyler’s War on the Mythical Lincoln

In 1917 Lyon Gardiner Tyler picked up a copy of the New York Times and grew angry. What so incensed Tyler was an editorial suggesting that Southern slaveowners were akin to the Hohenzollern autocrats then plaguing the world. The editorial insisted that slaveowners were arbitrary and oppressive and that they had sought to extend slavery. When the North and the Republican Party resisted, the South declared war, characterizing it as defensive, just as the Hohenzollerns described their aggression as defensive in nature. Continue reading

Teacher: Stroking Egos Does Nothing for Students

…raising expectations does!

[Image Credit: U.S. Air National Guard photo by Tech. Sgt. Dan Heaton]

Armed with a bachelor of science in elementary education, I charged into my career as a teacher. I was immediately exposed to students at three levels of public schools:

1. A rather wealthy district with an average IQ of 120.
2. A classic, middle-class school.
3. A school that is best described as a mini United Nations.

In the “UN” school, approximately 25 percent of students were new immigrants, 30-35 percent were American-born blacks, and the remainder were 40-45 percent Caucasian. The economic structure ranged from welfare to upper middle class. Continue reading

Jefferson Davis ~ Farewell to the Senate (January 2, 1861)

If you will have it thus, we will invoke the God of our fathers.

WASHINGTON, D. C., January 2, 1861 – Jefferson Davis, already a veteran of war and politics at the age of 52, and obviously wracked by the pains of illness, stood at his desk in the Senate today to deliver a calm speech that in other countries might have seen him dragged immediately to a dungeon.

It is the strange temper of these times, however, that it was possible for a courtly Southerner to announce calmly that his State had seceded from the Union, by his own advice and with his consent, and that accordingly he no longer would appear as its spokesman there.

I do think that she has a justifiable cause,” he said, “and I approve of her act.” Continue reading

Lincoln and the Bankers ~ April 12, 1861

The bankers go to work to start the Civil War.

With the Central Bank killed off, fractional reserve banking moved like a virus through numerous state chartered banks instead causing the instability this form of economics thrives on. When people lose their homes someone else wins them for a fraction of their worth. Depression is good news to the lender; but war causes even more debt and dependency than anything else, so if the money-changers couldn’t have their Central Bank with a license to print money, a war it would have to be. We can see from this quote of the then chancellor of Germany that slavery was not the only cause for the American Civil War. “The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States if they remained as one block would attain economic and financial independence which would upset their financial domination over the world.” ~ Otto von Bismark, the Chancellor of Germany, who united the German states.

On the 12th of April 1861 this economic war began. Continue reading

Benson: Socialism And The 14th Amendment

The 14th Amendment

Moral decline is one of the main fruits of apostasy. It is always accompanied by a decline in the level of personal responsibility. However, because responsibility is neglected does not mean that it has been eliminated. If rejected, it will be transferred elsewhere. If a formerly responsible people decide, one way or another, to abdicate their responsibilities and adopt a “Let Eroge (the State) do it” then you can rest assured that “George” will do it, and those that abdicated their responsibilities will live to regret what George does. Read First Samuel, chapter 8, in the Old Testament Scriptures.

After the shooting phase of the War of Northern Aggression had ceased and federal power grew, the States lost power. Now, in these latter years of insanity we live in, state governors, in order to maintain their popularity with a jaded electorate that wants everything done for them, have jumped on the “federal funds” bandwagon! Continue reading

Allsup: The Core of Good Parenting is the Fun Stuff…

A Teacher’s Advice to Parents in One Short List

According to studies and parents themselves, parenting can make you tired, overwhelmed and anxious. And no wonder. The parent zone includes marinara drizzled onto your new beige carpet, more hours in the car than in your bed and entire mountain ranges of laundry. Plus you are responsible for the health and well being of someone who means more to you than joy itself. My sense is that researchers who study parenting are finding nothing new; exhaustion, occasional (or perpetual) feelings of being overwhelmed and chronic anxiety have plagued parents since basically forever. Continue reading

4 Ways to Teach Kids Finance

Just 24 percent of millennials demonstrated a basic understanding of financial concepts, according to a recent PwC study.

Flickr-MIKI Yoshihito | CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

Finance is hard to see. And as a result, finance can be hard to understand – especially for kids! Let me explain. My sister goes to the grocery store with her debit card. She swipes the card and leaves the grocery store with the card and a bag of groceries.

From her son’s perspective, it seems like a sweet deal! It doesn’t look like my sister gave anything up to get the groceries. Her son doesn’t see the exchange; he doesn’t see that money left my sister’s bank account and went into the shopkeeper’s bank account. He doesn’t see that my sister first earned the money after she provided services to hospital patients. If my sister used a credit card instead of a debit card, the exchange would have been even more confusing! Now a credit card company is lending money to my sister? Continue reading

More than 2,000 NC teachers failed a math licensing exam. Now it may be dropped.

The math exam that has made it difficult for hundreds of new North Carolina teachers to get their license could be phased out as early as February, based on a recent vote by a panel of state education experts.

In August, the state Board of Education learned that almost 2,400 elementary and special education teachers had failed the math portion of the licensing exam. Critics say the test requires middle and high school math skills that teachers of young children may not use, while failing to gauge whether licensing candidates will be effective teachers.

Those critics got a boost from a report presented last week to the state’s Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission. That report looked at more than 1,100 beginning teachers who have taken licensing exams created by the for-profit Pearson publishing company. It found that teachers who passed the math test on the first try didn’t get significantly better results with their students than those who failed at least once. Continue reading

Handcuffed for Homeschooling? Paperwork Dispute Gets Ugly

A school system in Massachusetts is proving to be malicious, incompetent, or maybe both.

Of course, we suspected that already. But the latest example comes from a lawsuit from a woman who pulled her 8-year-old son from Worcester Public Schools to homeschool him last January.

Josilyn Goodall is suing the Worcester School Committee, Superintendent Maureen Binienda, and the state Department of Children and Families after police entered her home, handcuffed her, and arrested her over what amounted to a paperwork dispute. Continue reading

Allsup: Real Kids Need Real Teachers

They sit in front of a screen for five hours a day, hundreds of people at desks moving through the programs, step by step. Once a week they meet with a person for fifteen minutes. Occasionally they join a group listening briefly to a speaker. But mostly they interact with a screen, reading and giving answers. They try to keep on task, but sometimes they can’t resist the lure of a computer game. When the wi-fi is down they just sit, waiting. One day, fed up with the eerie quiet, with eye strain, with boredom, they walk out in protest.

Who are these people? Continue reading

You big Dummy?

“You Big Dummy!”

Least-Educated State: California No. 1 in Percentage of Residents 25 and Older Who Never Finished 9th Grade; No. 50 in High School Graduates

California ranks No. 1 among the 50 states for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 50th for the percentage who have graduated from high school, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

Texas ranks No. 2 for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 49th for the percentage who have graduated from high school. Continue reading

Spivey: To my Brothers and Sons of Confederate Veterans

“To you, Sons of Confederate Veterans, we submit the vindication of the cause for which we fought. To your strength will be given the defense of the Confederate soldier’s good name, the guardianship of his history, the emulation of his virtues, the perpetuation of those principles which he loved and which made him glorious, and which you also cherish. Remember it is your duty to see that the true history of the South is presented to future generations.” ~ Lieutenant General Stephen Dill Lee, Commander-in-Chief, United Confederate Veterans, 24 April 1906.

I joined the Sons of Confederate Veterans for three reasons.  The first was to honor my ancestors who served under the greatest of men, General Robert E. Lee, in the Army of Northern Virginia.  The second was to honor and protect the memories of, and monuments to, every Southern soldier, sailor, and marine that served the Confederate States of America in her struggle against the tyranny of a power-hungry Federal government.  The third was to help perpetuate the truth about what led the Southern States to secede from the Union and what really caused Americans to slaughter each other by the tens of thousands in the War of Northern Aggression.  I remain, and shall remain, a proud member of the SCV.  That being said, I feel that the Sons, as a whole and generally speaking, are guilty of not fulfilling the charge given us by Lieutenant General S. D. Lee one hundred and twelve years ago. Continue reading

Secession: If at first you don’t Secede… ~ Part I

~ Foreword ~
This has been a long journey – and one that is long overdue, but I guess that in the scheme of things ~ ALL things for a reason.

That “goddamnedpieceofpaper”-again

By the turn of the Millennium, I had already been broadcasting for a half-decade and due to the massive sized audience which I had developed by then – predominantly through short-wave and satellite broadcasts ~ I had made many friends. One such gentleman was located in the north-central region of Wisconsin ~ not an area known for its relations with true knowledge of the Confederate States of America ~ a region, philosophy and history which I became more than familiar with in my youth.

Hal Young was a good friend and loyal listener to my programming and had been for some years. I have recently located (by accident) a series of voluminous discs covering a wide expanse of American history which he had compiled and sent to me ~ probably around the years 2002-2003 ~ maybe a year or so later. Where have they been all of these years? Given that my office archives have grown to a massive collection – they got buried in boxes and subsequently in drawers and file cabinets ~ some of which have not been opened for years ~ but the time had come to begin pairing my life back from unnecessary “things” ~ and I came across Hal’s five discs ~ an oh, what a treasure they are.

What we present to you this day, may seem to have been put together in a somewhat haphazard fashion ~ but the more I read it ~ the more it begins to make sense ~ however ~ it IS long, and hence ~ I will be posting it in several different “Chapters,” as all seems to have been put together with information coming from a range of resources.

As with most postings of our columns are open to discussion – and correction by knowledgeable and qualified readers and contributors, so please feel free to participate. In our next Chapter, we will be going traveling back to to an earlier part of America’s history to study what the Founders had to say about this thing called, ‘secession.’

At the end of this lengthy post, you will find a link to a well related commentary, which expands the lessons contained below. we invite you to read, The Issue WAS State’s Rights

I’ll see you at Sundown…

Jeffrey Bennett, Editor and Publisher

Continue reading

They Cannot Win

I’ve been decompressing since the Silent Sam Prayer Service on Sunday (16 December 2018) and trying to think about how to write about what went on that day. What was supposed to be a prayer service for not only the two hundred and eighty-seven boy soldiers from the university that is now the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that are represented by Sam, but for all the boy soldiers that served in the War (that’s right, Southern and Northern alike), was turned into something different because of the profanities and vulgarities that were screamed at us through loudspeakers and megaphones. We did manage our Invocation, and we tried to keep our cool and ignore them, laugh at them, even, but we did have a few slip-ups. Hey, we’re all human, right? Continue reading

Thomas Paine’s American Crisis and Finding Hope in the Depths of Winter (December 19, 1776)

Thomas Paine’s Revolutionary War pamphlet may have changed the course of American history.

On December 19th, 1776, the firebrand journalist and activist Thomas Paine (1737-1809) published the first volume of his political pamphlet The Crisis (also known as The American Crisis). The Crisis would feature five more volumes over the next twelve months, documenting much of the first full year of the incipient American Revolution against England. Paine would go on to release thirteen additional volumes between 1778 and the Revolution’s 1783 conclusion, continuing to trace the conflict’s evolution and to add his passionate support to the colonist cause at each stage.

That December 19th number begins with some of the most eloquent and inspiring lines in American history:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: ‘Tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Continue reading