Category Archives: Mr. Benson’s Classroom

Al Benson Jr. is the editor and publisher of The Copperhead Chronicle, a quarterly newsletter that presents history from a pro-Southern and Christian perspective. He has written for several publications over the years. His articles have appeared in “The National Educator,” “The Free Magnolia,” and the “Southern Patriot.” I addition to that he was the editor of, and wrote for, “The Christian Educator” for several years. In addition to The Copperhead Chronicles, Al also maintains Revised History.

He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Confederate Society of America and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and has, in the past, been a member of the John Birch Society. He is the co-author, along with Walter D. Kennedy, of the book “Lincoln’s Marxists” and he has written for several Internet sites as well as authoring a series of booklets, with tests, dealing with the War of Northern Aggression, for home school students.

Mr. Benson is a highly respected scholar and writer and has graciously allowed Metropolis Café to publish his works. We are proud to have his involvement with this project.

Benson: Some Hidden (in plain sight) American History

The first place I ever read anything about Benjamin Bonneville was in a historical fiction novel by Janice Hold Giles, published back in 1968, called The Great Adventure.

Mrs. Giles did not have lots of information on Bonneville except to note that he was an army officer, traveling in the Far West during the fur trading days and she seemed to have some questions about an army officer traveling around out there on his own with no apparent military responsibilities.

Recently, I watched a video on the internet of a speech given by Arthur Thomson, CEO of the John “Birch Society. It was an excellent video, one I would recommend. The title of it is What you are not supposed to know about America’s founding. Continue reading

Benson: Texas

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. Continue reading

Benson: Oklahoma Reminiscences

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. Continue reading

America’s Exceptionalism: The Pastors of the Revolution

I was reminded this evening by a long-time reader of Kettle Moraine Publications, John Pickelsimer about this post from one of our other blogs. It fits on Metropolis Café as well. ~ Ed.

As we look at the preachers of early America what we will see is a total dedication to preaching the uncompromised Word of God and a refusal to budge from its true meaning.

The Church of England had been established in America because America was a subject of England, but many of the colonists had left not just England, but Europe in general to be free to worship in the manner that they saw fit. The Geneva Bible, which was the Bible of the majority of the pilgrims, had opened the eyes of many preachers and citizens alike because of its footnotes and commentaries as to what the Word was really saying about things like self-government, taxes, freedoms and liberties that no nation at that time allowed let alone practiced. Continue reading

A Little More Jayhawker History…

…your school books inadvertently forgot to mention

I’ve found it interesting, over the years, as I have perused the internet out of curiosity to see what sites it might contain that deal with Yankee/Marxist atrocities in Missouri before and during the War of Northern Aggression, the first sites that usually pop up in search engines mostly seem to deal with Lawrence, Kansas.

Could you say there was Yankee/Marxist bias on the internet? Heavens to Abigail–who would ever have thunk it??? Continue reading

Benson: “Maryland, my (home schooling) Maryland

Home schooling is one of those things that scares the living daylights out of the Educational Establishment and the Deep State. Home schooling, and Christian education in general tend to be areas where the participants do not always (usually) accept the Establishment version of history and/or politics.

From time to time, as they feel they can get away with it, the “change agents” in the educational bureaucracy seek to remedy this situation by trying to find reasons to enforce new controls that will give them more power and control over home schooling, its curriculums, and its participants. Continue reading

Benson: Did Lincoln’s Theological Views Reflect His Political Actions?

The title of this article is a legitimate question – not only for Lincoln, but for the rest of us as well. Do our political actions reflect our theology? If you look today at some of these Democrats and RINO’s that hate Trump and will do or say anything to hurt his agenda, true or not, (and most of the time it isn’t) you have to ask if what they are doing reflects their theology – and if it does – then what does it say about the god they serve?

Similar questions were not always asked about Abraham Lincoln because back then most people didn’t equate a man’s theological perspective with what he did politically. Then, as today, they should have. There is more connection there than most people realize. Continue reading

Belated Birthday Comments on Lincoln the Empire Builder

Well, we are now into February–the beginning of Black History Month, which should end sometime around the latter part of Spring. Yesterday was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, with all the attendant legends and myths posing as history that always accompany that. As always we will be fed all the historical bovine fertilizer that goes along with that notable event.

This brief commentary would normally have been posted on the “Great Emancipator’s” birthday. I roughed it out the previous evening, only to discover that, when I went to print it off, the printer attached to my computer had suddenly developed a case of IDS (ink deficiency syndrome). Having been able to obtain another print cartridge late on the day of his birth I am now posting this, but the date on it will be tomorrow, the 13th. In this case a day doesn’t make that much difference, seeing that we all have already been treated to 150 plus years of historic swill. Continue reading

How “History” Professors View the “Civil War”

Many who will read this are already aware of how our current crop of “historians”–so called, view the War of Northern Aggression. However, some who read it may not be all that aware, and so this is written for those unaware ones who still labor under the naive delusion that the War was fought over slavery and that communism did not rear its ugly head in America until at least the 1930s. Well, it did rear its ugly head in the 30s–but it was the 1830s, not the 1930s. By the 1930s communism was already well established here. It’s just that no one bothered to inform the American public.

I spend considerable time on the internet scrounging around for information in those areas that concern me, and one of those areas is the record of communist and socialist infiltration in this country, both in the 19th and 20th centuries. Continue reading

National Education: It Has Always Been About “Reconstructing” Southern Culture

                     John Chodes

In his book Segregation–Federal Policy or Racism (Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, South Carolina) author John Chodes noted, on page 53 that: “In 1867, a small agency was created by Congress. It was called the Bureau of Education. It consisted of only five employees: a supervisor and four clerks, ‘to collect such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several states and territories…as shall aid the people of the United States in the establishment and maintenance of efficient school systems, and otherwise promote the cause of education throughout the country.

From this miniscule beginning, over time, the Bureau of Education became a gigantic department, nationalizing, controlling, and separating black and white primary and secondary schools by administering the Morrill colleges and absorbing the Freedmen’s Bureau schools into its own bureaucracy.”

We have all been led to believe that the federal Department of Education didn’t happen until Jimmy Carter brought it in during his one-term presidency as payback to the National Education Association for their support of him. Actually, it seems that all Carter did was to support the most recent manifestation of something that had really been around, in one form or another, for a very long time. Continue reading

Education Is “Reconstruction” ~ Even Today!

In his informative book Segregation–Federal Policy or Racism, author John Chodes has some interesting information in chapter 6, which he entitles The Freedmen’s Bureau: Segregation for Black Education. In this chapter he notes that the whole concept of segregation was promoted so that blacks could be “educated” (radicalized) separately from whites. This was a kind of master plan to promote class hatred between the races. Look at it this way–one of the reasons for the War of Northern Aggression was not to free the slaves, but rather to transfer ownership from private hands to federal hands. From private hands to the Freedmen’s Bureau!

Chodes notes how the federal government was, even in the 1860s, messing around with federal control of and aid for education. The foolish idea of public, or government, schools being “ours” or somehow belonging to the people, is and has been the prevalent myth, propagated on the public at large so they will not realize that this leviathan institution was made and directed from Washington from day one. This is something we have got to get through our heads! These really were and are Government Schools!
Continue reading

Segregation Was Not Southern Racism – It Was Federal Policy

I have just received an informative little book that deals with a lot of material folks will never see in their “history” books, but need to be aware of, especially here in the South. This book was written by John Chodes of New York City and published by Shotwell Publishing in Columbia, South Carolina.

The title of the book is Segregation Federal Policy or Racism? And Mr. Chodes explains why it was federal policy instead of Southern racism. He starts out by dealing with a subject I have written about on and off for years, but which most people simply fail to grasp–that “reconstructiondid not end in the South after the Yankee/Marxist troops departed–it just continued under other names and it continues right down to our day. The current riots in Charlottesville, Virginia are a prime example of how “reconstruction” continues to work in our day. Continue reading

Benson: Socialist Teachers Unions

The NEA – the Ultimate Trojan Horse

The National Education Association meets every year for a big national convention in some city or other and teachers from all over the country show up for this event.

An agenda is usually presented showing all the things nationally that the NEA is either for or against. In the past several years they have presented agendas that Hugo Chavez, Marxist dictator of Venezuela, would love. Many of the issues they choose to address have little or nothing to do with education, but everything to do with their leftist worldview.

While many have heard of the NEA they don’t have any idea of how long it has been around or what it really does, only that many of their kids’ teachers belong to it, and the compliant media, when it reports on NEA conventions, is not about to give out anymore real information than it has to. In all fairness to public school teachers, there are some that are not in favor of what this “teachers union” does, but their opposition is generally ignored or ridiculed. Continue reading

Funding Public Education in Chicago

Over the years, as most who read my stuff will testify, I have followed what goes on in the vaunted, so-called “halls of education” in this country, particularly when those halls are located in public school buildings. Some pretty far-out things have happened in this country in the name of public education, but what I am about to comment on here may be the most expensive.

I came across a blog spot yesterday that had an article on it datelined May 25, 2017. The headline asked this question: “Why Does the Chicago Public School System have $9 Billion Dept With Only 381,000 Students?” When I first read it I couldn’t believe I hadn’t misread it. I thought it should have been $9 million, so I went back and reread it. It was $9 billion. Simply amazing! The article started off: “Chicago public schools will look to borrow $900 million in the coming weeks adding to the district’s $9 billion dept–but it remains unclear if anyone will actually give them all the money. The loans are $500 million more than Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office announced last week when a financial rescue plan was outlined….District officials told board members Wednesday that the district would likely ‘just run out of money’ if it didn’t take out these loans.Continue reading

Good News From Alabama After New Orleans’ Political Correctness

Many of us have watched, almost dumbstruck, at the rampant cultural genocide being displayed in New Orleans. The cultural Marxists there, from the mayor on down, have simply run amuck, basically doing what they wanted the way they wanted. To label them as culture destroyers is almost too charitable. I am sure that, along with myself, many others would describe their activities and personalities in language that I would hesitate to have reproduced in this article.

Their execrable attempts at the total destruction of Southern and Confederate history and heritage almost border on the insane–but then, they are cultural Marxists, so I guess that is par for the course. Continue reading

Compassionate Communism For the Kiddies

‘Lovable little revolutionaries’ teach children communism is ‘not that hard’

Years ago I read an article by William Lind in which he labeled many of America’s colleges as “little ivy-covered North Koreas.” Having had some experience with colleges, I have to say honestly, that Mr. Lind’s description is not all that far off. He knew whereof he spoke.

I recall a college on the East Coast (and some of my readers will know about this) that, back in 1970, invited a “community organizer” (that title ring any bells?) to come in during a special session they had for students in early January of that year, supposedly to help students “solve their problems.” It turned out, thanks to a good bit of exposure by a pastor who had a local radio program there that the public was able to find out that this “community organizer” was, in fact, a well-known and identified Communist Party member who was there, basically, to indoctrinate the students. Naturally the parents of the students were not informed of this man’s Leftist connections and when the pastor exposed them on his radio broadcast, every day for about a week, it was truly a revelation to most folks. Then, someone who had access to the school’s mailing list sent a letter to several of the parents detailing this man’s Communist connections. And this wasn’t “fake news”–the pastor had the goods on this turkey. Unfortunately this sort of thing, to one degree or another, is very typical of American colleges and universities. Parents need to be really careful about where they enroll their kids in college. All that seems to glitter ain’t necessarily gold! Continue reading

To Change the History Just Lie About It

The actual history of the War of Northern aggression has always had its detractors who have wanted to make the historical record say what they wanted it to say. The manifestations of their disease have been present in this country since Appomattox and they continue to this day.

Their solution to making the history say what they wish it said is, quite frankly, to lie about it. Just change a few words here and there, a phrase or two someplace else, and you can make the history say what you wish it said but doesn’t.

Unfortunately, most folks won’t realize that it doesn’t and they end up buying the same historical swill that has made the Cultural Marxists ideologically sick. Continue reading

Do The Leftists Control Public Education In This Country? You’d Better Believe It!

Just a couple days ago I read an excellent article by David Risselada. Among other things, Mr. Risselada said: “Finally, after eight years of governance by a left wing radical intent on turning our nation upside down, a new President is at the helm.” That’s a perfect description of what Comrade Obama did during his tenure in office. Mr. Risselada went on to comment briefly on some of Trump’s cabinet picks, both good and questionable, and then he came to Betsy DeVos, who is Mr. Trump’s choice to head the Department of Education–the department both us and our kids would be better off without.

In commenting on Mrs. DeVos he noted her endorsement of school choice (an interesting proposition that has two sides) and her opposition to Common Core. That opposition, at least, is a step in the right direction. Continue reading

Public Schools Promote What Scripture Forbids

Very recently I read an article Bob Unruh about a sodomite group in Scotland that is promoting a petition which demands that children from kindergarten on up be forced to “learn about homosexual, bi-sexual and transgender issues.” The moderator of the Free Church of Scotland labeled the proposal “a Trojan horse to impose an ideological perspective on all pupils.” He was right. This petition, circulated by a sodomite activist group, Time for Inclusive Education, wants children, from their earliest years of schooling to be indoctrinated in that which Holy Scripture forbids. I guess you could say those people have an agenda and it is clearly anti-Christian. Continue reading

Those Teachers’ Unions: What’s their real game?

Probably most of us have seen those sweet and subtle adds on television about the National Education Association and their supposed dedication to educating the children of America. I hate to be the bearer of negative news — but they are all hogwash!

Most folks who believe this drivel do so uncritically, never even having considered that any of this could be subtle propaganda to encourage them to keep their kids in the government school system which mal-nourishes them educationally but keeps the teachers’ unions fat and happy. Continue reading