The David Knight Show - Interview: 1913: The Year Communists Stole America
Aired: 2026-03-27
Duration: 40:32


=== Fighting Criminal Elements (14:10) ===

[00:00:07]  Joining us now is Gary Benoyd.
[00:00:09]  He has been working with the New American for nearly 50 years, just at the cusp of it.
[00:00:15]  He is now the editor-in-chief of the New American, the publication of the John Birch Society.
[00:00:20]  We're going to talk to him about his book.
[00:00:22]  I really like the title of this, The John Birch Society, The Vanguard of the Americanist Cause.
[00:00:29]  I think that's a great way to put it, and I think it's a good description of what they do.
[00:00:33]  But we're going to begin by talking about the constitutional issues about declaring war, since we're looking at this Iran war.
[00:00:41]  Thank you for joining us, Gary.
[00:00:43]  Oh, thank you.
[00:00:43]  I'm so happy to be on your program, David.
[00:00:45]  Well, thank you.
[00:00:46]  You know, we look at this.
[00:00:47]  We've talked about so many different aspects.
[00:00:49]  The number one issue for me personally is the moral issue.
[00:00:53]  But of course, there's practical issues involved with all of this.
[00:00:56]  There's also legal issues, which we're going to talk about.
[00:01:00]  But the only thing they seem to be interested in is lethal issues.
[00:01:05]  How many people can we kill?
[00:01:06]  That's what we hear from Pete Hegseth all the time.
[00:01:09]  He always wants to talk about lethality, lethality, but he never talks about legality that is there.
[00:01:15]  So let's talk a little bit about the Constitution and war, because we've had a slight pushback from the House and from the Senate on this.
[00:01:25]  And of course, with the War Powers Act, the president was supposed to, once they initiate acts of war against another country, they're supposed to notify Congress within 48 hours.
[00:01:35]  So they had Rubio go over and talk to the gang of eight, a term which I cannot find in the Constitution.
[00:01:41]  Maybe you know it, where it is in the Constitution.
[00:01:43]  I can't find it.
[00:01:45]  And so he talks to the leaders of the two different parties and a couple of other people and told them that we had been pushed into it by Israel, and that was the end of it.
[00:01:55]  You know, we don't have any more discussions.
[00:01:57]  And there have been bills that have been brought up in both the House and the Senate to say that we want to have a declaration of war before we continue with this.
[00:02:06]  Those have both been shut down.
[00:02:08]  Now, according to the War Powers Act, if there's not a declaration of war within 60 days, the president would have to withdraw.
[00:02:15]  But of course, that's not the way that it has worked for the longest time, is it?
[00:02:19]  No, it's not.
[00:02:20]  And actually, you mentioned, David, that you could not find the Gang of Eight terminology in the Constitution.
[00:02:26]  But I can't not only find that, I also cannot find the War Powers Act in the Constitution.
[00:02:32]  That's right.
[00:02:33]  And the War Powers Act, of course, that was something that was done during the Vietnam War era to try to change things in the future where the president can just not will and nilly go to war and have that war continue and escalate it as long as he wants.
[00:02:50]  But even the War Powers Act, I would argue, is unconstitutional.
[00:02:55]  I would go back to the provisions in the Constitution itself.
[00:02:58]  And those provisions are very clearly worded, excuse me, worded.
[00:03:02]  And they assign or the provisions assign in the Constitution, it's in Article 1, Section 8, assign most war powers to Congress, not to the President.
[00:03:12]  That's right.
[00:03:13]  And specifically regarding the decision whether or not to go to war, that is specifically Congress.
[00:03:19]  That is totally Congress.
[00:03:21]  And the way it's worded in the Constitution is the congressional power to declare war.
[00:03:26]  That's right.
[00:03:27]  And, you know, David, the only reason they use the word declare as opposed to the word make is because the founding fathers did recognize, well, my goodness, what if the United States of America is subjected to a sudden attack and we have the troops coming into America?
[00:03:44]  And then the president would have to violate the Constitution in order to save the country from that sudden attack.
[00:03:50]  That's the only reason why they made the word declare rather than the word make.
[00:03:56]  That's right.
[00:03:57]  And of course, we need to be able to declare our causes for this, declare what the end is, the end goal, as many people said.
[00:04:03]  If you don't have a declared ending to your war, it's never going to end, right?
[00:04:10]  And so it just keeps going on because we don't have, we got these moving goalposts.
[00:04:13]  And of course, people get drawn into this with the tit and tat that happens with war always.
[00:04:19]  But you're absolutely right.
[00:04:21]  Even the War Powers Act, of course, is not there.
[00:04:23]  I view that as kind of a desperate act from Congress saying, and we really mean it now.
[00:04:29]  Exactly.
[00:04:30]  Don't really mean it now.
[00:04:32]  This is interesting, though, how all of a sudden all these liberal Democrats have discovered the Constitution.
[00:04:38]  On this specific thing, they are right.
[00:04:40]  The president should not act as a king.
[00:04:43]  That's right.
[00:04:43]  The president should not have the power of a king to just have a war whenever he wants to.
[00:04:48]  But, you know, I can't help thinking, in particular, when you look at history, that if you had right now a Democrat president rather than a Republican president, that all of a sudden the Democrats would be taking the opposite position.
[00:05:01]  Oh, we know they would.
[00:05:02]  Absolutely would.
[00:05:03]  Yes.
[00:05:04]  And of course, when you look at the Senate, it was only 47% of the senators, along partisan lines pretty much, that voted to stop this act of aggression, which is really what this war is.
[00:05:16]  And in the House side, it was slightly closer.
[00:05:19]  It was 49% saying we need to stop this and 51% saying we don't care.
[00:05:24]  Do whatever you want.
[00:05:26]  That is a sad situation.
[00:05:27]  You know, I look at this and I think back to Mark Levin and his, you know, a lot of the people trying to put together a constitutional convention to change the Constitution.
[00:05:39]  And I know that the John Birch Society has warned about the dangers of this significantly.
[00:05:43]  And I look at it and I say, well, if we got a bunch of people who are not interested in following the Constitution we've got, why would we allow that gang of people to write a new constitution?
[00:05:53]  Because they won't even follow the rules that they've got right now.
[00:05:56]  Oh, I agree with you completely regarding that.
[00:05:59]  Yeah.
[00:05:59]  So it's a bad situation right now, aren't we?
[00:06:03]  Yes.
[00:06:03]  Of course, it is true that the founding fathers put into the Constitution a provision for having an Article V Convention.
[00:06:12]  But I would say that today would be the worst possible time we could employ that.
[00:06:18]  Yes.
[00:06:19]  Because there's so much of a lack of understanding on the part of the people today.
[00:06:24]  And, you know, if you go back to the Founding Fathers, you did have people of wisdom and they created the government large enough to protect our freedom, but not so large that that government become a destroyer of the freedom that it was supposed to protect.
[00:06:37]  And what would happen today if we opened up a new convention?
[00:06:41]  I agree with that.
[00:06:42]  Yeah.
[00:06:43]  And it wouldn't be just members of the John Birch Society who would be there.
[00:06:48]  It'd be the people who don't care what's in the Constitution and are going to do whatever they want.
[00:06:52]  And that'd be an incredibly dangerous thing.
[00:06:55]  Speaking of which, one of the things I just recently talked about, we have some really scary moves being made in terms of artificial intelligence and sweeping aside the 10th Amendment to allow the federal government to rush forward with this as really a surveillance and speech control tool.
[00:07:15]  And this has been introduced by both the Congress as well as the White House.
[00:07:18]  And we've got a new bill that has come out by Marsha Blackburn, who will probably be the next governor of Tennessee where I live.
[00:07:25]  And she has utter contempt for what she calls a patchwork of regulations.
[00:07:30]  That really is what the 10th Amendment is about, having the ability for different states to have different regulations for various things.
[00:07:37]  But we know how, from a practical standpoint, how that works.
[00:07:40]  They want to be able to pull everything together in Washington so they can control the supposed regulatory body, the regulatory capture that will result will allow them to do whatever they wish.
[00:07:52]  So it is a move to stop all regulation and to federalize all artificial intelligence.
[00:07:59]  It's a very, very dangerous move, I think, that's happening.
[00:08:02]  Well, I agree completely.
[00:08:03]  It is very, very dangerous.
[00:08:04]  And of course, the founding fathers recognized the corrupting influence of power.
[00:08:10]  And so when they created the federal government, they did not want to put all the power of government into a single pot.
[00:08:19]  And so what they did was they defined the few powers that government could have on the national level.
[00:08:24]  And then they took those few specified powers and they divided them among the three branches of government, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.
[00:08:33]  And then they built in a brilliant system of checks and balances to try to prevent power from being consolidated, let's say, in the executive branch or into another branch so the various branches could check themselves.
[00:08:46]  But then they took all other powers of government, and of course, this is where the 10th Amendment comes in, all other powers, and they reserve them to the people and to the states.
[00:08:56]  That's right.
[00:08:56]  That's right.
[00:08:57]  And so this is, it's almost like if you go back to a Lord of the Rings analogy, it's like they found this new ring of power, which is incredibly powerful, this artificial intelligence, the ability to be able to go back and audit everybody or everything in very fine detail and to collate all the information that they've been collecting on people for a very long time.
[00:09:17]  I remember over a decade ago talking about the massive amounts of information that they were saving.
[00:09:23]  I had an interview with William Benny, who was global technical head of the NSA.
[00:09:27]  And he was saying, yeah, they're saving everything on everybody.
[00:09:30]  And they're just waiting until they've got the computer power to go back and organize all this stuff and collate it.
[00:09:35]  That's where we are right now.
[00:09:36]  It's a very, very dangerous thing.
[00:09:38]  When I look at the powers that are being put into a police surveillance state, it truly is stunning to see what they're doing.
[00:09:45]  And it is the ultimate consolidation of power, isn't it?
[00:09:48]  Sure.
[00:09:49]  And so much of it is being done in the name of what is often called conservatism or called law and order.
[00:09:56]  Obviously, we believe that our rights should be protected.
[00:10:00]  That's the purpose of a government.
[00:10:02]  But we don't want to take it to the point where we have a police state because a government big enough to do everything that you'd want it to do, protection, everything else, is big enough to take away from you everything you have.
[00:10:13]  And so what the founding fathers imagined was that law enforcement, that that would belong to the states and to local communities.
[00:10:20]  And the idea, of course, if you have independent police departments, that those departments would be beholden to the communities that they protect and serve.
[00:10:30]  But then you take those powers and you transfer them into the hands of the national government and create a national police state.
[00:10:37]  What happens is then those police are beholden to the central government in Washington.
[00:10:42]  And that's not what we want.
[00:10:44]  But the thing is, the conspirators for global control, they don't come right out and say, well, gee, we want to enslave you.
[00:10:49]  We want to have complete and absolute power.
[00:10:51]  So they'll say things like, well, we need these powers in order to fight illegal immigration.
[00:10:58]  Or we'll need these powers in order to fight crime or in order to fight terrorism.
[00:11:03]  And certainly we need to fight terrorism.
[00:11:05]  We need to fight the criminal element and whatnot.
[00:11:10]  But let's not use that as a pretext in order to consolidate all power into the hands of the government.
[00:11:15]  Because if that happens, then what happens is the government becomes a criminal government.
[00:11:20]  That's right.
[00:11:20]  We've seen that happen so many times.
[00:11:22]  We've seen it happen with Nazi Germany.
[00:11:24]  We've seen it happen with the Soviet Union and whatnot.
[00:11:28]  And, you know, a good lesson, remember, in history is that the German people were beguiled into voting themselves into slavery.
[00:11:36]  They voted to put Hitler's National Socialist Party, which also is called the Nazi Party, into power.
[00:11:44]  And they were told that Hitler would make Germany great again and prosperous and whatnot.
[00:11:51]  But of course, he delivered tyranny instead.
[00:11:54]  I've had a lot of people get very angry with me because I say, yeah, I agree with the immigration stuff, but let's make sure that we're going to have a police force that is going to follow the law that's not going to be a law unto themselves with absolute immunity, I said, because then they become the most dangerous threat to us.
[00:12:13]  And that's really the case.
[00:12:14]  But a lot of people say, well, no, no, no, we want to have, we have this particular problem that we perceive.
[00:12:20]  And of course, always the solution that is given to you is since they've got one giant hammer coming out of Washington.
[00:12:27]  They perceive everything as a nail.
[00:12:29]  And so we want to give carte blanc to the federal police force to do whatever they wish.
[00:12:35]  And I said, that is the most dangerous thing we could have.
[00:12:37]  And when we look at it, we can put on the list in terms of excuses for getting rid of any protections against excessive use of force we could put on there.
[00:12:48]  What we saw during COVID, the public health issue.
[00:12:52]  And I think when we talk about conspiracies, I guess it's just a coincidence that all of the governments around the world are basically doing the same nonsensical stuff at the same time, right?
[00:13:02]  Exactly the same things.
[00:13:05]  But COVID, I would say, or specifically the COVID policies, those were a wake-up call to a lot of people.
[00:13:13]  Yeah.
[00:13:13]  They killed a lot of Americans because who could have imagined until then?
[00:13:18]  Well, I guess a few of us could, but very few people could have imagined until the COVID policies, the lockdowns, the mandates were put in place, that those things could happen in the United States of America.
[00:13:29]  I mean, who could have imagined before 2000?
[00:13:31]  Yeah.
[00:13:32]  Not even me.
[00:13:32]  And I was very cynical about that.
[00:13:34]  I was absolutely just shaking my head.
[00:13:36]  It's like, why isn't anybody having a problem with this?
[00:13:39]  I mean, they've moved the Overton window so far that they definestrated the Bill of Rights.
[00:13:44]  The good news is, though, I think if those policies were put in place again today, I think a lot more people would not go along with it, don't you?
[00:13:53]  I hope not.
[00:13:54]  But, you know, there hasn't been any penalty paid by these people.
[00:13:57]  And usually, if they admit that they did something wrong, they said, well, I'm sorry.
[00:14:01]  We'll do it quicker next time and we'll do it more thoroughly.
[00:14:04]  That seems to be the comeback that we see from these commissions of inquiry that are in different countries.
[00:14:09]  They come back.
[00:14:10]  If they'll admit any wrongdoing, they'll say, yeah, the problem is that we didn't do enough and we didn't do it early enough and we'll do better next time.

=== Defending American Freedoms (06:09) ===

[00:14:17]  That's not the message that I get from all of that.
[00:14:19]  Not at all.
[00:14:20]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:21]  You could in a test balloon to see how far they could go.
[00:14:23]  Yeah.
[00:14:23]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:24]  And they moved that overturned window, didn't they?
[00:14:26]  Truly is amazing.
[00:14:28]  Well, let's talk a little bit about your book and about the history of the John Birch Society, because I think it's a very fascinating history.
[00:14:35]  I first heard of the John Birch Society as it was being attacked as this crank, a conspiracy theorist group out there by William F. Buckley.
[00:14:44]  I eventually figured out where William F. Buckley was coming from, and I eventually figured out what the John Birch Society was about.
[00:14:50]  But that was when I was in college, and I heard the other viewpoint.
[00:14:54]  Talk a little bit about the founding of the John Birch Society and the resistance that you've had from mainstream media in a lot of different quarters, including conservative quarters.
[00:15:03]  Okay.
[00:15:04]  So-called.
[00:15:04]  Well, the John Birch Society was founded in 1958.
[00:15:08]  And of course, at the time, the country was viewed as very anti-communist.
[00:15:14]  You know, we believe in the Constitution and whatnot.
[00:15:17]  But in 1958, the founder of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, who was a businessman, but he was warning that communism really is a problem, not just externally, but also internally.
[00:15:30]  And so he founded this organization to stop communism.
[00:15:33]  And specifically, they called it a communist conspiracy.
[00:15:37]  Of course, as time went on, and it didn't take a lot of time, but he connected the dots too that showed that the people working for more government leading to world government in this country and elsewhere included not just communists, but included powerful elitists who wanted to basically bring about the same thing.
[00:15:58]  And so he blew the whistle.
[00:16:00]  He said that we would have more and more government in this country, leading to the total government.
[00:16:05]  He said the United Nations was a world government trap.
[00:16:08]  He said it would have an inflation because we would destroy the currency over time by printing more and more unbacked dollars in order to finance the growing government deficits.
[00:16:21]  And basically, what he was saying back in 1958 is exactly what we've seen happen over the years.
[00:16:26]  But back at that time, people scoffed because they said it was ridiculous.
[00:16:31]  You know, for example, what the United Nations was portrayed at the time as mankind's less best hope for peace.
[00:16:38]  Can you imagine calling it a communist-inspired organization?
[00:16:43]  And I remember the way it was portrayed.
[00:16:46]  We were crazy to imagine a communist threat.
[00:16:48]  Well, today, look at all the young people who probably bolstered.
[00:16:51]  Well, yeah, I believe in communism.
[00:16:53]  I believe in socialism.
[00:16:55]  But Robert Welch blew the whistle and he realized that in order to solve the problem, in order to expose this conspiracy, because it is the solution exposed in the conspiracy, you could not just do it through elections.
[00:17:07]  You could not just do it by running a good candidate.
[00:17:10]  Because ultimately, the kind of government we have would be determined by the understanding of the American people themselves.
[00:17:17]  The American people run informed, they would make good decisions in the voting booth.
[00:17:21]  And then politicians who would not abide by the people, insisting that they abide by their oath of office, those politicians would get voted out of office by an informed electorate.
[00:17:33]  And of course, others would see where the political wins are going and that they would vote better when they got elected.
[00:17:41]  So that was the solution that Robert Welch advocated.
[00:17:45]  And he realized, too, that no one person could save our freedoms.
[00:17:48]  It had been done, would have to be done by an informed electorate.
[00:17:51]  It had to be done by the American people themselves.
[00:17:54]  And so he created chapters throughout the country where people in their own congressional districts and their own communities could bring about this great awakening.
[00:18:03]  And I honestly believe, because I've been a member of the John Birch Society since 1968, since I was a teenager, I came on the staff in 1977.
[00:18:14]  But I believe that because of what the John Birch Society has done, specifically the members of the John Birch Society and their allies over so many years, that we would not have our freedoms today if it was not for what we've done.
[00:18:27]  So I feel like we've held back the forces that want to bring about world government and totalitarianism.
[00:18:35]  We have bought time so that today, in 2026, we can still use our freedoms to save our freedoms.
[00:18:41]  And that's why my book, by the way, is called The Vanguard of the Americanist Cause, because we've really been in the forefront of this fight.
[00:18:49]  I agree.
[00:18:49]  Yeah, I remember the Support Your Local Sheriff thing, which became a meme.
[00:18:54]  And actually, James Garner did a movie with that title.
[00:18:58]  And so that was, and I kind of scratched my head.
[00:19:01]  I thought, you know, what are they talking about?
[00:19:02]  I eventually figured out the dangers of a centralized federal police force, militarized police force, which is what I think they're in the process of trying to create right now.
[00:19:13]  And I think now more than ever, we need to revive that support your local sheriff thing.
[00:19:18]  And to have locally elected people, it's not perfect.
[00:19:22]  We get bad sheriffs, many different cases like that.
[00:19:26]  Again, that is you've got a better chance of having a say-so at the local election than you do at a federal election where you have basically no control whatsoever.
[00:19:37]  It was interesting, the back and forth, I think, of George Soros and Elon Musk, as Elon Musk said, well, you know, George Soros has got this right when he gets these district attorneys in or the state attorneys general, that he gives them a good bit of money and they can actually swap their opponent in terms of spending.
[00:19:56]  And he goes, he gets a lot more bang for his buck.
[00:19:58]  And of course, the voters do as well.
[00:20:00]  The more local the election, the more bang for the buck you get in terms of either your vote or your contribution that you make.
[00:20:08]  It gets very, very diluted and distant when you're talking about Washington.
[00:20:11]  And that's one of the reasons why we need to stop looking to Washington for every single solution.
[00:20:16]  To me, that is one of the biggest things that's changed in my lifetime.
[00:20:19]  We used to joke about, well, don't make a federal case out of it.
[00:20:22]  Everything is made a federal case out of today, including with conservatives.

=== Stifling Competition and Innovation (03:14) ===

[00:20:26]  And we used to say, you know, it's a free country, isn't it?
[00:20:30]  We don't say that anymore, though.
[00:20:32]  Nobody sees it as a free country because we have the federal government that is micromanaging every single aspect of our life.
[00:20:40]  And that is the real danger, I think.
[00:20:42]  I agree completely.
[00:20:43]  And of course, a lot of people really don't understand what freedom is.
[00:20:47]  You know, freedom is the ability to pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
[00:20:51]  It's the ability where government is limited and it's out of your way so that you can fulfill your dreams.
[00:20:58]  So if you want to buy a home, you have the ability to do that because you have the ability to keep the fruits of your own labor.
[00:21:06]  You had the ability to innovate.
[00:21:10]  You had the ability to build a small business, which is increasingly being stifled today because of all the government regulations.
[00:21:18]  Of course, that plays the hand of people we think of as capitalists or super capitalists.
[00:21:24]  But they actually use the fact that you have all these regulations and they use the power of government and government favoritism to favor them at the expense of the little guy, including the little business.
[00:21:37]  So we have to get back to that.
[00:21:39]  We have to get back to that wonderful system that caused America to become the greatest example of liberty in the history of the world.
[00:21:51]  That's right.
[00:21:52]  And you know, when we look at it, it's even at the local level, we see that a lot of the regulations for, let's say, even something as simple as a restaurant, right?
[00:21:59]  Because it's one of the few things that's left open to entrepreneurship in a sense.
[00:22:03]  I mean, it's getting more and more difficult with the supply chain disruptions that we had in 2020 and the ones that are coming along now, as well as inflation.
[00:22:11]  And with other regulations, that's even becoming almost impossible.
[00:22:14]  But that was one of the few avenues that were left to people.
[00:22:18]  And you would see that a lot of the regulations that were coming down the line for restaurants opening up were things that were not essential, but had absolutely nothing to do with health issues.
[00:22:28]  They were there to stifle competition.
[00:22:31]  And so that truly is what we see happening everywhere.
[00:22:34]  And again, going back to a lot of these regulations of artificial intelligence and even digital ID and the way that they are applying these things, we see the government coming after 3D printer manufacturers, putting onerous regulations on them to essentially censor or spy on their users as a manufacturer.
[00:22:53]  And if you don't do it, they're going to shut you down.
[00:22:54]  We see the same thing happening now even with software, with operating systems, things like Unix that they're going to be coming after because they don't, you know, anything that is open source or that is a new startup is going to be shut down by these onerous regulations.
[00:23:11]  They're going to make it so difficult to get started that people aren't going to start.
[00:23:15]  And a lot of small businesses have even signaled that they're going to have to shut down if these internet regulations and these regulations that are designed to outlaw all privacy are run through.
[00:23:28]  Let's talk a little bit about where this real conspiracy of communism is coming from.
[00:23:33]  I had somebody at an event that I was speaking at came up to me afterwards and he said, you know, they've taken over every one of the institutions.

=== Marching Through Institutions (15:50) ===

[00:23:41]  How in the world did this ever happen?
[00:23:43]  I said, well, you know, there was a plan.
[00:23:44]  It was called marching through the institutions, Gram C and others.
[00:23:48]  And they have executed that plan pretty well, haven't they?
[00:23:51]  You know, I think that was from Gram C, wasn't it?
[00:23:53]  He used that exact phrase, marching through the institutions.
[00:23:56]  And, of course, he was a communist strategist.
[00:23:59]  And the point that he made is that at least for an advanced country such as the United States, that the old-fashioned frontal assault is not going to work because people will say, well, gee, I don't want to become a slave.
[00:24:13]  You know, I believe in freedom.
[00:24:15]  I believe in the great heritage that we have.
[00:24:17]  And so how do they do it?
[00:24:19]  They do it step by step.
[00:24:21]  And if you look at this country as to how it came about, well, it started, I would say, almost after we got the Constitution, that patient gradualism.
[00:24:31]  But let's pick a date where I think it became very obvious.
[00:24:35]  And that was in 1913.
[00:24:37]  Because in 1913, three huge things happened in this country that were hammer blows to the Republic.
[00:24:45]  One of them was the establishment of a heavy progressive income tax.
[00:24:51]  And that actually was a plank right out of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in 1848.
[00:24:57]  So you could say that we moved in the communist direction, at least beginning in 1913.
[00:25:03]  So don't get angry at the IRS on April 15th.
[00:25:07]  On April 15th, sorry, don't get mad at the IRS as much as you get as mad at the communists who basically brought that to us.
[00:25:15]  That's right.
[00:25:16]  The anti-communist day, April 15th.
[00:25:18]  Yep.
[00:25:19]  It is coming up pretty fast.
[00:25:22]  But we got the progressive income tax in 1913.
[00:25:25]  Again, that was one of 10 steps in the communist manifesto that Karl Marx cited for communizing an advanced country in particular.
[00:25:33]  Another step was the creation of a central bank.
[00:25:36]  And we got that in 1913 in the form of the Federal Reserve System that is a central bank and controls money and credit in order to monetize federal debt.
[00:25:50]  And a lot of people think that when taxes are cut officially, such as Trump cutting taxes, well, gee, that means the government burden has been reduced.
[00:25:58]  That's only true if the government also cuts its spending.
[00:26:03]  Because if you cut taxes and allow spending to go up, you have a larger and larger deficit.
[00:26:08]  That's how we got these trillion-dollar deficits that we've been experiencing recently.
[00:26:13]  And when the government monetizes that, or excuse me, the Federal Reserve monetizes that, what the Federal Reserve is doing is they're pumping new money into the economy.
[00:26:25]  And so all those new dollars, it's just like a monopoly game.
[00:26:28]  All those new dollars devalues the dollars that are already in the economy, and that causes prices to go up.
[00:26:36]  So you could call that an inflation tax.
[00:26:38]  But anyway, the central bank out of the Communist Manifesto, we got that in 1913 as well.
[00:26:44]  So you could say in 1913, out of these 10 steps or 10 planks, we got two of them.
[00:26:50]  You could say as at that point, the United States of America was already 20% communist.
[00:26:55]  And the third thing I want to mention that happened in 1913 was the direct election of senators.
[00:27:02]  And a lot of people think, well, gee, isn't that a good thing?
[00:27:05]  Because don't we want the people to elect our senators?
[00:27:09]  But what was overlooked was the fact that, well, gee, we're already doing that in the form of the people we're electing to the House of Representatives.
[00:27:17]  And the whole concept of the founding fathers of having two houses composing Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate, was that a bill could not become law unless it was passed by both the House of Representatives representing the people and the Senate representing the states.
[00:27:36]  That's right.
[00:27:37]  But now the states do not have senators representing them in Congress.
[00:27:42]  And so it makes it much easier to usurp power from the states and transfer that power into the hands of the federal government.
[00:27:50]  That's right.
[00:27:50]  Yeah, people don't understand that division of power that was there.
[00:27:54]  That's what that represented.
[00:27:55]  It wasn't taking away your representation, as you point out.
[00:27:59]  And that's why people don't understand the 10th Amendment, because that was really about the power that's been delegated specifically by the people or by the states.
[00:28:10]  And so they broke that.
[00:28:11]  You're talking about the reducing taxes without reducing spending.
[00:28:15]  That was one of my issues with the Tea Party.
[00:28:18]  I thought they really didn't understand what they were talking about because they didn't have a priority.
[00:28:21]  You know, they said the Tea Party was taxed enough already.
[00:28:24]  But I'd say if you don't cut the spending, you should say we're indebted enough already.
[00:28:30]  That's absolutely correct.
[00:28:31]  I never talked about that side of it.
[00:28:33]  So obviously taxes should be cut, but over the long term, it's not going to help unless we lower taxes through less government.
[00:28:45]  And of course, the only way to do that is to get government back to the Constitution.
[00:28:48]  That's right.
[00:28:49]  The way I look at the John Burch Society is it's very important, the educational aspect of this, because another one of the planks of the Communist Party, I think, was the compulsory government-funded education.
[00:29:01]  And that's really what has gotten us there to a large degree.
[00:29:04]  And I think that it is very important that people understand what has really happened, get the perspective that the John Burch Society is out there as a counter to the government schools telling their one-sided story of this.
[00:29:19]  Right.
[00:29:20]  And of course, I would say that the government schools were designed in the beginning to become what they have become today.
[00:29:28]  And because a lot of people would say, well, gee, we need to reform the government schools.
[00:29:32]  Well, the only way to reform it is to get rid of the government schools and to go back to private education.
[00:29:38]  And that was the education that we had in this country prior to the advent of the government school system in the 19th century.
[00:29:46]  That's right.
[00:29:46]  Yeah, when you look at it, pretty much everybody was homeschooled, and maybe they'd have a little bit of private schooling.
[00:29:52]  I have talked over and over again about the Wright brothers versus Langley and how he was the establishment guy and he had all the credentials and he was head of the Smithsonian.
[00:30:04]  He had a couple of homeschooled bicycle mechanics who beat him to the punch, right?
[00:30:08]  That is a really good illustration.
[00:30:10]  It's something that always stuck with me after I saw it.
[00:30:14]  And I think that's the key.
[00:30:17]  You know, there was a tremendous amount of very high percentage of literacy at the time that America was created.
[00:30:24]  And of course, you have a book like Thomas Paine's Common Sense.
[00:30:28]  Everybody is reading it and they're thinking about the political theories behind it and discussing that.
[00:30:34]  And so for them, it was common sense.
[00:30:35]  But I wonder how many people would understand that book today.
[00:30:39]  That's right.
[00:30:40]  Yeah, maybe we should have a 250th anniversary of that.
[00:30:44]  Anyway, the solution of the government school problem is first of all to get the federal government out of education because the federal government does not have any constitutional authority to be involved.
[00:30:54]  That's right.
[00:30:55]  But even on the state level, my recommendation and the recommendation of the John Birch Society, even at that level, would be for the states to get education as well and allow it to be handled privately.
[00:31:07]  I agree.
[00:31:07]  Absolutely.
[00:31:08]  And of course, the churches, too.
[00:31:10]  Yes.
[00:31:11]  You know, isn't it wonderful to have a church school, for example?
[00:31:16]  And we have seen that, you know, private charity and the actions of churches and that type of thing.
[00:31:22]  That was something that was so ingrained in American society as Alexis de Trunkel talked about it.
[00:31:28]  And yet that is basically withered and died.
[00:31:31]  That isn't to say that it can't be restored, but there has to be a desire to do that.
[00:31:35]  As it is right now, everybody just figures, well, I gave it the IRS and I don't really have to worry about that.
[00:31:41]  That's a really good point.
[00:31:42]  They've already given through Uncle Sam.
[00:31:45]  They gave Uncle Sam the money and Uncle Sam's taking care of it.
[00:31:48]  But one problem without Uncle Sam taking care of it is what we saw happen very recently in Minneapolis, wouldn't you say?
[00:31:55]  That's right.
[00:31:56]  Because, you know, who's mining the store, so to speak?
[00:31:59]  And so look at all the fraud and abuse.
[00:32:02]  That's right.
[00:32:03]  And that's an argument, I think, for the fact that you really cannot solve the problem of the social welfare system by making it efficient.
[00:32:13]  I know Mussolini, the fascist Mussolini during World War II, promised that he would make Italian socialism efficient.
[00:32:22]  He would make the trains run on time.
[00:32:25]  And it doesn't work that way.
[00:32:27]  So, you know, obviously we're going to have all this waste as long as the government's involved.
[00:32:31]  So you got to get the government out of it.
[00:32:33]  And in particular, the federal government, because the federal government is not going to have as much of an understanding of what is really needed on the local level is the people on the local level.
[00:32:42]  It's that simple.
[00:32:44]  So a state government providing welfare would be better than a national government.
[00:32:48]  A local community providing welfare would be better than the state government.
[00:32:52]  But the ideal course would get back to a system where friends and neighbors were taking care of themselves.
[00:32:57]  That's right.
[00:32:58]  Absolutely.
[00:32:59]  Yeah, once you get those long lines, it is very easy to, long lines of control, it's very easy to subvert that, as we saw with Minneapolis.
[00:33:07]  That is one of the practical aspects of it.
[00:33:09]  But the other aspect of it, I guess, that has been lost, and I think it's part of the moral degradation of our society is that people, you know, so much of the charity was running through the churches and it was based on religion.
[00:33:21]  And people, once you practice that, you start to realize that it is better to give than to receive.
[00:33:28]  And there is a pleasure in helping other people that we completely miss out on.
[00:33:32]  That's one of the worst aspects of the welfare state, I think, is breaking that connection.
[00:33:37]  And that's one of the things that we see happening right now, especially with COVID.
[00:33:41]  It seems to be the primary focus of the technocracy is to break that human-to-human contact.
[00:33:50]  Government does that a great deal, but the technology is focusing on that even more and is splitting us off from that.
[00:33:56]  So we're disconnected.
[00:33:59]  Yeah, we're disconnected.
[00:34:00]  We're atomized.
[00:34:00]  We're isolated as individuals.
[00:34:02]  And that's a very dangerous thing.
[00:34:05]  And it shuts off so many wonderful things from all of us, doesn't it?
[00:34:09]  Let's talk a little bit about how we get back from this.
[00:34:13]  When you have the John Birch Society, do they meet in local meetings on a regular basis?
[00:34:20]  Yes.
[00:34:20]  Okay.
[00:34:20]  So tell us a little bit about that.
[00:34:23]  Okay.
[00:34:23]  Tell us a little bit about that and how that's organized.
[00:34:27]  Well, first of all, I would encourage people to go to jbs.org, JBS for the John Birch Society, and find out more about it.
[00:34:36]  But again, the whole idea is that we can't rely on a national mailing house.
[00:34:41]  We can't rely on a particular politician to save our country.
[00:34:44]  We've got to wake the town and tell the people and get them involved.
[00:34:48]  And that happens better.
[00:34:49]  It happens a lot better when you get synergy going.
[00:34:52]  So when you have people actually meeting together and working together and people comparing notes, so to speak, you can get a lot more done than if people are working in a vacuum.
[00:35:02]  And of course, another part of it, too, is you can focus on certain projects.
[00:35:07]  For example, a project of the John Birch Society going back to day one, basically, and running right up to the present has been to get us out of the United Nations.
[00:35:17]  Yes.
[00:35:18]  Recognizing that that was intended and still is intended, I believe, to be the seat of an emerging new world order.
[00:35:28]  I agree.
[00:35:29]  People get together.
[00:35:30]  They can do things like putting up a billboard in their community.
[00:35:33]  They can do things like distributing literature house to house and whatnot.
[00:35:38]  And they compare notes.
[00:35:39]  And, you know, it helps create the synergy.
[00:35:42]  Oh, I agree.
[00:35:43]  Yes.
[00:35:44]  And, you know, when we look at it, again, the solutions are local.
[00:35:47]  And so you need to make those connections locally.
[00:35:50]  And when you talk about the UN, everybody's looking at all these attacks on the family and the attacks on children in terms of the transgender issues and things like that.
[00:35:59]  That all flows from the UN, from the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child.
[00:36:04]  And the only country that hasn't bought into that formally is the United States.
[00:36:08]  And I say formally because from a practical standpoint, our state and local and federal governments, as well as the judiciary, have all bought into the premises of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
[00:36:19]  If you say that a child has rights, that is in direct competition to the idea of parental rights.
[00:36:26]  And that is a device, a scheme, a fiction that was created by the UN, propagated by the UN, in order to break up families, in order to separate the children.
[00:36:37]  But the whole idea on the part of the conspirators for global control, and of course that includes the people who operate the United Nations, is that they see themselves as the family.
[00:36:47]  They see the government as the family, so to speak.
[00:36:49]  That's right.
[00:36:50]  They see the family, the real family, that actually, under God's plan, is the fundamental unit of civilization.
[00:36:58]  They see that as a competing loyalty to them.
[00:37:01]  They want total loyalty to be devoted to the state.
[00:37:04]  And that is a very hallmark of communism, isn't it?
[00:37:07]  Of course, as Hillary is, it takes a village aspect of that.
[00:37:11]  And so it really is important for us to organize at the local level.
[00:37:16]  And the New American is the publication that you are editor-in-chief of, and that is the publication of the John Birch Society.
[00:37:24]  That gives you an overview of what is happening nationally and internationally.
[00:37:30]  You're going to get the local information, and that's the chitin is the things that I can't really cover on a regular basis.
[00:37:36]  That's why you need to have something like the John Birch Society, because that's going to give you a handle on what's happening in your local area.
[00:37:43]  There's so many different local offices that nobody can really report on that.
[00:37:47]  I mean, we can cover something bad that's happening at the state level from time to time, but what is happening right there in your community, a good example of this are the flock cameras that are springing up everywhere.
[00:37:59]  And people don't really understand what that is.
[00:38:02]  They don't understand how these things are flocking together into a massive informant network.
[00:38:09]  Once people find out about it, we've had some communities that have said, get those things out of here.
[00:38:14]  But you have to have people informed at the local level.
[00:38:17]  And so it's very important to have some kind of an organization like that.
[00:38:20]  And the John Burch Society is there, has been there for quite some time.
[00:38:24]  It's always great talking to people from the John Birch Society.
[00:38:27]  I've interviewed Alex Newman on education issues and climate change issues many, many times.
[00:38:32]  And it's always great having people.
[00:38:35]  Thank you for joining us, Gary.
[00:38:36]  And your book.
[00:38:37]  I'm glad to be able to do so, David.
[00:38:38]  And I believe this is my first time in your program.
[00:38:42]  It is.
[00:38:43]  And let's talk a little bit about your book as well.
[00:38:45]  The title is Vanguard of the Americanist Cause, a close look at the John Birch Society.
[00:38:51]  And where's the best place for people to get that?
[00:38:53]  Yeah, there you go.
[00:38:54]  Good.
[00:38:54]  And where can people get that?
[00:38:55]  Where's the best place to get there?
[00:38:56]  You can go to jbs.org and there's a place there where you can go to our book division and you'll find it there.
[00:39:05]  That's great.
[00:39:07]  Thank you so much.
[00:39:07]  Gary Benoit, thank you so much.
[00:39:09]  The editor-in-chief of the New American.
[00:39:12]  The newamerican.com.
[00:39:13]  Thank you, the common man.
[00:39:28]  They created common core to dumb down our children.

=== Dumbing Down Our Children (01:00) ===

[00:39:32]  They created common past to track and control us.
[00:39:35]  Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future.
[00:39:42]  They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
[00:39:47]  But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
[00:39:54]  That is what we have in common.
[00:39:56]  That is what they want to take away.
[00:39:58]  Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
[00:40:03]  They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
[00:40:09]  It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
[00:40:14]  Please share the information and links you'll find at thedavidnightshow.com.
[00:40:19]  Thank you for listening.
[00:40:20]  Thank you for sharing.
[00:40:26]  If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers.
[00:40:30]  The David Knight Show.com.