As an American who has witnessed the metastasizing of 5th stage cancer in the Empire since the 1960s, I must freely admit that the three holidays in this country which produce the most sadness and profound depression for me at this stage of my life are the 4th of July, Veterans’ Day, and Memorial Day.

Donald Jeffries covers the bases on many of my feelings today at Lew Rockwell in an essay entitled Our Plastic Patriotism. Suffice it to say that cardboard patriots in Star-Spangled Attire mouthing platitudes about “freedom” not only fail to understand that Washington, Adams, and Jefferson would not even recognize what this country has become internationally or domestically, but proceed to a mindless and terrifying embrace of the notion that utilizing the American military as a Regime Change Janissary force for Israel, the banks, and the multinational oil, gas, and mineral consortiums is a laudable thing.

Starting a war of aggression with Russia utilizing NATO would be just terrific by these folks.

Jefferson knew otherwise. Even a cursory look at his writings reveals his grasp of the truism that a country involved perpetually in foreign wars of aggression has a government also bent on destroying the liberties of its domestic population. And yet the flag waving and mindless chants of USA!USA! on this day fail to grasp the dark truth that the United States is the leading nation on the face of the earth in the exportation of the instruments of death and the accompanying ideology of preemptive wars for the promotion of usury, sodomy, Palestinian land theft, and World Government eventually culminating in the appearance of Antichrist.

Just a few days before this fateful 4th of July, I encountered a young man at an exercise gym near Randolph AFB in the Alamo City, also known as Military Town USA. After identifying himself as a member of an Evangelical Baptist Church in San Antonio (read “pro-Zionist” and “pro-Empire“), he proceeded to engage me in conversation on several political subjects that pertain to these very issues.

I told him of some of my past appearances in recent years on Press TV available on YouTube and elsewhere, and jotted down a random sample of some of my articles and interviews in the last decade which include The Closing of the Zionist Mind; FDR and Pearl Harbor: The Primer for the Zionist Assault on the American Republic and the Nation of Iran; Mark Dankof’s Final Word on Michael Collins Piper’s Final Judgment on Israel and the Assassination of JFK; a review of The Real Lincoln; a past radio show on Israel and 9-11; a conversation with Iran’s Kourosh Ziabari on this latter topic; an interview with the Tasnim News Agency of Iran on Western duplicity, and interviews with everyone from David Duke to Bedros Hajian of Armenian Christian television in Los Angeles.

I also included a couple of articles I thought an Evangelical might actually warm up to, including The Church of Smyrna Speaks to the Confessing Church of Christ in This Darkening Hour; and An Overview of Jonah as Prototypical Primer for Catacomb Church and Homeschool Study. For good measure, I threw in a graduate paper of mine on Dispensationalism, just to challenge his eschatology.

Our chat became particularly spirited when the subject of Russia came up. He initiated this. It was fascinating to see that this young Evangelical Baptist’s perception of both President Putin specifically and Russia generally was taken right off the 3×5 note cards of either Hillary Clinton or William Kristol. I explained that in my view, Russia was not only a post-Communist society coming out of a 70 year tragedy, but that Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church were jointly leading the country into a pre-Bolshevik spiritual, moral, and political renaissance based on Christianity.

I went on to say that Putin’s Russia was the last and best bastion against the New World Order itself, deliberately targeted by globalist forces for this very reason. Using his smart phone, I pointed him to both Russia Insider and Russian Faith as necessary alternatives to American Mainstream Media (MSM) for his careful consideration.

As we parted, I reminded him of Francis Bacon’s famous dictum:  “Read, not to believe and take for granted; nor to contradict and confute; but to weigh and consider.”

I ran into him again at the gym on July 3rd.  He seemed nervous, distant, even slightly hostile. I greeted him on my way to the jacuzzi after my floor workout. He later caught up with me there but didn’t seem to be the gregarious sort he had been some 72 hours before.  When I inquired as to how he was doing, he suddenly came out with, “My father and my pastor told me to stay away from you and stop reading and listening to these things. They said you must be some sort of Communist.”

I was trying to keep an Old Right Prophet’s straight face when I said, “You know, kid, your father and pastor are wise and cautious fellows.  They’re just trying to protect you from concluding that worship of Jesus and Old Glory may not be one and the same thing.  That would be a shame after all the work they’ve done in educating you to ‘know the truth, the truth which shall make you free.'” (John 8:32).  The young man never detected the amused sarcastic intent.  I parted with him with a sincere handshake and a smile.  Maybe he is on the beginning of a journey that will take him to a better vantage point in this present life, and the next one.

And at the end of July 4th, 2018, I take one lesson away from all of this. If one is indeed encouraged in matters of truth, theology, culture, politics, war, and history to read and to think, to weigh and consider critically from any and all sources of information and knowledge available, it may in fact quite rightly be perceived as a most dangerous and subversive concept. It is apparently considered inherently suspicious by the Citizens of these United States on this hallowed day of Flag Waving and Caesar Worship.

After all, the person making the recommendation might just be some sort of Godless Communist deliberately missing the parades and the stadium fly-overs.

(Mark Dankof is a Lutheran clergyman, radio broadcaster, and past contributor to Press TV, the International Christian Family Network in Los Angeles, the American Free Press, and the Tasnim News Agency of Iran.)