Govt. Overreach In Rural Communities With Chris Bennett

Chris Bennett [00:00:00] You can pretend that you're not interested in politics, but let me tell you, politics is interested in you. That,

Vance Crowe [00:00:07] That you're taking an entire race of people or a country of people and, you know, booting them out of your country. I don't know, I, I, I see no positive way in under which this can resolve itself.

Chris Bennett [00:00:17] And you're dealing with a religion that can't be reformed when you're dealing with a religion that has a text that's immutable, right? Quran's not written. It's uncreated. It just is when you're dealing with all that.

Vance Crowe [00:00:31] Howdy. I'm Hannah. New at Schwer, a production lead at a soybean seed facility in central Illinois, and you're listening to Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. Chris Bennett returns to the podcast. We're gonna talk about his past, which is mysterious and shrouded. I have actually no idea where this guy came from, even though he is been on the podcast a bunch. Then we're gonna talk about some of the big issues going on in the world today. One of the things I always rely on for Chris is a cold objective. Look at the way the government is interacting with its people, particularly in rural America. We're gonna get to that in just a moment, but first, you may have noticed that over the last week or so, I've started posting videos that describe some communications lessons, some ways to describe yourself as an introduction, ways to get through conflict, ways to negotiate. This has been done as a part of something that I'm working on in a much bigger picture, which is to continue the public speaking that I do, to travel around the country, to attend conferences and meetings where I can help people get better at negotiating through conflict with some of their loved ones or employees. Thinking about succession planning and the need to get stories told about your family members. How do you get them to open up? How do you get them to share who they are and what they care about? If you're interested in having me attend one of your events to give a talk or potentially put on a workshop, go to vance crow.com to find out more.

Vance Crowe [00:02:04] There's a contact page there, and you can always just write me a quick note about your event and we can schedule a call to see if I'm a good fit for it. Otherwise, just enjoy those shorts. They've been a labor of love, and I think hopefully one day we'll put 'em all together in a single class. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with my man, Chris Bennett. Chris Bennett, welcome to the podcast

Chris Bennett [00:02:27] Vance. Great to see you and great to talk to you. It's an absolute privilege to be on here. You keep your hands on your head because like always, I'm gonna try and steal a few IQ points from you if I can.

Vance Crowe [00:02:41] Well, man, you know, we were talking before this podcast got started. You've been one of the all time favorite guests of, of mine, of, of the audience, but I actually don't have any idea where you came from, where you got this thick southern draw from and, and who the heck you are. So I thought I'd start off there today. Who is this man shrouded in mystery? Chris Bennett.

Chris Bennett [00:03:04] Hey, Vance. Well, you know, where I was somewhat a product of our past at least a little bit. And when I was in the early 1970s, my parents were missionaries. My father was a pastor in southeast Arkansas. When I was a little kid. We moved to Jordan. We were supposed to go to Lebanon, stop period temporarily in Jordan. This was in the early 1970s. This was right after the 67 war, the big one with Israel, of course. And it was in the midst of pretty much constant turmoil. So the place was relatively primitive at the time we lived in a man, the capital, but we lived out in the middle of nowhere. We had a house, it was on stone blocks, or it would be made of stone blocks, it set by itself. And there were shepherds and sheep goats that came through constantly, you know, the fellas in robes and the women in the black and the tents and so on. And we had access. I had a brother, I had an older brother, and we had access to literally behind the house. It went on forever and ever, you know, almost on a and a really clear day in spots you could see through the valleys, pretty much, you know, all the way to Israel. Some spots not far away. You could see, you know, the tower of Jerusalem and so on. So it was a wonderful place as a little kid to spend some time.

Chris Bennett [00:04:36] We went back and forth from there to Arkansas back and forth, and I know I distinctly remember that as a little boy right down the hill from us. There was a family living there of Bedwin, and the, the, the daddy of the group had full wives and he had 'em set up in little cinder block huts. Each one, I believe it was the cinder blocks with maybe 10 on the roof. And, and the kids ran around and I played with him. And one day he came flying by our house. He had his robe, his dress pulled up to his groin almost, where you could see the whites of his thighs. And he was running lickety split across stones and thorns. That barefoot of course, that they were all barefoot. And he, I mean, he was booking, and right behind him, 20, 30 yards came the pack of men. They were cussing and screaming. They had stones, baseball to softball size, and they were throwing them. They looked like they mean to kill him. And I, they they did. And we saw him cut across the field and he got away from them. And what he'd done, Vance, was he had done something, I don't, I don't remember to one of those wives, and her family had come for him to take his head. They got it all settled. And I don't want to act like that where something normal that I saw every day, but that certainly was part of the milieu of what was going on. You know, it was desert area, at least very dry at the time, at the time, early seventies, very primitive.

Chris Bennett [00:06:09] So they didn't have any water. We got water. I think maybe once a month they would come fill up a little tank on top of, of the house. It was a metal tank and that was it. And when you ran out and you ran out, and I remember my, I remember driving with my daddy to bribe an official or a truck guy, you stopped and pay 'em cash and see if they could give you some water and make it again if they rest of 'em. Interesting stuff. But anyway, that's a little bit of the background there. And how long were you out there living like that? Oh, it, it, it was like that for I'd say seven, eight years. Like I said, we weren't there the whole time. We stayed three or four years and come back. But it, it was pretty much like that. And then Jordan had the advantage of catching the good winds of war. And every time there was a conflict, Lord, there was a conflict every two to three years it was using influx of money, an influx of circumstance and influx of Western government favor. And so the country was able to build itself up. And by the time you get into the 1980s, things had changed and they had begun to modernize. I remember back in around the early eighties, I was playing on the soccer team and I wasn't, I wasn't any good. Don't, don't get me wrong, it's not my point. In fact, I think I was probably the last man on a 15 man squad to make the team, which is something, or something relishing something very satisfactory about being 15 of 15. I, I don't know why it's come maybe coming, like coming last in your class at West Point there, there's a degree of bravado.

Chris Bennett [00:07:47] Anyway, sorry. So I was playing on the soccer team and we were going to play a tournament in Dubai. And Dubai at the time were just a bunch of sand itself. Certainly there were no tall buildings, anything like that. And to get there, to put it, basically you had to fly over the Persian Gulf. And the Persian Gulf at the time was terrorist Central. If you wanted to be hijacked, you know, keep flying over the Persian Gulf. I mean, you get off a plane, you sit if armed or unarmed, that kind of thing. So anyway, we went to Dubai and got our tails just kicked. I remember after the tournament, the coach told us how, how bad we were, how traumatizing it was for me to hear that from him. And then later in life it became one of the funniest moments of life. But anyhow, on the way back flight, back over the purging Gulf again, there was 15 kids, coach, I don't know where he went, he was on the plane, but he went somewhere else more than likely to get drunk drinking. So he wasn't sitting with us. There were 15 of us in our church shoes, some sort of dress slacks and, you know, blazers that, that didn't fit, that you could tell were, were gotten from the older brother or off the rack at some unfortunate store. And so somebody, you know, it was a big plane, three or four seats on the sides, five, six in the middle, giant plane packed. I mean, there was a team that beat us from Cairo in the back.

Chris Bennett [00:09:22] We were somewhat in the middle. Then up in front of us was a bunch of Filipino ladies, must have been workers. And then you got a mix of Arabs and they were just looked like someone shook, shook up a canister of jelly beans. So midway through the flight over the Persian Gulf, one of my buddies pulls out this cylinder from his pocket, and the cylinder has a another cylinder within and it has a yellow liquid. And so I knew what it was, we all knew it was a stink bomb. And so I said, Hey, hey y'all, listen, we got to take that stink bomb. We got to take it back to the back by the chiro team and let's break it and we'll get, you know, a tiny bit of revenge on those boards that beat us. So everybody was, you know, dying for that. And two of the idiots, not me, decided yeah, they'll, they'll acted out, they'll take it back there. I said, all right, when of y'all take it back there and Neil dying, act like you're tying your shoe vance with shoes that had no laces, of course, just act like you're tying your shoe. And then the other one, you hit it with your heel, and then y'all go into the bathroom and this whole thing will blow over. They'll call from little and we'll be fine. I had no idea the effects inside a fuselage of a stink bomb. We had used these tanks for, we'd used them for years, man, at school or, or, or in stores and stuff. So anyway, they took it back there and they broke it. And as soon as they broke it on the ground, one of 'em broke it with his heel. He panicked. And when they panicked, they turned around and ran back to us.

Chris Bennett [00:10:55] 13 heads stuck in the aisle, peering down back at them. And here they come bolting toward us and right behind them, within, I'd say three or four seconds, maybe less, but certainly three or four seconds came a, an absolute smell from the pits of hell. This came roaring behind them and instantly all over the plane, everyone assumed like you would, that we were under terror attack. And people began to wa the secret service guys pulled their pistols and they're running around, you know, they got the little short ties on. Look like they hadn't slept for four days. Bad mustaches that all of them, at least five or six, they're running around everywhere, can't figure out what's going on. There are people standing up in the aisle, standing up in their seats. The Filipinos are crying out to Jesus for mercy. The ladies are standing up raising their hands. You got the Arab women are calling out to Allah, they're calling out things and everybody's freaking out. People are pulling down their oxygen mask and people are retching all over the plane. So we're laughing, right? We got our jackets pulled over our heads and we laughing like the devil. This goes on for at least five minutes. Finally, the captain or co-captain, somebody with stripes, comes back to us and says, we know what you did. We know it's you as we'll let you know that when we land, when we land this plane, the military is going to be waiting on y'all. They're gonna pick you up and they will take you directly to prison.

Chris Bennett [00:12:30] And the 15th of you tonight were sleeping in prison. So of course we stopped laughing, pretty much calmed us down a hundred percent. Got sober, you know, found religion. And when we landed in Jordan, there was no military, there was no police. We went right through the airport, no one said a thing. Who knows Vance. Little crazy story.

Vance Crowe [00:12:53] Whoa. So you got off scot free after you went through the terror of thinking you're going to a Jordanian prison,

Chris Bennett [00:13:01] Right? Right. Yeah, exactly. Which we used to call, we used to call 'em fingernail factories because they'd catch people, young people sometimes. And one of the common things they would do is if you did something wrong, I don't know, 'em, they got caught driving, you know, without a license or something. They, they shaped people's heads. And so the story got out that they pulled the fingernails too. So we call, they were always called the fingernail factor. But that could be true. That could not be true. There you go.

Vance Crowe [00:13:27] You're living there as a, a, like a minister's kid. Are you guys converting people in your house? Are you welcomed in this community? How, how is all this working?

Chris Bennett [00:13:38] Oh, no, not, not even, not even a modicum of that Jordan to one of the few Arab countries that had original church charters established when the country was formed. In other words, the king allowed a couple of churches to be in existence, right? There's always been a Christian community in these countries, most of them. And most of them have a community that still survives. But to go and actually build a church was illegal at the time. So if you had a charter dating to way back when, then you were okay to have your, your one building or two buildings or whatever they allowed you. And as long as you held service within that building and, and did nothing else, they would leave you alone. But over the years, there were certainly people killed often by their own families. You know, somebody if you, you would hear, you know, a woman might want to convert to Christ and then two months later she would fall out of a fourth story apartment window that wasn't, you know, nothing unusual, nothing unheard of. And again, I hadn't been there for years. So I'm not telling you what things are like now, but the idea that Christianity would have any sort of free reign, any sort of elbow room in a Muslim country would be nothing to, I would've never have seen anything remotely of that soul.

Vance Crowe [00:15:05] This has to be a, a radically different upbringing than other kids that have your accent. Where is your accent actually from? And then how did this experience of living abroad in Jordan impact you as a kid being way more cultured than a lot of other people you were probably around. We

Chris Bennett [00:15:25] Would go back and forth to southeast Arkansas, which is where my mama's people were from. She was from Phillips County. My father was from the other side of the state in Clark County. So Arkansas at the time was all I knew for America. So we'd come back every three, four years. That was my identity. That was who I was as a a, an American. And I'm in Mississippi now, Lord bless. And I married a Mississippi girl later on, but when I was a little boy, I guess two years old, three years old, yeah, two, we had nowhere to go to school except Arab school. So we went to Arab kindergarten and they didn't have speak, no English, nothing like that. And then when my brother, who would've, he's about three years older than me, when he got to the point where he could go to school, he couldn't go to the school we were in, we had to go somewhere else. And there was a school that was in English and we switched over to that one. And that's where I spent for the next, oh man, I don't even know Vince, nine, 10 years. And my heart, my identity was a hundred percent always back here in the south. That's just the way we were raised. And I only knew Phillips County, Arkansas, and I only knew agriculture. That's about all I knew in America.

Vance Crowe [00:16:53] Did you feel like you were missing out? Like you had to go to Jordan and you didn't want to, you wanted to be in Arkansas or were you perfectly happy to be traveling with your family?

Chris Bennett [00:17:03] No, I was just a kid. Didn't know any better. I I, I was just a boy and a probably more foolish than most. And I just went along, went along for the ride when I got older and went to college looking for a job and so on, then I begin to recognize how desperately I wished I would've had stronger roots in different places. But that's not what the Lord had for me. I don't mean that as a complaint. I just a fact, you know, we all get dealt certain hands that are good and bad and and so on. But I, I knew one thing and I know one thing growing up partially where I did that America truly is the land of the free. This is the place that everyone wants to be. And the reason is not economic. Certainly it would be for some, but, but the core values we have the liberty loving the worth of the individual residing in Judeo-Christian, Greco, Roman, you know, you name it, Western siv. It's all real. And Lord bless those people on Jordan and everywhere else, more power to 'em. But it's not where I wanna be Vance. I'm, I wanna be in the land of the free, you

Vance Crowe [00:18:16] Know, there's something like paradoxical about the, the situation you described about, you know, seeing gangs of people go out for justice for their daughter or, you know, I, I saw it in Africa where I would see people that had been robbed and, and they thought, Hey, let's, let's let's push back on these thieves. We are gonna do it as a collection 'cause there's no police. And then you come to the United States and you say, well, we don't, we don't have that. We, we actually give the monopoly on violence over to the police. But, but like, I think that there is something to be said for the sort of relationships that you have that your kin will come fight for you. Not that I want that in any way at all. I don't want mob justice in the us but it's not by default automatically the best way. Right? Like, there's something you lose when you don't have your kin come look out for you,

Chris Bennett [00:19:11] Right? You, you, you can feel it. And we can, we can talk legalism all day, but you, and I know Vance said, if one of our close cousins, for example, calls us and says, Hey, you know, need some help, I'm not gonna ask too many questions. I'm going to help him. And it involves what it involves. I'm not saying I'm gonna take a body out in the woods and bury it. That's not what I said. But I'm not gonna ask too many questions because of the blood. And I, I I, I believe that most people or a lot of people feel that same way and they understand that primal foot pull. Maybe they can't, maybe they can't express it, but, but it's there.

Vance Crowe [00:19:54] So when you look back on what you learned about the Arab culture, you know, just, just that part of the world and now you see what's going on. You got Israel and, and their, their attacks on Palestine trying to root out Hamas, you know, all the Persian Gulf is still a total mess. We don't, we don't allow ships through there anymore. What's your take on what's going on there and and will it ever get cleaned up?

Chris Bennett [00:20:19] I don't believe so. I believe it's more of the same, my opinion, the whole area is blanketed with Islam and therefore you have a, a place that's gonna be in constant turmoil and constant dualism from here to eternity when you're dealing with a religion that can't be reformed when you're dealing with a religion that has a text that's immutable, right? Quran's not written, it's uncreated. It just is, when you're dealing with all that in 2024, the same way you would've been dealing with it in 700 ad and this is the fruit that it bears. If, if, if, if blessed are the peacemakers, if you can go into Israel right now and get everybody to calm down a more power to do, I think there will be any sort of permanent resolution that will change anything. I do not look up any Islamic country. They all have the bloody borders. They always will internally far worse. And that is often papered over, of course, by Western money. And in the case of the Emirates, in the case of Saudi, you have a geological accident where it's papered over by old but Islam, in my opinion, it is what it is. And anyone who doubts that simply has to go and live or examine their societies and their tenants. I I, I wish you know, like a lot of people do. I wish I could tell you, Hey man, I believe that all cultures are equal.

Chris Bennett [00:21:51] I don't believe that remotely. I I believe that western cultures have it right or they recognize the worth of the individual and the rest fall way behind just my opinion. But I believe history bears that out and going forward, I believe it's going to become even clearer, which in some ways seems to be happening. Most values seem to be grinding at the moment. Yeah, I mean I think one of the

Vance Crowe [00:22:22] Challenges with thinking about it as western culture is Western culture contains Christianity and it has for many, many years. And all of the things that go along with that, the ability to forgive the, the push against mob justice meritocracy somehow fits. It depends. You, you've actually sent me some books where you see Christianity run amuck can be just as much of a prison as, as anything else. But I, I don't know that the foundational beliefs in the West you, that you can continue to point to in being Christian. There are a lot of people that are, I think moving into a woke ideology, which I think has every single tenant of, of a religion except for maybe known sacred texts. You know, they, they they're, but they have all these belief systems about, you know, what is right and wrong. Where, who is responsible, what is, what are grievances, these kinds of things. So do you think that western culture is still a Christian culture

Chris Bennett [00:23:21] At its base? It is. But if the, the grind going on right now in the United States, the sparks, and admittedly figuratively, you certainly can see them Europe even more advanced than us in your lifetime, Lance, in my lifetime, the change is apparent. Now, I don't know what direction we will go in the future, but I do know that we are going to go in some direction. And once you begin to move away from the constitution, as we have certainly in the last 15 years, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt, certainly since the great society in the 1960s, once you begin to push past the Constitution and you begin to go beyond its original meanings, you're in grave danger. And we are now at the point that we can all see that once the Supreme Court, or if the Supreme Court was to get packed, or if it was to lean completely left, you would have a new set of Moore's values and interpretations of the Constitution that would set in thereby transforming society. You know, we're actually at a point as we speak, where you've got roughly 50% of the country that simply doesn't pay taxes. We're at a point where if you add government employees and then state employees together, I mean, shoot, is it now 20 million people or something like that?

Chris Bennett [00:24:58] We're at a point where the government departments have bigger budgets and more employees and sometimes anything you could have ever, ever imagined, I I, I'll just use USDA for an example, since I write it by USDA, I mean, I don't know, it's a hundred thousand employees, 200 billion budget, something, 150 billion, then you've got it all repeated, redundant at the state level, let's do it all again. And then you just extrapolate on out from there across government departments and then, you know, it's almost farcical to bring up the border is open in the midst of IIII, me and you talking right now, the border is open and I, you know, I hear all the talk about, hey, Ukrainian foreign aid or that foreign aid to Israel and so on. And there has to be a reckoning. You have to think, I understand giving food aid, I understand giving staples to anyone, but whether it's Ukraine or Israel who have you, what have you, just handing out boatloads of cash seems to be cutting our own throats. That seems to be what, that's just the way I see it,

Vance Crowe [00:26:17] You know, I heard it is when you think about cutting your own throat, I I, so I actually got a little pushback on last week's episode from, from a guy that he thought, hey, you know, the immigration issue that, that we're having right now or people coming over the border, you know, we need those people because people in the US are not willing or able to work for the wages that we have. And you think about the, so we can kinda take that and put it to the side for a second. When somebody tries to explain to me why the Biden administration would want the borders open, the best explanation they can come up with is, well, they're trying to do this so that that way they can raise the number of people that are counted in the census so that that way they can get more electoral votes so that that way they can take over. There's something that doesn't seem right about that explanation because that explanation only takes you so far. Like, I, I don't know, it's hard for me to imagine somebody saying, I'm gonna blow this place up in order that I can reign over hell. Where, where are you on this one?

Chris Bennett [00:27:22] You know, frankly, I, I don't have any problem believing that myself because some people are happy in hell, but we know that, however, I would assume this is a guess that they would indeed be trying to boost or manipulate the census. A big business would want a lot of those people to come in. You can change voting demographics for long periods of time. And you know, reasonable question for anyone who says that though is, okay, well why don't we just double 'em? Why don't we just triple 'em, right? If we really need 'em, and it's no problem having an open border, why don't we make it wider? You, right? Why, why don't we bring in a hundred million this year? The question answers itself through its absurdity. Everyone knows you can't bring in a hundred million. Everyone knows that even if you bring in only a few million, don't put 'em in my town, or at least don't put 'em in my neighborhood or don't put 'em in my house. All of this is reasonable. America has long been the most wonderful place to allow illegal immigration. And it used to be that we were able to look at even illegal immigration and say, Hey, need a moratorium here. We've had too many come in at one time, let's just stop. You can't even do that anymore. And then, you know, Vance, I don't know where your people came from, you don't know where mine came from, but back in the day when they came, there was no government tent. They got here and hey, you pull yourself up by your bootstrap.

Chris Bennett [00:28:56] You get to work, you can get some charity from private organizations, but if you come here, you give to us, you create a life essentially for your children or for your grandchildren. That's not what I see you, I see the same things that everyone else sees. I see people sometimes arriving with designer clothes and cell phones, and some of them, yes, I am somewhat skinny, but some of them look like they have more calories on their bones than I do. This does not accord with what I've seen with political asylum refugees of the past. It certainly doesn't accord with Ellis Asylum. And if anybody says that's a, a, a biased way to look or, or a racist way to look, I'd say, look, I mean, I, let me be very frank. I don't want unbounded numbers of Swedes or Irish coming across the southern southern border at the base of the argument. I don't want anyone coming across that seems very reasonable. It was reasonable to my grandfather and to my forefathers. And I will go far to say that. I believe if we could pull James Madison who wrote the constitution up from the grave, I think it would be very reasonable to James Madison as well. And he would say, what have y'all done? What are y'all doing?

Vance Crowe [00:30:22] Yeah, I think one of the biggest problems with this border is no matter how you feel about whether or not people should or shouldn't be here, I think, you know, largely the people listen to this probably say, let's be very careful about how many people we let in, but what are you gonna do when you decide there, there will eventually be a conflict, right? It, there's, there's no chance that it won't be if we continue to live in, in AFL inflationary environment where, you know, the amount that it costs to live keeps going up. And then you, if, if you start to have unemployment problems, people are gonna look around and they say, what are these people doing here? And what are you gonna do? You're gonna round up millions of people and then put them on airplanes, put Dr. Drive them to Mexico, where are you going to take them? And and in what way can you do this that you are not, that you're not actually being treated like you're doing some kind of a genocide, you know, like that, that you're taking an entire race of people or a country of people and, and you know, booting them out of your country. I don't know. I I I see no positive way in under which this can resolve itself,

Chris Bennett [00:31:25] Right?

Vance Crowe [00:31:26] Unless you have some kind of integration, I guess. But it seems very unlikely to me. Yeah.

Chris Bennett [00:31:30] You know, if what you described, if that was to go on tomorrow, the media, the legacy media would come unwound and, and the word would come, as you said, genocidal or something along that line. They would screech until it stopped. You know, when you take a country and you bring in a massive amount of people, you're not simply replacing or changing or adding to, right? It does does not work that way culturally. If you were to go into Saudi Arabia right now, and you were to pump in a massive amount, let's say five, 10, 15% to their population of Vietnamese, everyone knows the Saudis would explode. And everyone knows you would not have a mixing and you would not have integration. And everyone knows that there wouldn't be any talk about racism. It would simply be, Hey, this is not a good idea. This does not work well with human beings. So the idea that you just suck, come here and dump a bunch of people in without the time that re that is required to allow the proper blending with all of us. You are putting, you know, you're, you're, you're setting a match to the, to the fuse. And I don't know what's going to happen when it explodes, but I do believe that something is going to happen. I it's not just me and my neighbor. It's not just me and the fella at the cafe.

Chris Bennett [00:33:04] It's not just what I read or see online. Everyone knows, everyone can feel that we as a society have at least moved toward the possibility of some degree of civil war. I'm not here to tell you it happens tomorrow. I'm not here to tell you it's gonna happen in 50 years. I'm simply saying it's now on the table for the right and for the left. The Civil War happens, breaks out in 1861 talk of Civil War began right after the war of 1812. That's a 50 year span. So could there not be something like that happening before us? I think there very, very well could be. I don't know what the split would be. I don't know if it's Texas in the south. I don't know if it's Texas in the west. I think something will happen. And I don't think that the will of the federal government will be there to stop people from breaking away once it happens. If it happens, yes, there are far, far smarter minds, including yourself, that know more than I do about that topic. However, I know it's out there on the street. I know the common man talks about it.

Vance Crowe [00:34:21] Oh, I mean, you and I, well, you know, 'cause Chris and I write back and forth all the time. I, I, Chris, we stay in touch, but I, I, about a year ago I was talking with, you know, I've got a, a buddy that's just a normie. He's a guy. Nothing wrong with him. Great guy cares for his family, has a great corporate job. But what I wanna ask him about stuff that I am hearing about, just to see, hey, what a, what a normal people think of not the guys that are scouring podcasts and looking through the deep edges of Twitter and finding these kind of edgy things. And I asked him about national divorce and he was like, no, I, I think that's the only thing that crazy people talk about. Fast forward nine months. 10 months. And I asked him again and he was like, oh yeah, I'm hearing it all over the place. Right? So it is definitely gone down the graph. It is, it is way more inside of the Overton window. It went from being a, you know, certainly an unthinkable idea to now maybe radical to, I would imagine among some people thinking it's acceptable. And when I think about it, I think how frustrated I get with the, when, when Trump was elected, how all of a sudden there was violence everywhere. It it was everywhere. You know, there were buildings being burned down, there were people protesting. Now all of a sudden racial tensions got kicked up to another level. You know, it happened in St. Louis. I mean, it, it was a really intense time. And I sense that that will happen again.

Vance Crowe [00:35:54] Exactly. If not worse, if Trump were to be elected again. And I think that I'm not the only person that even if you don't vote for Trump, the idea that the one side would resort to violence when they don't get their way, makes me resentful and think what do we have to do to separate ourselves from these people that are so willing to use violence?

Chris Bennett [00:36:15] You know, Vince, you, you are exactly right there. We've reached a point where the, we, we, we, we walk over litmus paper issues every day. So we're at the point where abortion is a breaking issue, right? It's a wedge issue. We're at the point where we don't even as, as a country, we can't even define marriage. Right? Tell, regardless of your position on gay marriage, tell me beyond that, you know, is it just two people, three people? You can see where this goes go erosion of morality, whether you agree or not. It's changing. We have a big difference on, on, on the whole welfare system. We now have the, the border, we have our views on public education and there are more and more of these issues not even to mention the whole debacle of trans and she males and so on. Where does that all go? I, I don't see it being papered over. I certainly don't see everybody coming to the table in five years and saying, okay, we'll have a sit down. We able to figure this out. Those seem to be permanent divides. They seem to be chasms. I don't see a illusion coming. And regardless of some, whether someone is a Trumps up order or anti-Trump, even if he was reelected, he's in there for four more years. So after four years, you're at the same level of discord regarding, are you going to put in another outsider?

Chris Bennett [00:37:52] Are you going to put in another rhino or are you gonna put in another Democrat? I don't know. Vance, I, I, I, if you'd asked me just a few years ago, I'd have been very sanguine and very hopeful. And Lord, I'm very hopeful, always maintain hope. But I tell you just what I see and things do not bode well o otherwise, I, I I would say different. I, I'm just glad to write in agriculture. I'm glad to be farming. I feel like there are the most wonderful people in that work field. And why, Bitch? I'm not sure. I think maybe because regardless of how well they're doing now, they might just be a single generation removed from an ass whipping that their daddy took or, or their grandparents took their people that recognize often where they came from. So for me to get to right on that, right about that, despite the crazy storm that we're in and is around us right now, it's very, very, very grounding. You know, if you go back to, if you just go back to 1790, we've got roughly 3 million, 4 million people in the country and 90% Vance, 90% of those are farmers, right? So that's who we are.

Chris Bennett [00:39:23] So this great experiment of liberty that kicks off in 1776 or arguably before then. But this great experiment of liberty was also an experiment in, in farming liberty, what happens to, if a farming society when they are given right, the, the, the most amount of rope in world history when they exploded, when they did arguably the finest job of agricultural work in world history. But that is who we are, right? So maybe my daddy, your daddy was not a farmer, but all you gotta do is go back down the line and we all were at some point 56, 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. 10 of those are farmers, 10 more involved in commerce than involves ag trade. And almost everyone in the building has some sort of tangential relationship to farming through a relative. So when they're not talking that summer about liberty and politics and consequences, some of them are literally thinking about their operations. And if you push up 10 years, let's go to 1787 of the constitutional convention. I think that's about 55 framers. Once again, you got about 10 farmers, 10 in ag commerce and the rest attach somehow to farming. And we stay that way. We stay that way until 1920. 1920 is the first ag census where, I mean, excuse me, the first census that shows more people living in a, in the city than rural area.

Chris Bennett [00:41:00] So from 1920, all the way back to the late 17 hundreds, we were very, very much a farming society. And, and, and you can go to any point in US history, and you can pull on that point, you can unravel the threads if you like, and you grab any of those threads and when you pull, you pull out farming, you pull out agriculture. I, I, I wanna go to 1860, but I'll stop right there and get a breath, Vance. Well, I, to me, what

Vance Crowe [00:41:33] This reminds me of, so I do these Legacy Interviews where I record people telling their life stories. And so many of my clients are in ag and one of the things that I have come to realize is of deep importance is to record these people in their sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, talking about not just how you ran your own family and how you ran your farm, but almost all of these people are connected to their community and they figured out how do you balance the relationship between the freedom of farming and the need to have consensus in the city. And how do you, how do you work together and how do you set up these institutions? So whether it's your, your grain co-op or your electric co-op, your farm bureau, your, your, like, all the different things that, that were in a community, rotary clubs and these different organizations and this social technology that I think farmers essentially invented, which was how to get along in small communities is being lost. And we don't know actually how to do it. And if you wanna go now in the United States and just start a club or start an organization, I would say it would take extreme effort and probably only most people would fail at trying to get some of the organizations started that, that ag has had for the last a hundred, 150 years.

Chris Bennett [00:42:52] You know, Vance, if, if, let me show you how deep this runs, right? How this connects truly around our heart. Go to 1861 start of the Civil War. We bump up four years, April 9th. April 9th, 1865, Appomattox Courthouse and Bobby Lee goes in there, waves a white flag, signs a surrender grant takes it, and the country, at least the north explodes in celebration and everyone thinks only good times are ahead. That's April 9th. And as April 9th unfolds and the days after John Wils booth is running around in DC fixing to unleash hell. And he has four targets, alright? He wants to kill Ulysses s Scran, he wants to kill Andrew Jackson, he wants to kill Secretary of State William Seward. And of course he wants to kill Abraham Lincoln. And the great irony here is that John Wils booth is born on a farm. They had a 400, 300 acre operation sizable at the time. And when he wasn't at the theater as a boy, he's running around oftentimes on his farm booth. Despite pale skin and soft hands, understood agriculture and his four targets are directly off the farm. The Lincoln, the farm boy Andrew Johnson, he's vice president and has a 400 acre farm back in Tennessee.

Chris Bennett [00:44:27] Secretary of State, William Seward grows up on a farm in New York. He's the one that passes the, gets the fertilizer Act passed in 1856 to help out farmers. The man understands farming. And then of course Ulysses says, grant, right? Grant is farming row cropping up until 1859 up till the eve of the Civil War. He's in the fields. And those are the four guys that Booth wants to kill on April 14th, five days after the war ends. And he has this group of assassins and they go to target these men. Grant chooses to leave town. Grant was supposed to be there at Ford's theater in that box with Lincoln, ah, if I remember right, Grant's wife and Lincoln's wife didn't like each other. I think, you know, not to speak Ill the did. I don't think most people liked Mary Todd Lincoln. So she talks, Ulysses says, grant into leaving town, his wife. And they do and probably saved their lives. Alright? The first person they go after that night is Vice President Andrew Johnson. There's a man named George Ro that's supposed to kill Johnson, who I said as a farm back in Tennessee. The guy chickens out, doesn't even go to Vice President Johnson's room in a hotel. Leaves him alone. Johnson doesn't even know till later he was a target, could have been killed and should have been killed.

Chris Bennett [00:45:58] Wasn't killed. The next person that night was Secretary of State, William Seward. And Booth sends one of his assassins, or actually a couple, but the man to carry out the assassination is named Louis Powell. Big, tall, handsome guy, one of the oddest characters in US history. So Powell is a farm boy outta Alabama, right? He's a farm boy outta Alabama and Georgia family had farms in both places. Daddy was a preacher farmer. He sent into Seward's house, something like late later on in the evening with some medicine for Seward because Seward has had a horse accident and is in the bed with a metal brace on, with terribly injured. Powell forces his way into Seward's house, runs up the stairs, is met by Seward's son, cracks, Seward's son over the head with a pistol, fractures Seward's son's head. And the pistol breaks. So when he bursts into Secretary of State's Seward's room, the pistol is broken, he's forced to pull a knife. He pulls what's essentially a buoy knife, goes over to the bed and begins to stab. And Seward comes within a hair of a terrible, terrible death. But he has this metal brace on and Powell can't cut the jugular. So Powell freaks out, can't quite kill him, and runs away. Seward survives that night. Google a picture when you're curious of Secretary of State, William Seward, and you'll see him in profile. You'll see him with the collar pulled up high.

Chris Bennett [00:47:31] He's hiding his neck, he's hiding all the wounds on his neck and his jawline, right? So now at that point, booth was over for two. If you count U List C says Grant, he's over for three. But Booth himself is going to carry out, of course this assassination of Lincoln. So when he goes up there with that derringer, what was it? A 44 dare. Anyhow, you know, significant little ball and puts it into the back of Lincoln's head. There's another guy there in the booth, of course with his wife who replaced Grant named Henry Rathbone. He take, pulls a knife and he slices wrath bone's, arm to the artery, severe wound. He kills Lincoln. Lincoln's gonna die. Day later of course he puts the bullet into Lincoln, he cuts wrath bone's arm and he leaps off down onto the stage, right? The guy he killed there, wrath, I mean, excuse me, the guy he injured there, wrath bone later goes insane and murders his own wife and kids with a knife. I think she used a knife or a gun, I can't remember. And then tried to kill himself. There's a wild one there. Let, but that's a tangent. Booth jumps out, he runs off into the night Vance, and then proceeds for the next few days to hide out on farm after farm after farm. So the farm boy booth, who just assassinated a farm boy, tried to kill a bunch of other farm related fellows, then runs off and hides and farm after farm after farm in Virginia.

Chris Bennett [00:49:03] They catch him, right? That was April 9th was the end of the war. April 14th was the assassination of Lincoln. April 26th. April 26th, they catch up to boot in the middle of the night, he's in the barn. They're under strict orders. Do not kill this fellow booth. 'cause they knew there was a grand conspiracy. And the Secretary of War wanted his head and he wanted to question him. One of the fellas that surrounded the barn, they set the barn on fire. And one of the most, the one of the odds, one of the most surreal characters in US history just happens to be outside the barn armed. He's a soldier. This is a man who's so crazy that he cut off his own testicles, right? This guy cut his own balls off, said he was, I believe he was lusting after prostitutes, something like that. And he, he cut his own balls off and went to church the same night. That's who we're dealing with. That's who's staring at Booth. He's living through the cracks of the barn. Old ball is Boston, Corvette. He's looking through the cracks of the barn. He shoots booth in the neck. They run in to get booth. Booth dies on the scene, right? It's total chaos in the United States. That's April 9th, that's April 14th, that's April 26th. On April 27th, the next day, the next day, 10 11 days after the end of the Civil War, you've got guys moving all over the country, right? You've got, you had tens of thousands or more of soldiers in the north, soldiers in the south there in prisoner war camps.

Chris Bennett [00:50:37] They have to go home. Vance, you had in the union, you had 50% of union soldiers where farm boys, right? 48%, something like that. Very high number in the south. The number was outrageously high. Like 70% of all fellows in the army were farm boys. And all of these farm boys are now returning home. But to get the union soldiers home out of places like Georgia and Alabama, where most of these prisoner war camps, they needed the Mississippi River. So they muled them or they marched them in a few cases. They took them by train, they took them over to the Mississippi River and they're sending them north, right? On Steamboats, they were paying Steamboat captains who normally moved Farm goods. They were paying them outrageous amounts of money to take officers and far boy soldiers back home. And they load one up. It becomes notorious in history. It's one of the last ones. It's called the Ana. And it's built for like 300, 400 men, 260 feet long. They cram almost 2,500 people on there, right? The, the boat is creaking, the boilers are bad. They send it up river and just, I believe north of Memphis, the boiler explode in the middle of the night. The ship goes down. 1200 men either burned or drowned, and presumably righteous, a decent guess of the 1200. If we go with the 50% mark, you know, up to 500, 600 farm boys then die on the saltana.

Chris Bennett [00:52:11] That is the worst. That's the number one, that's the worst US maritime disaster in history, right? Titanic was not a, it was not an American ship. So you can't count that one technically, but that's the worst maritime disaster. The problem is the saltana occurs on the 27th Booth was killed on the 26th. So the media, right? Everyone in the country did not want to hear about 1200 deaths. Not even on a battlefield, but on the Mississippi River in the cold winter flow. So that one just got pushed off the scene. But that's from April 9th to April 27th. V that's one tiny thread. There are millions of those threads to pull to show the wonder wondrous, deep grip that America has or ha or agriculture has on America. So I get excited about that. I can't help,

Vance Crowe [00:53:10] Oh man, I think you should have been a US history teacher. 'cause we start talking and you start telling me things that are shocking to me. You know, I, I'm, I'm willing to admit my own ignorance here, which is I had no idea how close to the end of the Civil War that John Wilkes booth killed Abraham Lincoln. Those two things were separated in my mind to, to a large extent that they were much further apart. I really didn't know that there was a conspiracy on four people. I remember there'd being a movie kind of about it, but I didn't really check it out. And then to the, the loss of life on this maritime, I, I've never heard that story. These are all those things that, you know, it's, I it is certainly in my forties. It's on me to, to go through and do my own history reading. But I definitely feel like I am wanting, when it comes to knowledge of, of us history

Chris Bennett [00:54:04] Vance, when you get a chance, anybody listening, Google Lewis Powell, he's the guy that booth sent to kill Secretary of State, William Seward. He's a uniquely handsome fella. He was a tall fella, very odd looking, remarkable photos of him before he was executed. They took him and I believe three of the other conspirators, and they hung all of them. And when they did, so the hangman, the executer got it right on everyone except for Powell. He was tall. And when the rope dropped on him, I think the rope was too short. And so he ended up dangling and kicking for, I believe something like five whole minutes. It's very, very well documented. And I think it was only a few years ago at the Smithsonian, there was some museum just a few years ago in the nineties, found his skull, his skull had been taken there. They found it. I think he's finally put to rest somewhere down in Florida. Wild story. This country has more nuts and coops running around in it today and in its history, surely than any place on earth. And man, I, I guess I'm one of 'em. Look,

Vance Crowe [00:55:19] Oh man, you, you've, you unearth some of the craziest things, people out there, people willing to fight with the government, even though it looks totally, totally helpless. We'll go to some of those stories in just a second. But, you know, one of the things that I'm, I'm worried about as, as worried as you can be about an amorphous event that could happen, but I think it's very possible, is we have watched the Ukraine War have this massive increase in the amount of drones that are being used. And not just drones where somebody's flying that drone back in their, in their little cockpit back in, in headquarters. But like now, some of these are autonomous. And to me, this, this is a dangerous omen because drones are gonna be able to be used in political assassinations and, and people that in the past would've been very well protected, may not be. And I think about the amount of chaos that that can add into the system. This, it's, it's striking. What do you think happens if the US experiences a major assassination on our own soil?

Chris Bennett [00:56:24] Right? I it's going to happen, Lance. I certainly doesn't, I I certainly would pray that it doesn't happen to President Biden or President Trump or, or any president, but I I I can say with conviction, with on past history, based on Mr. Garfield, based on the attempts on Mr. Roosevelt, certainly Lincoln Kennedy, others, McKinley, it's going to happen again. And what you say about drones, it should be put in stone or on a flag somewhere, because you're exactly right. And I'll add something to that by saying, at the rate of drone technology, at the rate of all of this extreme artificial in intelligence technology, I I, I would assume that eventually not too long from now, a drone will be entirely invisible. In other words, so small that you can't see it. Maybe it's a, a drone that's small enough to carry some sort of launching device, maybe even a single bullet. The point would be that the tech, the technology's there, I'm sure they already have the but to carry out an, an assassination of sort at a public event, surely, surely is already being discussed by different groups, oh lord, by our, our own government. I I, there's nothing I put past them. I mean, I I I don't believe that that Lee Harvey Oswald was, you know, acting me, put it this way when he said, I'm a patsy.

Chris Bennett [00:57:59] I believe it.

Vance Crowe [00:58:02] Well, you know, you talk to people all the time that are no patsy because they get into a fight with the government who they find tr trespassing on their land or trying to take something from them. And you really highlight their stories. I think it's actually a, a noble pursuit that you're doing. 'cause otherwise a lot of these guys' stories would be something just told inside their own families or something. But what's the big ones you've been coming up with lately?

Chris Bennett [00:58:29] It's, I, I hope Tucker Carlson, I hope someone with a very big stage, very big audience out there takes this one and runs with it. 'cause it's crucial for this country and it is open fields now in four states, right now in four states, I just published an article this morning on what's going on in Louisiana. Now. You've got Louisiana, you got Tennessee, you got Virginia, and you got Pennsylvania. They are all either appealing or directly involved now in open Fields litigation. And essentially that means whether or not the government has access to your private land. And when I say government, I'm talking about either the state level government or the federal government, or both. According to the Supreme Court as we sit here, Vance, according to the Supreme Court, according to government, they claim the right, a total right, a blanket right of access to your private land. Yes, the Fourth Amendment is there. They acknowledge that own your house on the immediate area around your house. Once you get past that, whether it's whether you own a thousand acres or four acres or a hundred thousand acres, the government has complete access to that. Now, there are some exceptions. Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, several other states about eight states have laws whereby the state constitution protects your land.

Chris Bennett [01:00:11] But that state constitution only prevents state officials from going on to your land. Federal officials, the ones out DC, still have complete access to your ground. Now, what does that mean? That means that they can come on, right? They can come onto your ground at Will. So it doesn't have to be, I'm, I'm not talking about game wardens, certainly it could be a game warden, but it could be an official of any kind from the government. They, the government, Supreme Court doesn't, they don't define it. So they can come on your ground. They can come as long as they want. They don't have to announce themselves, they don't have to have a search warrant. They don't have to have probable cause. They don't even have to have reasonable suspicion. They can come on, stay as long as they want. They can behave as they want any kind of activity. They could take a soil sample, for example. They could put a camera up, they could put a movie camera up, they could put up a different sorts of surveillance or sensor technology, right? Open ended access. Now, as I said, that's being challenged in four states right now. Maybe one of those cases is going to wind up back again at the Supreme Court. Supreme Court made the decisions regarding what's called Open Fields doctrine, allowing the government onto Atlanta in 1924 and in 1984.

Chris Bennett [01:01:42] Since then, we haven't had a decision on it. But it strikes at the core, right? It strikes at the core of who we are as Americans, what we believe about the Constitution. And again, I take it right back to our forefathers. If you brought our framers into the room and told our framers, Hey, the government claims that they have complete carte blanche to come onto my property and they can surveil me anytime they want. I believe the framers would throw up a red flag immediately. I believe the framers would look around and ask, you know, is this a joke? So Vance, when I'm, when I've done these stories and talked to different state organizations, I've asked them a, a simple question like Departments of conservation. Okay, tell me what your policy is, right? Tell me if one of your officials goes on to Vance Crow's land, does he have to record it? Does he have to tell his boss if he puts a camera up on Vance Crow's land, if he catches any female relative of Vance's, right? Going to the bathroom, for example, who gets access to those pictures? Who is allowed to see that there is a Pandora's box of questions out there? No one will answer when you,

Vance Crowe [01:03:06] Do they not answer? Do they just tell you no comment? What do they

Chris Bennett [01:03:08] They do not answer, period. They don't even take on, they don't even accept the questions and respond to them. Now, foia, right? Freedom Information Act and say, how many cameras nationwide does Fish and Wildlife or DOJ have on private land that are warrantless, alright? And yes, yes, yes, yes. I've tried that. Others have tried that. You can imagine the level of success with that. So that's where we're at, right? And, and, and the big shame here, the big shame is that this should be a story or a series of stories on the cover of Time or Newsweek, New York Times. You figure, hey, somebody run with this. They don't run with advance. Because I believe, again, at their core, I, I believe they support government's ability to go in when government, you know, needs to, if you'll, if you allow me to say that it,

Vance Crowe [01:04:13] The, the, you and I have spoken about this concept of curtilage and you know, what is your property and what can the government go on? And it's just so astounding that anyone outside of the guy that gets to walk on your property would ever advocate for this. Why in the world would you want the government to do that? But I'm guessing if you're, I, I mean, I, I don't, I try not to distill things down into dichotomies, but I think even more than we have a blue red problem in this, in this country or division in this country. We have a rural urban division in this country. And it's not so perfectly rural and urban that if you're living in, you know, Chesterfield, Missouri, you're, you're against the, or rural people. I don't think it's quite like that. But there's certainly this belief of people living in large cities, that the people living in the countryside are slow. They have all kinds of backwards ideas that we need to get rid of. They have all these, you know, they, they have ill intents. And I could imagine that somebody living in the city could say, well, if you have 400 acres, we need to make sure you're not poaching and killing, you know, special eagles or, or, you know, protected species or something. But outside of that, why in the world would anyone want to advocate that the government be able to do this?

Chris Bennett [01:05:37] A a absolutely. It, it's, you know, it's a lot different there if you have, if you live in a suburb and have a half acre behind your house, as opposed to if you're out in the country with a house and 10 acres, you're a hundred acres, or, you know, possibly, possibly much more. And it also gets down to, you know, who's armed out there, who's not armed out there, who's packing, who's not. You're right, there's a dichotomy between city and country. And someone could argue very reasonably and say there has always been such a split. But I think the split now is deeper than ever, partially, in my opinion, based on those litmus paper tests of what do you believe about X, Y, and Z where we seem to be on two opposite sides of a canyon. And, and you can only talk so much, you can only compromise so much if you're truly standing on opposite edges of something wide. You know, you can only put on for so long. So where, perfect, where do we go from here? I, I have kids Vance and, and you have kids. So I, I never want to take the approach of, Hey, you know, I, I just, you know, piss on all of them and we'll go do our thing.

Chris Bennett [01:07:09] That's not what my forefathers did. That's not what the boys and girls did in 1776, that they stood for something and they spoke out. So for the sake of my kids, for the sake of my country coming to be, I'm not going to disband or walk away from politics. I don't know who it was, was it Pericles, you know, that said, oh, you, you know, you, you can pretend that you're not interested in politics, but let me tell you, politics is interested in you. And that may not have been Pericles. And please excuse me if it was someone else, but I think it might've been, anyhow, let's attribute it to him now. Or we could just make something up and say, Hey man, that's what Napoleon said.

Vance Crowe [01:07:58] So Chris, you, you have, you've been following a lot of stuff of government intrusion and, and, and making sure people are in ag. A lot of your stories are about people doing swindles. They're great stories about people pulling, pulling some pranks on, on either unsuspecting victims or using government systems to, to run up their own, the amount of money they're making. What's a big story you have coming down the pipe that we can be looking forward

Chris Bennett [01:08:24] To? I, I just finished last month, a, a very big one on Roger Reeves and Vance, that was the one on Pablo Escobar's pilot. And he is the most prolific drug pilot, probably in history. He grew up on a farm in Georgia. He grew up as poor, as poor can be, and yet he ascended to incredible heights of wealth. And then he crashed, spent 33 years in prison. He's out now, and he's telling his story. I, I think that one of the big TV companies, apple or some one has bought his TV rights, they're gonna turn him into a movie. Yeah. Incredible story. If anybody wants to google Roger Reeves to what I wrote or somebody else wrote, it's, I assure you there are many crazy tales out there. There's only one tale of Roger Reeves, but upcoming, I got one Vance on Buddy Holly and the land where he crashed in 1959, as you know, he crashed with Richie Valence. When we crashed with Big Bopper, we crashed in a field Iowa cornfield. And so I interviewed that farmer who owns the land today. He worked on that land when he was a child, never even knew that that is where Buddy Holly crashed. And once you start to peel back the layers on the Buddy Holly story, it connects directly, of course, not just with Waylon Jennings. It also attaches itself to Bob Dylan and to Clapton and to the Beatles and to others, even, even Elvis.

Chris Bennett [01:10:02] Very, very, very poignant tale. Very, you know, who was this guy going to be? You know, he, he was going to be an absolute Mount Rushmore figure except for falling out of the sky that night. But anyway, I think it will, once it's actually published, it's going to be a good one.

Vance Crowe [01:10:22] It's funny you mentioned that story. 'cause I just gave a talk at a, at an organization called the Ag Ventures Alliance in Clear Lake, and it was actually at the Bandstand location that he had his last show before he got on that plane in Clear Lake and then, and then crashed that just, just two weeks ago base.

Chris Bennett [01:10:39] Were you, were you at the Surf Ballroom?

Vance Crowe [01:10:42] Yeah, that's right. The surf bar. That's right.

Chris Bennett [01:10:45] Wow. Man, I can,

Vance Crowe [01:10:46] It's an incredible location. Iowa's littered with all these great little places where bands used to play. It looks like a gymnasium. And that one, they've kept very well preserved, but I, you know, that's amazing. The, the synchronicity there

Chris Bennett [01:10:59] That, you know, when they left that night, they left by vehicle to drive to the air. Everybody else got on the bus, but the floor, the three of them and, and the pilot of course who was waiting in the airplane, they were waiting behind the surf ballroom and Vallens Richie, Vallens old Mr. Lab Baba was the last one out of the building. And Buddy Holly sent one of the guys in the car inside to get their road crew, I mean, excuse me, some of their equipment, because they didn't have a road crew. And when he went in, Richie Valence was in the building, signing that last autograph. And Vallen sees him, he sees him come in and says, Hey man, hey man, can I please have a seat on that plane? The guy says, no man, there's no more seats. This is the last seat. And man, it says, please, can I have a seat on the plow? I flipped you forward. He pulled out a 50 cent piece, they flipped right there. Vallens winds walks out the door, gets in the car with Buddy Holly and them, you can imagine they're chuckling, they're laughing, they're young guys, they're telling jokes and they're, they're dead minutes later, quite, quite unusual, but I've got another one come advance up. And the next few months the story's done. I've just gotta publish on a, on a major major ag scam, Ponzi scam out of the Midwest where some old school kind of evangelistic grifters used fish and quail eggs and aquaponics and fake stock and read a wondrous theme that took, unfortunately a huge amount of farmers for I think maybe 5, 4, 5 different states.

Chris Bennett [01:12:42] They said that they had a contract to sell the fish to Dubai. They were the Dubai and Abu Dhabi were gonna send in planes to pick up the fish in Oklahoma. Then they had a contract with Carnival Cruise line to sell their quail eggs for their buffets. And it was all, you know, Hey, it's all good. Bob's your uncle. And of course once it got cranked up and you paid your money and boom, you know that, that they were gone. You never saw 'em again. So I finally got that one done and it's going to be kind of, it's gonna be kind of buck wild man. It's then I kept, I've got always got, I always got few crazy, I, I'll tell you one advance that's coming very soon, probably next week, I've got one out on the amount of people killed in the last 20 years by wild pigs. I'm talking about fatal attacks. The numbers will blow you away because most of the fatalities occur in foreign countries, China and India. But they certainly do occur here in the United States, but there's only been, I think less than 10 recorded wild pig caused deaths in the last a hundred years in the United States. But the kicker is at the last one in the US was in Texas in 2019. That's only only five years ago. And it is arguably the most gruesome wild pig attack documented on a human being, possibly in history.

Chris Bennett [01:14:14] And this, a poor lady, she was almost 60, maybe 59, was getting out of her vehicle one morning, 6:00 AM 6:30 AM out in a, a rural port of Chambers County, Texas. And she got, she was hit by sounder of pigs and they, she bled to death, they ate her alive, they consumed roughly a third of her legs and she was covered head to toe in wounds. And, and people didn't even accept at first that it was hogs 'cause it hadn't been filmed. But when they did the autopsy, when the pathology reports came in, they even did, I believe they did DNA also, you know, she was riddled, she was riddled with puncture wounds and bats and so on. Because a lot of the time, that's what these hogs do, at least the males, right? The males, the women, I mean, excuse me, the, the females and the, and the males, they both have tusks, but the male's tusks come up, let's say, you know, three to four inches off the jawline, far deeper in the jaw. The female's tusk just barely come up beyond that. So in other words, the females can't stab as well as the males. But the end of a tusk, if, if I were just to pull a tusk off of a hog and hand it to you, you'll note that the end of it is hard. The very end is hard, almost like a nail. And once you get past that, on the side of the bottom tusks, they are sharp as razors. So that hog, what he'll do is come in and and puncture with that lower tusk hook, right?

Chris Bennett [01:15:47] And then he'll pull back. And if he was to come up on you, let's say he's a 250, 300 pound hog V and he meets you an adult, he's gonna be roughly right, roughly at your growing level. And because he's at that growing level, your femoral artery is often exposed in these tacks. So a lot of the times that boar's gonna hook right there at the femoral artery. There was a American farmer, a Mississippi guy, roughly 1920 that was out. And he got hooked femoral artery severed, he died in less than five minutes, right there in front of his boys. I think the family still has the rag that they tried to use as a tourniquet on him. And they still have one of the tusks from the hog that actually did the killing. But that story, I'm gonna publish it in a few months, it also tore my heart out 'cause I could not get over imagining seeing his boys, who I believe were something like 16 and 19th at the time, watching daddy bleed out and fade out on the ground. They couldn't even get him

Vance Crowe [01:16:58] Back. Oh man. They couldn't

Chris Bennett [01:16:59] Even get him back to the house. Anyway, sorry for the long-winded answer, but yeah, that's what's going on.

Vance Crowe [01:17:05] Well, Chris Bennett, I, I know we'll probably have you on before then, but I'm definitely having you on for this year's Halloween episode. We'll have you come on and talk about gore and all these sorts of things. But thank you so much for coming on, chatting. If people wanted to read your stuff, talk, chat more about you, they have a story they think you ought to help 'em tell, where should they go? Hey,

Chris Bennett [01:17:26] Please look me up online, just put my name in, put farm journal, my, my email address is c bennett cbee NNET t@farmjournal.com. Or you know, they, they can call a cell. It's all there, it's all there. 6 6 2 5 9 2 1 1 0 6. I'm not on the traditional social medias. Maybe I should be, maybe I will get on there, but holler at me and I'll holler back and Vance, it's an absolute privilege to be on here with you. Vance Crow. Nobody does it like Vance Crow and he just happens to be blessed with the best name in all of audio, visual, whatever. In fact, I'm, I'm gonna publicly ask now if I can take train trade names with you.

Vance Crowe [01:18:15] Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on. I absolutely love it. Thank you.