MARSH MAN MASSON: SPECKLED TROUT In A Roadside Ditch! (CATCH & COOK)

March 1st, 2024 Todd Masson

Fishing from the bank presents a unique set of challenges, and that’s especially true when what you’re fishing is a glorified ditch with cars and trucks zooming by you every few seconds.

But it can be an absolute blast. That certainly was the case this week when I teamed up with Jared Serigne, host of the @OutsidetheLevees YouTube channel, to explore some of the roadside stuff down in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana.

Our primary target was marsh bass, but that didn’t keep us from catching some surprise fish.

Check out the video for all the details!

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Trending on The Hayride

The mainstream narrative paints Bashar al-Assad as the great villain of Syria. He’s called a “dictator,” a “butcher,” an “enemy of democracy.” But if that’s true, then why are Syria’s Christians—the very people being slaughtered—some of his staunchest supporters? Because Assad, for all his faults, protects them. Or, protected them, I should say. The alternative was and now is a nightmare. When jihadist militias seize territory, Christians disappear. Their churches are torched. Their women and daughters are taken as slaves. Their priests are slaughtered. It is happening right now.

Once again, Trump was right. He was saying this about Syria and Assad back in 2015:

[video width="1280" height="714" mp4="https://thehayride.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ssstwitter.com_1741552521567.mp4"][/video]

Some questions demand answers.

And then there are the questions that powerful people pray you never ask.

History teaches us that great empires rarely fall in one cataclysmic moment. Instead, they rot from within—the comfortable life, the riches, the greed, the betrayal, the enemies who know how to infiltrate and manipulate the cracks. America—the incredible Trump-led movement notwithstanding—is crumbling, not from a lack of strength, but from a lack of truth.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in our foreign policy and our mental space concerning fellow Christians all over the world.

The Pattern of Destruction

The patterns, or dare I say “pattern” in the singular, is as consistent as homogeneous whole milk—just not nearly as delicious. For years, Christians in Syria have been caught in a hellish crossfire between jihadist extremists, Western-backed rebels (think Obama and Clinton, neocons McCain and Graham), and geopolitical superpowers arbitrarily playing chess with human lives. The narrative we’re fed is neat and sanitized: Syria is just another conflict zone, just another “complicated situation” where everyone is at fault and no one is to blame. But for those willing to see, the truth is clear: Christians are being targeted. They're being systematically slaughtered just as they were during the Bolshevik Revolution no one taught us. Their suffering is not collateral damage. It is the goal. Here seems to be the party line conservative view on the situation in the Middle East right now:

A video of Zionist commentator Ben Shapiro explaining the benefits toppling Assad has had for Israel has been making the rounds on social media today. While noting that the “Russian-Iranian” influence around Israel has been drastically reduced, Shapiro seemed rather indifferent towards the suffering the Christian population there might undergo in the coming days. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been taking a victory lap since Assad’s removal. At a press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month, Netanyahu took credit for Assad’s fall, stating that it was “made possible by Israel’s weakening of Iran’s terror axis.” Netanyahu is being far too shy. The Israeli government has provided funding to the “rebels” in Syria since at least 2017. The offensive was successful largely due to their support.

Which raises the eternally uncomfortable question more and more people are asking across the X landscape: Why exactly are Israel and the US (Mossad? CIA?) funding, if not establishing, Islamic terrorist groups?

Are we to believe the stories they tell us? Are we to blindly trust them while Christians continue to be exterminated? Did you know Hillary Clinton--not a party line conservative--is a part of all of this too, just as she is with every other damn thing I research it seems? You remember Benghazi as well, right? What about Haiti?

Her involvement in everything is why I was hoping for a rematch with Trump in the fall. Clinton is a lynchpin.

And many a conservative are siding with her.

This is so much bigger than politics. This is, in a word, Biblical. It is the hallmark of Satan--to deceive, to hide behind and inside others to do his work, just as both Genesis and Christ himself tell us.

Syria is a perfect case study. A nation where Christians, Muslims, and various ethnic minorities once coexisted in relative peace has become a charnel house of endless war. But why?

We’re told Assad was a brutal dictator, a monster whose removal everyone should have celebrated. And yet, under his government, Christians were protected. Churches stood tall. Christmas was openly celebrated. Women weren’t forced into submission under jihadist warlords. Colleague Jeff Crouere discusses:

While Assad had many faults he did protect the Christian minority in Syria. However, as noted by commentator Tucker Carlson, as the civil war progressed, “the percentage of Christians in Syria went from ten percent to two percent.”
His removal was celebrated by neocons in this country, the same ones who worked to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. While both were brutal dictators, their removal led to even worse results. Today, Iraq is a strong ally of Iran, the world’s foremost benefactor of terrorism, while Libya has been splintered into regions controlled by rival Jihadist organizations. Similarly, after Assad fled for Russia, Ahmed al-Sharaa seized control as Syria’s new interim President. He is the former leader of HTS. Previously, the United States offered a $10 million reward for his capture, but the Biden administration removed it last December.

So why did our government—funded by our hard-earned tax dollars—work overtime to arm the very radicals who sought to destroy Syria’s Christian communities?

They say, “Oh, we were fighting for democracy.”

Did we get it in Iraq when we toppled Saddam?

Did we get democracy in Libya when we overthrew Gaddafi?

What did the Christian communities in those nations get, other than persecution and bloodshed?

Who is really behind the slaughter of Christians in Syria? Who benefits from the chaos and suffering? And why do the same forces claiming to champion “democracy” and “human rights” always seem to be the architects of bloodshed?

Are we to understand the answer in that Wikileaks email above?

If you understand the art of deception and the structure of mafia layers to ensure plausible deniability with every single crime you commit, you may already know the answer.

If you understand why Christ was crucified, you may understand the answer as well.

The War on Christians

It’s not a war of rhetoric as I so often explore. Not a war of lawsuits or canceled social media accounts or narratives. It’s a war that everyone should be able to recognize, of blood and fire, of massacres and executions, of churches burned to the ground and ancient Christian communities wiped off the face of the earth. And nowhere is this war more brutal, more relentless, than in the Middle East. Well, Ukraine is a part of this too, so.... [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://thehayride.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/kill-christians-subtext.mp4"][/video]

Tucker Carlson is one voice who has highlighted such genocide of Christians throughout the world. Like him, I’ve covered the slaughter of Christians in Palestine while continuing to pray for the good people of Israel all along. I breadcrumbed the Syria story two months ago because the trajectory was obvious. And now once again the future has proven the past. Others saw it too. From fellow Catholic Candace Owens:

Tulsi Gabbard was saying it just last month at her confirmation hearing:

“Syria is now controlled by al-Qaeda offshoot [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham], led by an Islamist Jihadist … who has already begun to persecute and kill and arrest religious minorities like Christians.”
Gabbard was smeared relentlessly by neocons like Bari Weiss as being a Russian pawn for telling the truth. But she was right to do so. Under Assad, Christians were fairly-well protected and faced minimal harassment. He also visited their churches and balanced differing factions of Islamic sects. The West sought to court Assad for years after he succeeded his father in 2000 at the tender age of 34. But when it realized he wasn’t going to play ball, they made up claims he gassed his own people and started calling him the “Butcher of Syria.” Then-U.S. President Barack Obama funded “moderate rebels” to take him out. “He’s the founder of ISIS,” Trump said of Obama in 2016. Just one year earlier, Trump prophetically noted that “we have no idea who the other side are … to me, Assad looks better than the other side.” Turns out he was right.

Right--yet again. In fact his rightness on seemingly everything days, weeks, months, years ahead of time is one of the things that frightens me about him. And I say that only half jokingly. :)

Forgetting the Persecution, Confusing the Villains

Remember all the times some terrorist organization stormed across the Middle East, butchering Christians, enslaving women, and dynamiting churches that have stood since the time of the apostles? The world notices sometimes—briefly. There are hashtags--maybe. There are candlelight vigils--maybe. And then, the cameras move on--most certainly. But the war on Christians doesn’t end when terrorist groups come and go or when the electronic screens stop reciting their stories to us. The players change. The ancient persecution remains. Christ himself said it would be this way. Today, Syria’s Christians are still being hunted, still being driven from their homes, still being murdered for their faith. And the so-called “good guys” in this conflict—the US government, NATO, and our allies including Israel—aren’t just standing by. They’re arming, funding, and supporting many of the very factions that have made Christian blood run in the streets. They’re doing what they’ve always done—what they did in Ukraine in 2014. They install the leadership they want to install, whoever is willing to be the next proxy:

Unlike Assad, the West has given Syria’s new leader a hero’s welcome. Instead of calling him a “dictator” like his predecessor, Abu Mohammad al-Julani has had the red carpet rolled out for him. Julani has already met with the U.N.’s Secretary General, and is slated to visit EU leaders (with the EU already having eased sanctions on Syria). He has also welcomed Germany’s Foreign Minister to Damascus. Friendly Western outlets now speak of Julani’s “transformation.” “From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician: How Abu Mohammed al-Julani reinvented himself,” reads a BBC headline from December. This is rather remarkable given that there was nothing “democratic” about how he became the “president.” It is also remarkable given that he was labelled a terrorist by the U.S. in a 2017 X post.

Here’s where the mainstream narrative starts to crack.

When you follow the money, the logistics, and the undeniable patterns, you find the fingerprints consistently circling back to a certain source. And it’s not Russia. I do hope the following two videos are not eventually proven to be fake or old, but even if they are, my contentions still stand. I take the risk to provide some illustration:

Of course, we can’t talk about Syria without addressing the great Russian scapegoat. Because that’s the fallback, right? Whenever someone dares to question the official narrative, the legacy media screams “Russian disinformation!” Just like that Hunter Biden laptop riiiight before the 2020 election. Who has actually been defending Syrian Christians from jihadist slaughter? Who has stood by Assad’s government—not because they love dictators, but because they understand the alternative is far worse--just like Trump? Who has consistently exposed the Western-backed networks funding and arming the radical Islamist factions--just like Trump? It sure as hell isn’t the United States, not the non-Trump, infiltrated, compromised version of it anyway. And yet, we’re supposed to believe that Russia is the villain? That Putin, of all people, is the threat to “democracy” in Syria, when it’s the US and its allies who are most culpable? So why does our government insist on demonizing them? Because Russia is one of the few nations left on Earth that doesn’t play by the globalist script. And that is why it seems Trump and Putin get along so well, while someone like a Zelenskyy—a puppet of the globalist deep state—seems to cause trouble with everyone.

I can read the room, don't misunderstand. But can we not at least ask the questions, just as I was challenging us all to do going all the way back to 2022 with Russia and Ukraine? We've seen how that narrative has turned out, right?

Who is the one consistently lobbying for US intervention in the Middle East—not for our benefit, but for their own dominance?

Who is the one arming jihadists under the pretense of “fighting terrorism” while ensuring Christian populations are wiped out?

Who is the one every major US politician—Republican and Democrat alike, including Trump—treat as untouchable, beyond scrutiny?

Who is the one behind and in control of Epstein and all the blackmail tapes he collected on US politicians?

This is about saying goodbye to old alliances and old paradigms just because "it's how we've always done it. This is about a historic global power realignment. It’s about control. It's about Communism. It's about totalitarianism.

It's about us and our souls.

Yet the deep state component of the US and its allies continue to play dumb while funneling over billions of dollars and weaponry, while Christians continue to die at their hands, while the legacy media just shrugs. While so many American Christians continue to claim “conspiracy theory” on it all. Trump must not shrug at this. Not any of it. If he is a Christian, he must go beyond DOGE. He must wax philosophical more. He must illuminate what has actually been going on behind the scenes worldwide. He must use the strong arm he’s been wielding lately to spread truth--in his ongoing narrative deployments and wargames--to what already is a trusting and captive American audience.

The War Will Continue—Unless We Make It Stop

The tactic is as old as war itself: create so much confusion, so much violence, that people stop asking questions, stop demanding answers. All the while, the Christian blood flows. This is the cloak of chaos—an intentional strategy of perpetual conflict where no one is ever truly allowed to win, and the only people who suffer are the ones with no army, no oil fields, and no superpower backing them. The chaos—the endless, grinding, inescapable chaos—is a tool to weaken nations, uproot traditions, erase Christianity from lands where it has flourished for two thousand years. Erase Christianity from existence entirely. That does not mean collateral damage. That is the goal. And unless we rise up—unless we speak the truth, demand justice, and refuse to be complicit—it will not end. The Noahide Laws. Are you familiar with them? This is one of the major reasons I warn against Trump worship. Even though we support him, we all have to decide what the exact line in the sand is with him, if it should ever come to that. If Trump and America still have a shred of moral clarity, it would recognize the systematic annihilation of Syrian Christians--and the same in Ukraine and Africa for that matter--for what it is: genocide. It would fight for them as it has fought along side the State of Israel and its respective causes for so long. As Christians in the West, we must demand that our government stop funding the very groups that slaughter Christians. We must refuse to buy into the false narratives that paint legacy media-labeled world leaders as the only villains while ignoring the US-backed jihadists who rape, enslave, and kill in the name of their twisted ideology. We must recognize that the United States we think is noble was never in fact noble under previous leadership--the same leadership any of us would admit to bemoaning and belittling all along anyway! Is Trump truly different? Sure seems so. But sometimes it doesn't as well. We simply cannot afford to sit on the sidelines. We cannot afford to let our brothers and sisters in Syria be wiped from the earth while we debate nonsense and scroll through distractions. The time for ignorance has long been over. People are speaking on this stuff every day. It isn't obscure anymore. We must support organizations that are actually helping persecuted Christians on the ground—those who are rebuilding churches, sheltering families, and standing between believers and their executioners. Above all, we must pray. We must fast. Not with the weak, empty prayers of complacency, but with the fire of righteous anger, with the cry of a people who will not stand by while their brothers and sisters are crucified in the land where St Paul once walked.

Because the war isn’t just in Syria. It is here.

And if we don’t start considering the difficult answers to all of this now, if we don't start praying and fasting to a God we abandoned as a culture long ago, the next Christian persecution may well be on American soil--where you and I walk.

May everyone named directly or referenced indirectly ask forgiveness and do penance for their sins against America and God. I fight this information war in the spirit of justice and love for the innocent, but I have been reminded of the need for mercy and prayers for our enemies. I am a sinner in need of redemption as well after all, for my sins are many. In the words of Jesus Christ himself, Lord forgive us all, for we know not what we do.

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