Boys with a Chattanooga Trail Life USA chapter make camp stoves out of cans, cutting into market share of national cook stove brands such as Coleman and learning a little independence from the system. (Photo David Tulis)
By David Tulis
An overlooked virtue of local economy as an idea is that it cannot be radicalized by agents provocateurs who, as plants from the state, seek to block reform and stifle dissent.
If you were a tea partier, a gun rights advocate, a prolifer, an anarcho-capitalist, an environmentalist, an anti-globalist demonstrator, a proponent of Anonymous, a booster of Julian Assange, you might be a target.
But if you are a proponent of the weak, slight and whimsical idea of local economy, you have little to worry about.
Danger from the state
Conditions in the federal government have sharply deteriorated, and the official position of the U.S. government is that enemies lurk behind every traffic pole and behind every bush decorating the entranceway to the nearest administrative building. These enemies are not Muslims, for these get a pass. The enemies are people like those a former Pennsylvania police chief, Mark Kessler, hoped to lure into government notice with provocative and daring words.
Mr. Kessler of the Gilberton police department went online with videos in which he fired weapons and made noisy and bold statements about the 2nd amendment right to bear arms against all malefactors, private and public.
In a TV interview in 2014 he admitted he had been recruited by several federal agencies to act as an agent provocateur. Kessler claims he was sent out to attract and investigate patriot groups, Second Amendment groups, and militia groups. When Alan Colmes tries to provoke Mr. Kessler with a jab about “libtards” he states, “That’s not my job. That was specifically designed to attract groups of people, who are extremists. Sovereign citizens, insurrectionists. *** When I say groups, I’m talking about Second Amendment groups, patriot groups, alleged patriot groups, militia groups.”
His muzzle flashing, Mark Kessler seeks to entrap gun rights advocates with a provocative pro-gun video July 2013. (Photo YouTube)
“I signed up with those agencies, several different agencies and began an operation where I was just a magnet,” he says. “I was sent out there to attract the worst of the worst and frankly it worked.
Mr. Kessler became the stooge of the agencies as a career move for which he received no compensation. “I’d seen an opportunity to advance my law enforcement career, and there was no way I was going to turn it down.”
Among the groups he “took down” was a Texas organization and the Triple X Minutemen in Georgia whom he said planned to blow up federal real estate. Mr. Kessler said his videos drew thousands of people to the attention of the federal government who is investigating some of them for purportedly violent intentions and being “a threat to society.”
Soft-spoken resistance
Promoters of the constitutional right to bear arms are perhaps at the top of lists drafted by good people in Washington and in federal fusion centers dotting a map of the 50 states.
At the bottom of the list, if they are on it at all, are people like you and me, folks who believe in the innocuous and harmless idea of local economy. Local economy is harmless because it is nonpolitical, nonlegal, nonconfrontational and plainspokenly provincial. It is about people who favor their town, their county, their neck of the woods, their fields and lands, their neighboring hills, their neighbors. Yes, they care about local economy and free markets with a sense of militant defiance if you throw at them news about federal surveillance or stories such as the spraying of St. Louis housing projects with cadmium sulfide in 1953-1954 and 1963-1965.
They admit evils from the imperium, but cheerfully press on about their local business, serving their customers, networking, making contact with prospects and neigbors, teaching their children Christian virtues, going to church, looking in on the elderly soul across the street, and buying fewer and fewer digital and industrial economy geegaws such as tablets or or late-model cars, holding on to their 1994 Fords and “eating in” for lunch.
Local economy actors are, I’d like to suggest, a slight threat to the national system of debt, surveillance and consumption in that they are putting these into discount, which may spread to more and more parts of the population that get their news and perspective from alternative media. But mostly they pose no direct threat to the government nor to public order. They are unworthy of governmental notice, unworthy of surveillance. They don’t need to be interrogated by the FBI and written up in a FD-302 report, or warned that they are under investigation.
Instead, lococentrists are irrelevant, lack a proper perspective, have merely local or regional concerns, are not part of any big picture, lack importance or bearing on matters of national import.
Local economy poses no threat, so it unlikely to be the victim of any plots or plants to radicalize it. It’s conversation may be defiant of Washington, D.C., but only in passing. It talks about candidate debates, elections, Congress and the benefits train only to dismiss them.
It causes no offense, and in its banality finds a measure of safety.
— David Tulis hosts a talk show weekdays in Chattanooga from 9 to 11 a.m. on 1240 AM Hot News Talk Radio, covering local economy and free markets in Chattanooga and beyond. Support this site and his radio station on the real airwaves in Chattanooga, on your smartphone via the TuneIn radio app or at Hotnewstalkradio.com. You back David by patronizing his advertisers with specific reference to him. Even better, encourage independent media by having David run commercials for your business. Also, “buy me a coffee at the tip jar.”
Sources: Derrick Broze, “Notorious Former Police Chief Claims He Was Federal Informant,” Dec. 3, 2014, Truth In Media, http://truthinmedia.com/notorious-former-police-chief-claims-he-was-federal-informant/
Sources: Emily Anne Epstein, “Revealed: Army scientists secretly sprayed St Louis with ‘radioactive’ particles for YEARS to test chemical warfare technology,” Sept. 29, 2012, Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210415/Revealed-Army-scientists-secretly-sprayed-St-Louis-radioactive-particles-YEARS-test-chemical-warfare-technology.html#ixzz3rB7ySPmB
