From The Fields

I'm Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. Libertarian Party Chair Angela McCardle beclowned herself (she actually put on a clown nose) after the Libertarian Convention by saying that Donald Trump, who she invited to speak to the LP Convention, was close to being a Libertarian. Because he said he was, I guess. Well, now that Trump's ear was grazed by a would-be assassin's bullet, he has risen to martyr status. He will almost certainly win against a demented Joe Biden. Even if, at this late date, the Democrats manage to ditch Biden and replace him with someone else, Trump will probably still win.

So, how has the supposedly libertarian-sympathetic candidate displayed his alleged libertarian credentials? First, he had a labor boss, Teamster President Sean O'Brien delivering the keynote address to the Republican National Convention. Oops. Then he picked Senator and Hillbilly Elegy author, J. D. Vance as his pick for Vice-President. Let's check out Vance's libertarian credentials. He's an unapologetic drug warrior. Oops. He wants to finish the border wall and opposes every attempt to grant amnesty. Oops. He wants broad-based tariffs, especially on imports from China. In other words, higher prices for American consumers. Oops. He wants to continue supporting the war between Israel and Gaza. Oops. He supports Lina Khan's anti-business jihad at the Federal Trade Commission. Oops. He supports a higher minimum wage which would inexorably lead to higher youth and minority unemployment. Oops. He wants to raise corporate taxes. Oops. He promises to protect funding for MediCare, the single biggest contributor to the Federal government's continuing obscene and ruinous deficits and the inflation deficits always cause. Oops. On the Nolan chart, J. D. Vance is a hard core conservative.Not a libertarian. Oops.

Let's see, that's 10 oopsies. And that's just a quick scan of his public record. To be fair, Vance is against the quasi-criminalization of cryptocurrencies. And he's a skeptic of the climate warming narrative. But, last time I looked, Chase Oliver is on the presidential ballot. Beats me why a libertarian would ever vote for Trump/Vance or Weekend at Bidens/Harris tickets whose economic policies are essentially the same. Not when one can vote for an actual Libertarian. That's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.

Carl von Clausewitz, the renowned Prussian military theorist said "War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means." Those other means are primarily the use of violence. The inverse is also true. Politics is a form of war where the threat of violence takes the place of actual violence. In politics, people jockey for so-called leadership roles where they can tell the rest of the people to do everything the leader's way. Those who don't risk fines or incarceration. If they resist their punishment, they risk armed violence. Ergo, politics is the threat of violence. War is the next step, the actual use of violence. Thomas Crooks, a random 20 year old guy from Pennsylvania. tried to ratchet politics, the threat of violence, into war, the actual use of violence by attempting to assassinate Presidential candidate Donald Trump. He was only a few millimeters away from being successful. Luckily for Trump, Crooks was rejected when he tried out for his high school shooting team.

Naturally, conspiracy theories have sprung up in the aftermath. Democrats floated the theory that the whole thing was a false flag operation to turn Trump into a martyr. That seems unlikely. Trump's ear is too close to his skull for that to be believable. Trump, who has played the martyr ever since he was elected in 2016, now gets to actually be one. It will probably make the difference in getting him elected. Others have floated the theory that the Secret Service was somehow either complicit of incompetent. The roof that Crooks shot from is only about 400 feet from the podium from which Trump was speaking. It has a clear line of sight to the podium. The Secret Service did not secure it. Several bystanders tried to alert police to an armed man on the roof in the five minutes before the shooting started. There was no police or Secret Service effort to check those reports out. Yet, somehow, Secret Service snipers on another rooftop managed to locate and kill Crooks within seconds of when he started shooting. Complicit or incompetent? It was probably one or the other. The Secret Service's primary task is to prevent assassinations of presidential candidates. Only the bad aim of the assassin prevented their total failure on that task.

An interesting footnote, after months of requests by the Robert F Kennedy presidential campaign for Secret Service protection, the Biden administration finally decided to provide it. No such luck for Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate or any of the other third party candidates. I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields.

Boomers and our children are the only generations in recent history to have had the privilege of living in an era of mostly unrestricted free speech. Prior to the internet and the email communications and the social media platforms it spawned, free speech and free press had, what Hillary Clinton longingly called, gatekeepers. The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, the Associated Press and toward the end of that period FOX. They controlled the dissemination of "news". In order to get news unfiltered by the gatekeepers, one had to subscribe to small circulation magazines, financial newsletters and such. When internet communications arrived on the scene in the 1990s, freedom of speech began to flourish, gradually at first and then with gusto. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter were largely uncensored and unfiltered. Anyone with a camera on their computer or phone could become a self-styled expert on something or other on YouTube. Everyone had equal access. The internet did not care what one said or thought. They were happy to sell advertising clicks on anything and everything. At the same time mostly conservative talk radio came into its own.

In retrospect, it's clear that this unprecedented free speech brought about the end of the screening of political candidates by the state, deep state intelligence agencies, middle state bureaucracies and the various shallow state government/private sector partnerships exemplified by the military/industrial/education//health care etc complexes. As H. L. Mencken said, "In a democracy, the people get what they want, good and hard." In 2016, we got Donald J. Trump. The last deep state-approved Presidential candidate was Barack Obama.

Ever since, the deep, middle and shallow state have been laboring industriously to make sure THAT never happens again. The social media companies have all (except X under Elon Musk) been strong-armed into amplifying only state approved narratives. The strong-arm technique is extortion, pure and simple. As in "That sure is a profitable social media site you have there. You sure wouldn't want to lose it, would you." The implicit threats include crippling regulations up to and including getting rid of Section 230 which shields social media companies from liability stemming from inflammatory and libelous claims their users might post.

The final two nails in the coffin are the Supreme Court's dismissal of Murthy v. Missouri because of lack of standing and the appointment of retired U.S. Army General, Director of the National Security Agency and Chief of the Central Security Service, Paul Nakasone to the Board of OpenAI as well as to its Safety and Security Committee.

The Supreme Court decision means the Weekend With Biden administration or its successor can continue its blatant censorship of social media to make sure no one can be seen or heard stepping over the official government narrative. Right now that means the Democratic Party narrative since they control the Executive branch of government. Sure, a party with standing can come back later and give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule that this kind of media censorship is unconstitutional. But it won't happen before this year's election.

OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT. For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is the public facing tool of artificial intelligence. In highly simplified terms, when given a prompt or a question, ChatGPT will scour all the publicly available information stored in the cloud to come up with a response to a prompt or an answer to a question. It's called artificial intelligence but it's really just a summary of groupthink. You may have noticed that internet searches now come up with those groupthink summaries rather than links to original sources. An unrepentant deep state cretin is now a gatekeeper on whatever gets onto the cloud, or at least what ChatGPT can draw from the cloud. You can bet that there will not be a trace of anything that contradicts the Deep State narrative. So, get ready to say goodby to anything approaching objectivity when you do an internet search.

We're back to the era of Walter Cronkite when it comes to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And that's the way it is. I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields.

Report From the Fields

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. It has been abundantly clear for over a year that Joe Biden suffers from dementia...and that it is rapidly getting worse. It also is completely obvious that the New York Times and the Washington Post along with the major broadcast and cable TV networks have been purposely running cover for Biden's senility, calling it all right wing propaganda. All of these media outlets are mouthpieces for the self-appointed elites who control the Federal government's Executive branch and the majority of the Legislative branch.

But, government controlled media cannot hide everything. There are still enough independent and financial media outlets with cameras and mikes. They recorded enough Joe Biden faux pas to convince me over a year ago that the odds were that Joe Biden would not be the Democratic candidate for President this year. The debate proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Joe Biden's dementia is getting really obvious. Democratic Party kingmakers are now discussing multiple scenarios to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. All those government mouthpiece media outlets mentioned above are dutifully calling for Biden to withdraw from the race.

Biden's loss of the debate is not a result of his command of the issues. Both Trump and Biden lied incessantly about the cause and importance of federal deficits, about taxes, about immigration and border control, about the war in Ukraine, about the trespassing by Trump supporters of the Halls of Congress on January 6 and about each other's crimes. Biden lost the debate because TV is a visual medium. And as Marshall McLuhan explained in The Media is the Message, in TV video is what counts. We saw an hour and a half video of Biden unable to finish sentences, staring blankly into space while Trump was talking, stuttering and otherwise making himself look, well, demented. That image won't go away in the minds of voters no matter how much the media tries to explain it or turn the focus back on Trump. Trump, on the other hand, told his usual lies with conviction and wit. He was a much more convincing liar.

It's easy to see why both Democrats and Republicans conspired to keep all other candidates off the stage. The well-spoken, photogenic and 38 year old young Libertarian Chase Oliver would have made mince meat out of both Trump and Biden. Even the one-note-symphony vaccine hater, RFK would have appeared to be a lot more reasonable than the octogenarian clowns the Democrats and Republicans have presented us with.

Unfortunately, the names being floated by the Democrats to replace Biden, Gavin Newsome, Kamala Harris and even Hillary Clinton are just as bad and in some ways worse on policy than Biden.

That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.

My comments today owe 100% credit to Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Research. He is one of the most astute analysts of the intersection of politics and the economy writing today. As a result, his work is widely censored. He is the painstaking researcher who pieced together a credible theory of why then-President Trump did a 180 in the early days of the pandemic, pivoting from it's just the flu to lockdowns, masking and elevating Fauci to rock star health guru.

As part of that research he has come up with a very incisive way of describing how government and big business actually work. We've all heard the phrase "deep state". It's a term that is alternately ridiculed as conspiracy by legacy media and then described as a very good thing by the New York Times. Tucker goes deeper in his analysis and defines terms better than I have seen anywhere else.

He defines the deep state as the intelligence and security agencies that coordinate closely with law enforcement agencies. They operate largely without media scrutiny. Included would be the CIA, DHS, FBI, NSA, CISA, NSC and more than a dozen others along with their government funded foundations, think tanks and private sector cutouts. Deep means clandestine and that's the way they operate.

The middle state is otherwise known as the administrative state. Over 400 different civilian letter agencies with 2 million+ employees who, because of civil service protection and union rules, cannot be fired. The infamous Dr. Fauci is a prime example. The President can appoint a few hundred agency heads but the actual institutional knowledge and power resides with the career bureaucrats who mostly do whatever they want...or nothing at all. The political appointees are here today, gone tomorrow. The permanent bureaucrats do what they want and barely pay attention to their politically appointed "bosses".

Tucker goes on to describe what he calls the shallow state. This is where the turnstyle between big government and big business becomes the most obvious. The word state is effectively expanded to include businesses operating at the pleasure of the state, whether on government contracts, the use of regulations to stymie their competitors or using the threat of regulatory extortion to tell them that they must do whatever their government masters want them to do if they want to stay in business. The term turnstyle refers to high ranking employees in regulated industries moving fluidly from their business to the agency regulating their business and then back again.

Government contractors are most obvious in the defense sector, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics, etc.The FDA keeps pharmaceutical companies in lockstep, Moderna, Pfizer, Eli Lilly etc. Pharma's gigantic advertising budgets make sure legacy media never blows the whistle on them, witness the rapid FDA approval of COVID vaccines which were not as effective as claimed and had serious side effects. Also they were not actual vaccines but gene modification treatments.

Many other large companies that don't come to mind as government contractors, in fact, are. Amazon Web Services has upwards of $20 billion in contracts with the NSA, the U.S. Navy and is the host of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract. Their product search algorithms disfavor government disapproved products and services, The dairy lobby works with the U.S.Department of Agriculture to prevent competition from raw milk producers. The government mouthpiece New York Times chimes in calling raw milk a right wing hobby horse when anyone with any sense of history can tell you that consuming raw milk is a lefty thing.Even family doctors were paid bounties for pushing the COVID vaccine. Microsoft has upwards of $32 billion in defense contracts. Its LinkedIn division helped push lockdowns. Academia, which directly or indirectly receives most of its funding from the government , enthusiastically pushed lockdowns to the educational detriment of at least two classes of students.

And, of course, the whole monetary system is used to levy what is effectively a 2% sales tax on everyone while playing favorites with its too big to fail financial institutions.

Whether it's the deep state, the middle state or the shallow state, we're all in thrall to the state. And it's not a good thing; Sooner or later, in the latter stages of empire, it ends in collapse. We may be getting closer than you might think. That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.