Month: December 2021

Liz Cheney and Establishment Types at Fox News Have No Idea What’s Going On: Remember the Know-Nothings because they knew a lot

Know about the Know-Nothings

Alright, we’ve played patty cake enough.  For all the global insurgents, the George Soros types, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerbucks, and many many others, you have to understand history, which they obviously don’t.  After listening to Liz Cheney scratch, a chalkboard with her wretched voice reading the texts from Fox News hosts over what happened on January 6th, 2021, all I can say to everyone is to remember the riots of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s and 1850s.  None of this is new.  People are willing to put up with a certain amount of corruption and government nonsense so long as they have money in their pockets and can ignore government in their lives as much as possible.  But when you shut down an economy over Covid and rob them of their opportunities at an election, because of the massive cheating that took place with Covid providing Zuckerbucks and big tech with the ability to tamper with our election of 2020, people are going to be mad when they can’t escape the useless nature of government.  I see nothing wrong with January 6th, and I’ve said that from the beginning.  People expressed themselves after a lot of frustration, and they had a right to do it.  People see what’s going on.  They know what is behind the January 6th commission. It’s essentially Joe Biden and government in general saying, “I don’t have the votes for Build Back Better, 50% of the country thinks I’m doing a bad job, and all these damn states won’t stop investigating the election fraud that put me in office with a minority of the voting population. Please give me a distraction! Give me Omicron! Oh, and we have to cover up that Dr. Fauci, who is on my staff, helped develop the bioweapon with our enemy, China, who also has trash on my son selling access to my offices. They released the virus to get rid of Trump. And now the public thinks I sexually molested my daughter, and the ice cream after didn’t make the problem disappear. That’s what the January 6th commission is, to cover all that up in the news cycles, and it’s out of touch with reality and history.

News flash to the losers who think Tragedy and Hope is some great work of future philosophy, who believe that Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward was a future people would put up with. America will never accept a centralized authority running their lives.  What happened on January 6th is just a silly thing compared to what will happen in the future if the government continues to impose itself into the lives of people the way they have been trying to do since Trump left office.  People know the government is corrupt, and they are willing to waste a certain amount of money on it to make it disappear.  When government oversteps that comfort zone, as they have essentially since 2016, people will be unhappy about it.  And if the government gets in their way, the government will get its ass kicked.  Humans have been running from government imposition for thousands and thousands of years, and they are not going just to say, “Hey, let’s give up our freedoms and adopt communism.” It’s not going to happen.  It may have occurred in cultures where people did not expect freedom where they had been living under tyranny for many hundreds if not thousands of years.  But people who came to America to get away from Europe, or some other corner of the world and all their problems will not fall in line with some big global New World Order.  I don’t care if it was predicted in the Bible.  I don’t care if the wealthiest people in the world want it.  I don’t care if the United Nations has planned all this for most of a century.  People have a comfort zone about tyranny, and our current government has exceeded that, meaning that people will lash out when enforcement becomes a mandate.

The Know-Nothing Party literally came about as a secret society of conservatives forming out of the Whig Party.  While Democrats were fighting to keep their slaves in the South, conservatives were trying to figure out how to have a society that would honor the constitution of the founding of America.  Abraham Lincoln would obviously be the most successful in building the Republican Party over time.  But the Known Nothings, they would tell people when asked about their Party, “I Know Nothing.” Because they were very skeptical of more Europeans settling America and bringing with them the garbage of European ideas, they were anti-immigrant, especially regarding the Catholic Church because they thought people might be more loyal to the church than to the American Constitution.  In hindsight, there is a lot of intelligence in that.  Being all-inclusive as Americans into every idea out there probably hasn’t been a good thing.  People need to fight for what they believe and to maintain their freedom.  But throughout history, people have shown that so long as they had money in their pockets, freedoms to make a decent life for their families, they would put up with differences in others to a certain point.  When things did get hot, such as they did with the riots of the Know-Nothings, which were far more severe than anything that happened on January 6th, 2021, the conflict would boil over, and people would fight it out.  The Civil War is a good example of this.  But this idea that all people will be thrown under some umbrella of centralized control is just preposterous, and those who used Covid to invoke election fraud in the 2020 election were out of their minds. People have a right to be angry about it.  A little of that anger was expressed on January 6th, and it will not go away. 

When Liz Cheney read off the names of Sean Hannity texts from that January 6th event, along with Brian Kilmeade and Laura Ingrahm pleading with Mark Meadows to get Trump to speak to his “followers” not to undo four good years of the America First agenda, they were all speaking from a perspective that was not relevant to the circumstances.  The Fox News hosts just showed that they didn’t understand the Trump presidency at all.  Trump was not a leader.  He was a representative of the people who voted for him.  And we voted for him not to play these kinds of stupid games that obviously the Fox News hosts were wholly committed to.  We don’t care what the optics look like on television. We’re not on television and could care less.  We don’t want the government sticking its noses in our business.  We don’t wish to have a centralized authority.  We don’t want leaders.  We want to be free of all that, and the government took away Trump from us through many methods.   And people were upset about it.  And they are angrier now than they were then.   The only difference is that the anger has become much more passive-aggressive than direct.  People now won’t express it publically because they’ve seen how the government will react.  So they have gone underground where the government will never have control again, ever.  The central planners have lost their merit forever, and no amount of theater from the January 6th commission will make that problem disappear.  It will just get worse.  And that is what everyone is missing in this case, especially old establishment losers like Liz Cheney.  America is never going back to those days of the Bush administration and a commitment to the New World Order.  Americans have been fleeing that world order from the beginning of time, and if governments want to fight, well, then we’ll fight.  But catering to centralized authority is not going to happen.  It has never happened, really, and that is a lesson obviously Liz Cheney and the rest of the establishment are going to have to learn the hard way. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Tornados of Mayfield, Kentucky: Government using tragedy to grab more power for themselves

The Government Power Grab after the Tornados of Kentucky

It’s more than worth it after the media tried to portray Rand Paul negatively after asking for tornado disaster relief for his state to tackle a usually obscure issue of government interference.  Paul has a history of speaking out against every little bailout, but I understand Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell’s problem in Kentucky.  In many ways, it’s the only thing they can do now that the government has embedded itself into people’s lives the way they have.  They really have no choice.  Saying no to federal money would be like denying people surgery after they’ve lost a leg.  The only option but to bleed to death really isn’t practical. This topic deserves some analysis for the many evils that come after the tornados ruined the lives of many thousands of people in Western Kentucky, an area I know very well.

In some cases, there was a tornado on the ground for over 200 miles, so the level of destruction was enormous, even to the point where Rand Paul had to put his differences aside and ask for federal money when he clearly, otherwise wouldn’t.  There is something else at work here that is much more sinister than the tornados themselves.  In a drool of excitement, the media revealed it, and it’s something we must all contend with while dealing with these issues in the future.  The media and their partners in government ultimately want a universal wage to pay people and control them totally. To get there, they have an anti-work attitude about everything hoping to rob people of their joy of work so that the universal wage can become possible.  Where people would just accept the government check, accept what role the government gives them in a heavily managed economy, and lower their standard of living to such an extent that the government could justifiably become everybody’s parents from the perspective of a panel of experts who themselves are nothing but lazy slugs looking for a government check. 

The instant target was a candle factory in Mayfield, where reports were that the management there ordered workers to continue working even during the tornado sirens.  The communist governor Andy Beshear has stuck his nose into the situation to promise an investigation.  The media and government both quickly jumped into an anti-work sentiment indicating that safety is always first, no matter what.  Now, I have a long history with this kind of thing, and honestly, I would have kept working.  When there is something to be done, nothing comes between me or it.  However, the rules say that you are responsible for their safety if you employ people, so I would have let the employees seek shelter or even gone home.  If it had been me in charge that night at the candle factory, I would have been tracking the storm on my phone, and when the red part of the cell hit our area and moved on, I would have then had everyone return to their jobs.  The whole tornado drill would have lasted about 15 minutes.  The employees could have worked a little overtime to compensate for the lost time.  But, I can see why the management would have been skeptical of the storms and the weather reports.  Usually, the news is wrong about these kinds of things, just as they have been over Covid.  So when the media cries wolf too many times, people just stop listening.  Tornados in December are pretty rare, and I can see how management would have thought it a safe bet to ignore the news and keep working.  After all, some things needed to be done, and just because the media says something, it suddenly doesn’t make everyone who hears it culpable.  You see, that is the little secret that is really behind all this.  The media wants to do the bidding of the government and claim powers it doesn’t have, such as telling people when it’s safe to work and when it isn’t.  And they use every little tragedy that might come along to gain that power little by little.  So the management of companies that did not run for their lives when the media reported a tornado warning is under attack not just for not believing the news or ignoring the information, but in putting work and the need of it over all else.

I’ve ridden bicycles in tornados, I’ve worked through serious tragedies, I’ve steamrolled through every kind of problem imaginable.  There have been times when my wife and I only had one car, and I’d ride a motorcycle through snowstorms to get to work.  I am one of those never-call-off types.  Work is always the most important thing to me, to hell with what the rest of the world thinks.  And yes, I have been in charge of many workers under dangerous conditions, and everyone has always gone home without harm to their families at the end of their shifts.  People might get angry with me, but so what.  If there is work to do, that is always the highest priority, end of the story.  The media and government have been trying over a long period to gain control of work through socialism, regulation, emergency powers such as they did with Covid, and to throttle productivity into something they control.  Every time there is a tragedy like these tornados in Kentucky or a hurricane in the south, the government can’t wait to pass out confiscated wealth to the victims so that they can then set new rules against the qualification of money because they have become so litigious that all human resource departments are now slaves to every little government whim.    And in that way, Rand Paul had no choice but to take money from the federal government to help the victims.  Because that good ol’ fashioned “can-do” spirit that is quite well-known in regions like Western Kentucky is destroyed under the liability of making the wrong decision according to the government.  And nobody wants to take that chance. 

The government stuck its nose in our economy over Covid, and we have never recovered.  That is why fast food lines are taking too long, shipping is stuck in ports, and planes are canceling flights.  The government creates a liability to alter behavior and, thus, to tamper with the enthusiasm to be productive.  Most of the time, the media gets tornado warnings wrong, and even though that candle factory was pressed to fulfill orders during a holiday season, and the Amazon plant there was trying to stay on top of things, tornado or not, everyone would have gone home except for this extraordinary situation of a perfect December storm.  Without question, it was wrong not to let workers seek shelter, and people did die.  But, the government doesn’t really care about those deaths; what they want out of this tragedy is more control.  The management had the liability to follow the storm and to listen to what the “experts” said.  And because they put productivity over safety, according to the government, they are now accountable for what nature did to them.  And companies all across the country are watching and taking note.  When people wonder how companies become so “woke,” this is how.  They overreact to every government action because it’s really the only way they can stay in business.  And when compliance to the government becomes more important than the productivity of industrious effort, you have an economy that is moving more to the static. You are putting up with government interference that is far worse than the death of a freakish storm.  You have tyranny that is disguised behind safety and a government that looks to eat all innocent people in its perpetual desire to grow and dominate our lives from behind a desk of bureaucracy and wants to rule us all without the risk of a physical, risky takeover.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Gavin Newsom is Wrong In California: Guns are Constitutionally protected, abortion is not

Abortion is Murder, Gun Rights is about Protecting LIfe

The best thing about the last few years in America has been that people have read and understood the Constitution more than ever.  I remember well that our local Tea Party used to have Saturday classes to teach the Constitution.  My son-in-law also took a lengthy class at Liberty University as an immigrant from the United Kingdom that he valued quite a lot.  Many in the world have understood the Constitution for a long time, the law of the land, and our country.  Without those laws, we don’t have a country.  Otherwise, there is merely a mob of power-hungry bureaucrats who live to tell other people what to do, like Dr. Fauci.  Little people like him gain a lot of power if there is no constitutional law, so there are apparent forces at play to erode our laws so that a bureaucratic expert class can take over.  For instance, if people had just followed the law from the outset of Covid, there wouldn’t be many of the problems we have now.  We don’t change our laws to solve emergencies, even government-made ones like Covid-19 and manufactured variants.  We use science to solve those kinds of problems, and while that occurs, we stay on target with a law-and-order society.  Those are the rules, and more people than ever understand those rules.  So, it didn’t take much for people to see through the problem quickly of California’s Gavin Newsom’s attempt to turn the world upside down to rally progressives to their increasingly losing cause.

Newsom and other progressives were upset about the trajectory of the Supreme Court, specifically a Texas law that allows for legal procedures against abortion clinics that enable abortions after six weeks.  They attempted to flip the script and apply the same methods to firearms in California.  The effort gained a lot of press from the communists, socialists, and soothsayers of public education who work in the media, but nobody seemed to understand the differences.  Many media types referred to the abortion law of Texas as an attack on a constitutionally protected right, whereas removing gun rights in any form was somehow validated.  This is where a decent understanding of the Constitution comes in handy.  Every American should understand it.  It should be taught in public schools when we are all little. It’s the essential thing you can learn, yet obviously, that has not been the case with most people in politics.  The Supreme Court made a mistake with Roe v. Wade that will be rectified after a few decades of analysis.  The trajectory of the law is that it will be revisited, and that decision that allowed for abortion will be reversed because it was never a constitutional right.

Meanwhile, gun rights are in the same mold in that their effectiveness has been eroded unjustly because they are a constitutionally protected right.  Thugs and losers posing as a mob threatening to destroy the lives of members of the court were how Roe v. Wade came about in the first place.  And if guns had played a more central role in the protests, preventing acts of violence from being threatened, then a more logical court decision would have transpired, and we wouldn’t be talking about all this now. 

The trajectory meanwhile of gun rights, despite the progressive controls we see all around us from the government, is that restoration of legal purity is underway.  In Ohio and many other places, we aren’t just talking about Concealed Carry; we are moving toward Constitutional Carry, where you don’t even have to let the police know you are armed if you get pulled over for a traffic stop.  Carrying a gun should be as common as carrying a wallet, and that’s where many of the mistakes progressives have made are taking our nation to a more pure appreciation for the Constitution in the first place.  I say it often; I have copies of The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers next to my reading chair, which I look at several times a week for pleasure.  I see them as works of philosophy emerging from western civilization resulting from centuries of trial and error.  They are incredible human achievement works, and I often remind myself of them by sifting through their pages during football games and other television programs.

Additionally, I have a copy of the Ohio Constitution that I do the same with.  These are law and order components of our society which has worked well for all people.  And I stand by them.  On the other hand, I don’t have tolerance or understanding among law enforcement or politicians who do not follow the rules.  What happened to General Flynn, Roger Stone, even Brad Parscall won’t happen at my house.  I will defend it the way the Constitution specifies.  The legal system doesn’t get to suspend my constitutional rights while they figure things out as a slow, dim-witted, bureaucratic society.  In their world, people like Dr. Fauci are king.  But in the world of the constitutionally protected, kings are rejected, and their powers are limited to some useless office position behind a desk somewhere.  They are not allowed to bring their nonsense into our lives. 

Now, regarding that California proposal, which is just air coming out of the mouth of Gavin Newsom, looking for revenge and intimidation meant to hurl at the Supreme Court if Roe v. Wade is overturned in the summer of 2022.  Gun rights are legal and constitutionally protected.  They are intended to protect us from overreaching authority figures like Gavin Newsom and Dr. Fauci.  And yes, that means that gunfights are expected and patriotic if a government goes bad and comes to spread their “badness” to constitutionally protected people.  Not desired, but neither is government abuse.  Gun rights are the last right of defense against an out-of-control government, and over the previous several years, we have seen just how bad it can get.  It’s one thing to warn about these things before people know for themselves how dangerous government can be and what we saw from the government over Covid should be enough to rattle the foundations of anybody.

Nobody wants to shoot people in self-defense.  But living under tyranny is worse.  So that is why there is a trend in states toward even fewer gun restrictions instead of more.   And this has all happened as the government is trying to bankrupt the NRA financially.  Like Trump, through the NRA, the government thought those were the forces behind gun rights, so they attacked them in ways to destroy them.  No, the NRA was just a collection of over 5 million people who supported gun rights.  They would continue to support gun rights whether or not there was an NRA.  One did not create the other.   There are no rights to apply to anti-gun advocates seeking to use the Texas abortion law to gun sales in California.  Guns are constitutionally protected.  Abortion is not and never was.  Only threats of intimidation allowed for abortion, and that portion of the law will soon be restored to constitutional observations of life.  Guns are meant to protect life, liberty, and happiness.  And abortion is about killing life.  Now that more people appreciate the Constitution, we see a restoration of its legal value.  And from my observation, that is a wonderful, new trait that I welcome tremendously. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What Freedom Means to Me: ‘The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline’

What Freedom Means

Another treasure that has come out of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is yet another wonderful book called The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline. I would say that my visit to that excellent museum in Cody, Wyoming was equivalent to discovering a massive chunk of gold and igniting a gold rush in California or South Dakota. It was a rich experience that has produced treasures that kept on giving. I saw many very wonderful things in America during 2021, but so far, my visit to that Center of the West and the books I found there have been life-changing, given the state of the world we are all experiencing. I went there looking for answers, and I found plenty. And within that book about Ned Buntline, which was an alias for the real person E. Z. C. Judson, was a passage that I thought was particularly potent. You see, Ned Buntline was at his time one of the most prolific writers in America, in the world for that matter. He influenced people like Mark Twain and later would give birth to the Republic serials, the movie career of John Wayne, create Buffalo Bill, and essentially launch modern entertainment as we know it now. But I found a passage particularly relevant to me which said by Judson, “I found that to make a living I must write trash for the masses, for he endeavors to write for the critical few, and do his genius justice, will go hungry if he has no other means of support.” I have never read a more accurate statement. 

Obviously, I write a tremendous amount of material. I always have, and it is the most frequent question I get asked. “Why do you do it,” they say. Well, I would say I do it because I love it. And also cherish my freedom to such an extent that I do not want other people involved in my doing it. When you sell writing, you bring others into the process, and I have found that I hate giving up those freedoms. In my early years, I wrote in newspapers and online periodicals, such as American Thinker and such things. I had frequent contact with Wilshire Blvd. agents in Hollywood as I was in the mode to sell screenplays to get into the movie business. I didn’t think that I was very attached to those bodies of work, but I discovered that I wouldn’t say I liked to work within the confines of editors who all had a liberal slant compared to my positions. I remember sitting in an office with an agent who wanted to represent me and listening to them tell me that I needed to tone down the violence of an award-winning screenplay that I had called The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia because it would turn people off. I thought that was nonsense, and later that year, Kill Bill came out, which was along the same lines as what I was writing, and it was very successful. It wasn’t the violence that the agent had a problem with. Instead, it was just their way of sticking their nose into my work and shaping it into something they could relate to, which happens all the time.

I’ve written books, short stories and been in contact with just about every publishing house that exists, and they all left the same bad taste in my mouth. I learned over time that the only way to write for a living was to do as Ned Buntline did, to listen to the editorial critics and focus on the masses. But to me, that felt cheap, and it made me not love the writing process. So I decided to make a living in different ways; I had many other talents, after all. Did I really need to sell my writing? Of course not, life is what you make it, and if you love what you do and don’t really care who sees it, then there is a certain freedom to it that has much more value. In these modern times where newspapers are irrelevant, there are plenty of options for the self-publisher who can write for themselves, and if a critical few enjoy the work, good for them. So that is how I came to write so much in the way that I do. That is also why there aren’t more writers out there unveiling the truth about things, because they always have editors who reel them in from the touchy stuff, like talking about Covid, election fraud, or whatever company policy the publisher has. To be free in life, you have to function without the restrictions of other people’s opinions.   They may not like what you are doing; you may find that you write for only that critical, vital few. But it’s better work, it’s more important because of its authenticity, and it feels better as a person to produce it. 

I thought this was all particularly important, at least to me, in defining freedom. We talk about it all the time. But when we say it, what do we want freedom from? In a free market system, we should all be free within reason to pursue our own way in life without some centralized government pointing us in the direction of their deficiencies. And just because you are free, there is no promise that people will like what you do. But with Ned Buntline, would he have traded authenticity for all his fame and fortune? In life, he was a crazy person with all kinds of deficiencies, many of which I would attribute to a genius that had to be snuffed out to write material for those masses to make a living. The contrast in that life was too much for him, and he lived a reckless and uninhibited, sometimes lawless life. We often see it in such people who know better than to live the confines of a life controlled by others. They turn to the bottle or reckless relationships with other people and find themselves damaged as people as a result all too often. That is the cost of a lack of freedom in people’s lives. Everyone has to figure out what freedom means to them. For me, it’s being able to do what I love without other people sticking their noses into the process. Writing is not a collaborative process where movie making is. I prefer to write what I want, let people think what they want, and do whatever happens as a result.

Meanwhile, I’m on to the next dozen topics, which is how it is with me. And I love it that way. Freedom for me is not being stuck in the mud of other people’s lives, especially the government. And I love it so much that I prefer not to sell my work to the masses but to produce it for myself and share it with whomever. But never to be stuck or shaped by the opinions of others. And in that way, I am one of the freest people on earth, and I will continue that way. So when we talk about freedom, we have to define what that is for ourselves. When I am asked why I write so much, that passage in The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline says it all. And it says much more about the freedoms we all expect as Americans when we point at a government and call it tyranny. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Brian Williams Signs Off: The smoke on the horizon that all progressives see coming

The Smoke on the Horizon

I had some very interesting thoughts about Brian Williams signing off his show on MSNBC, The 11th Hour, for the last time.  About the same time on Fox, the long-time news guy Chris Wallace was leaving for CNN, and Steven Spielberg, along with Disney, was reeling from the rejection of West Side Story that had just been released to theaters.  All kinds of mystification were transpiring at many levels of our society. Still, it all pointed back to one essential thing, something that had been brewing since the creation of America really.  Brian Williams could see, as they all could, that with Trump gone from the White House for a year, Democrats controlling all the levers of power couldn’t duplicate the success of the previous administration, and now they were folding under the pressures of their party.  The cracks were just too big.  Dr. Fauci had just been caught representing our government in creating a bioweapon, Covid-19, in a lab in partnership with China to cause a great reset in the world, and he had been caught.  IN CASE NOBODY WAS PAYING ATTENTION, Robert F. Kennedy’s book, The Real Dr. Fauci, was still the best seller on Amazon for several consecutive weeks.  That meant that millions and millions of people were getting their hands on the content to learn just what role Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci had played in a global insurrection using Covid-19 as the cover story.  And to pave the way for that plan, many Democrat types had got themselves involved in some form or another in election fraud, to steal the election from Trump and give it to their hand-picked guy, Joe Biden.  And that wasn’t working out too well.  People weren’t buying it, and institutionalists like Brian Williams have been some of the first to see the direction the world is moving in. 

To see the story clearly, I think you need to look at the history of the United States as a whole, at the time when the Whig Party broke up and split into two factions, the Republicans who would go on to become the party of Abraham Lincoln and the “Know-Nothings” which was advocated by America’s most famous novelist and sensationalists, Edward Z. C. Judson.  Why were they called the “Know-Nothings” you might ask?  Well, when people asked them about their existence, members would say, “I know nothing.” They were a secret society of the Native American Party who were very skeptical of global powers moving to America as immigrants and bringing dumb, European ideas with them.  Democrats at that time were pushing to split the country in two because they were all about slavery and wanted to preserve it.  Those forces were at work against each other for most of the 19th century. Of course, after the Civil War, many factions were guilty of serious crimes, and progressivism from Europe came in as the Know-Nothings feared always they would and steered our country into a different direction using institutions to help the pill go down.

This went on for over the next hundred years, the rise of institutionalism and the class structure that European immigrants had brought with them to America to turn a free country into just another European territory essentially.  Sigmond Freud came along as a seller of institutionalism to discuss the practices of sex.  Albert Einstein sold physics, Carl Jung sold dream analysis.  Many fields of science arrived from universities copying Europe to create archaeology, paleontology, geology, astronomy, and many other “ologies.” The European answer to the problem in America was more education that was controlled by Edward Bellamy’s fans and the book about socialism Looking Backward.  Institutions were formed to give a tapestry to society that showed sophistication and innovation, just as the novel Looking Backward did projecting society into the future of the year 2000, all in an attempt to sell the work of Karl Marx to a gullible public on their heels after the Civil War.  The political left from Europe, the come lately that the Know-Nothing Party had warned everyone about, led to the Astor House riot and several others across the country that were very violent over essentially immigration issues.  The Know-Nothings believed the Come Lately’s did not have the country’s best interests in mind, and history showed their suspicions to be correct.  Yeah, compared to those riots, the little thing that Democrats saw on January 6th, 2020 was nothing; it was kiddie pool stuff. 

Progressives from the Democrat and Republican Party hoped to mask all these issues with institutionalism which worked for a while thanks to a few World Wars and several other regional wars like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  But essentially, the worry of mid 19th century Republicans and Know-Nothings who had formed out of the former Whig Party was still very much alive.  The concerns had not abated generationally because they were human in scope.  People who came to America came for freedom, but different people had different ideas of what freedom was.  And Europe, then later, the rest of the world was all too jealous to allow such a thing to occur, and people, real people who have to make a living every day, saw that as the case.  Now being someone who reads a lot of history, I knew a lot of this, but after Joe Biden was sworn in under the most scandalous circumstances, I hit the road with my wife to see what America was really about.  I learned that much of the country is still as it was initially.  They didn’t like institutionalism and wanted to be free of it.  It had nothing to do with President Trump.  He was just the latest vehicle that they thought might give them insulation from global nosiness.  They were still very much rebels in their hearts and minds, which the institutionalists know.  They know how many people really voted for Trump, and they know how much they had to cheat to make it happen.  They know what they did with Covid, and they expected to hide it from the public.  But, the public isn’t buying it because institutionalism is not providing the cover that Democrats and other liberals expected it would, as it had in the past. 

The failure of institutionalism has been evident for a long time, but you can really see it when films like West Side Story come out, and the early reports from Disney about their Star Wars Hotel, which is falling flat on its face with woke politics.  People don’t want that garbage; they never did.  People don’t care what college celebrities like Carl Jung say about dreams or scientists say about global warming manipulating data as they have with Covid to create a political platform.  People see through this stuff, as they always have.  And they want options.  And now that progressives went all-in after over a century of planning and manipulation, they are suddenly like the teenage daughter who was full of rebellion, wanting to run off with her boyfriend, smoking, and getting tattoos to declare her independence.   Once she had her freedom, she realized that smoking ruined her skin.  The tattoos stretched out as she got fat sitting around on her third husband in 10 years while she waited for a government check to arrive in the mail so she could get groceries.  The rebellion of instituting institutionalism was long over, and now people like Brian Williams could see the smoke on the horizon headed their way.  It was the same angry Americans who had been abused and treated terribly by these classes of people looking for social insurrection.  And now the table has turned on them, and it’s only going to get worse.  I should know, I’ve seen these people up close, and they are not happy.  

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Intellectual Capital: What Ray Dalio and other billionaires miss in financial portfolios and quests for freedom

Intellectual Currency

There are many kinds of currency in our society.  We tend to focus on financial currency, and our governments emphasize that measurable standard because it’s easy and obvious.  But many currencies are instigated to measure value.  So when I criticize people like Ray Dalio for all his Chinese investments, or George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerbucks, and many others, it’s because I don’t have a lot of value for the way they measure currency.  Most of the people I know, people I associate with, are millionaires or more.  I know what they did to get the money, I don’t think of making money as being hard, and it’s easy to see the faults of their life from my perspective because I value a different kind of currency in life.  Because they think of finance as their most important measure of wealth, most people believe that a billionaire is at the top of our pecking order in society.  But I don’t think that way at all.  I think money is easy to make, and I make what I need to get through a day or a year.  I see those types of people as an evolving group, and they are not as free as I need to be in life because with all their financial entanglements come claims on their time and energy, which I find objectionable.  Making a million dollars is not hard.  Just do something that people want to pay a million dollars for, and you’ll have it.  No, there is a lot more to currency than just financial, and for me, the most significant measure of value in human scale is what I call “intellectual capital.” 

My oldest grandson has a currency that he invented that lets me know that he had a good time visiting with me.  He allows me to buckle him up in his mom’s car when he leaves. That’s his way of showing value for our visit without getting all mushy about wordy exchanges.  When a wife grants sex to a husband even though she may not feel like being poked and prodded due to the stresses of life, it’s usually to express appreciation for a nice lawn mowed, a car fixed, or a paycheck deposited into the bank account, one less thing to be stressed out about.  Sex is a kind of currency in a marriage that has value and promotes a healthy economy under the roof of a house.  Humans have many ways of generating currency and showing that they are willing to pay something to get something that everyone agrees is of value.  In the video above, I tell a little story about a very beautiful woman I know who is married, but she’s always on the lookout for male attention. She’s not really interested in men for men’s sake, but she does have a love of exotic cars.  She loves Lamborghinis.  And she has traded her womanly traits with other men who have bought her a few of them.  What her husband thinks of these cars in her driveway is a good question.  But people work the currencies of their lives in their own unique ways depending on their values.  So when it comes to politics, we must deal with all the kinds of currencies there are, not just the financial ones.  And if we could point to one thing that is the source of all corruption in politics, our value for politics is not the same as our politicians have.  They measure things in financial capital, looking for more intellectual capital from elected officials. 

So, when its said, “well, you’re not a billionaire.  Who are you to criticize Ray Dalio?  He does a lot of good in the world, gives his money to lots of charities, makes a lot of people wealthy with their stock portfolios, and is a generous man who writes books to share the wealth with others.” I say, yes, he makes a lot of money and shares it with others like some global grandparent.  But there’s more to the story, he has invested in China at the expense of America and is perpetuating a global system of government that erodes American sovereignty.  The values of that American sovereignty are not measured using financial capital but of intellectual capital.  Our right to think, do, and say what we want in our lives and to produce GDP based on our vast imaginations and intellect is what is harmed by people like Ray Dalio.  Those types of investments don’t show up well on a stock portfolio.  But they show up in mysterious ways to financial planners blind to those measures when they count the product that is made, money.  People like Ray who work strictly with financial capital often miss the ingredients that make money.  They know how to measure money once it is made.  But they don’t really understand what makes money to start with, which is intellectual capital. 

Most of my life has not been built around financial portfolios or banking relationships.  I view the making of money as a secondary thing.  What is valuable to me, and what people often are willing to pay for in regards to me, is my intellectual capital, my portfolio of ideas that have been built by a lifetime of experience in thinking outside the box.  There are talks of boycotting people like Elon Musk, an intelligent guy, but if China needs a massage, Elon must give it to them because he requires their car batteries.  Suppose some billionaire must take up climate change as a political position to keep government out of their pockets with excessive taxation. In that case, they are stuck uttering things they don’t believe so that they can stay in business.    The point of the matter is that our current political movement needs to understand that the battle is fought not in financial capital.  Governments and mobs have found ways to capture financial capital and to manipulate all of society based on their ability to steal it.  But for me, I purposely don’t have millions of dollars in the bank.  I could put millions of dollars in the bank tomorrow, and so could anybody who has developed their intellectual capital to such a degree.  But the world’s governments cannot steal what’s in my head.  They can’t steal my thoughts.  They can’t tax what I have invested in to put knowledge in my head. What’s in my mind is mine, and that is the wealthiest attribute a human can have.  Once people understand that, the power of government loses all its ability, and they will wither in front of us like dried leaves in autumn.  The purpose of this story is to express to you, dear reader, that the way to beat these oppressive forces is not to play their game of financial capital. Instead, stick with intellectual capital.  It’s all valuable, and to my experience, intellectual capital is far more beneficial.  It can make millions of dollars.  But it can also do much more, which is what real freedom looks like.  It’s not just property rights and physical inventory that give power to people.  It’s what they think, what they know, and how they apply it to wealth creation that genuinely matters.  Ray Dalio and all the other billionaires secretly know this, and they are always in service to those who can think of new ideas, which makes them inferior in every way humans measure value.  And those, my friends, are the rules of the universe.  Use them to significant effect and maintain your personal freedom accordingly.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Failures of Institutionalism: Disney’s New Star Wars Hotel Rejected by the Fans

Corporate Failure

To understand why and how liberalism is failing currently and will continue to fail, a great example of what’s to come was displayed when Disney released a preview video for their new Star Wars Hotel experience.  Fans had been waiting for over eight years for the opening of this more than a billion-dollar investment, and what Disney showed the public instantly went from ambitious hope to fandom scorn for the immense wokeness contained in the project.  I certainly wanted to give the project a chance. I would have liked to take my grandchildren and children to this hotel if it looked any good.   After all, I raised my family on Star Wars and the various stories of good and evil in such a modern storybook fashion.  But what Disney did with Star Wars and the hotel experience was full of contemporary liberalism in every way that we can see it failing, from the Biden administration to the global greenie weenies at the United Nations.  These people at Disney, who had infinite resources to spend on this hotel experience and Star Wars itself, didn’t understand what they had bought from George Lucas. They presented the ultimate failure of liberalism, which I found very interesting and relevant to our modern observations.  After a very long wait, the hotel is supposed to open in a few months, March of 2022.  The video itself looks like a child made it, and for what Star Wars means to people, everyone expected from Disney a lot more. 

Part of that billion-dollar investment went into making the Galaxy’s Edge experience at the two Disney parks in Florida and California.  My wife and I went to the one in Florida once it opened, and I thought it was magnificent for the price of a $100 admission ticket.  To see some full-scale props from the movies was worth the money.  I enjoyed myself and thought it was a great experience.  But this hotel experience was poised to be something like a “West World” experience, or Fantasy Island from the old television show where you came to Disney to realize a fantasy of living in Star Wars for a two-day affair.  And for that experience, it would cost around $6,000 to $10,000.  So naturally, what they were selling was very ambitious, and people were excited about it.  The point of releasing a preview video, which they did in mid-December 2021, was to book reservations for the rest of 2022 and into 2023.  But the video turned out to be so bad that the opposite happened.  People started canceling their reservations as soon as they saw the video because it looked and felt nothing like Star Wars.  I covered this problem years ago on a radio show with a guy who is now a Disney employee.  Way back in 2013, when this Disney Hotel was just announced, we contemplated the problem Disney would have with its anti-gun politics when Star Wars was all about guns.  How do you have fun with Star Wars without promoting “war?” When fans attended the hotel experience but couldn’t wear around their blasters, it wouldn’t feel like Star Wars, and that is precisely what the first problem was with the video promo. 

It looked like the people who developed the concept for the hotel were more in love with the movie, The Fifth Element rather than Star Wars.  The cantina singer as the feature in the video was a clear sign that the Disney creators thought Star Wars was all about funny colored aliens, space, and orchestral music.  They didn’t understand the heart and soul of what made the films so beloved in the first place. It’s the kind of corporate failure I see all the time and talk about extensively in my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  I wasn’t upset by the video, but it certainly solidified my plans for 2022.  There was no way I would spend $20-30,000 in 2022 to take my family to this Star Wars experience.  To understand their target audience at this hotel, the Disney planners would have done well to study the current video games, Battlefront, Call of Duty, and Fortnite.  With the amount of money Disney wants for the hotel, they should know that, at a minimum, they should be offering some kind of competitive laser tag experience, something that simulates pulse-pounding action with real consequences to the story.  People were not going to spend that kind of money to watch people sing and eat food.  But to be fair, the Disney philosophy had no chance out of the gate; as a woke company going after what they think is the emerging middle class of China, they are not prepared to tell Star Wars stories.  They believe that as a media company, they set society’s values instead of offering the products that society wants. It’s a fine line that they have lost, but it’s more a condition of modern liberalism in general and institutional failure on a massive scale.  Institutions are not powerful if they don’t embody what the public wants as a consumer class.  And Disney has lost its way the more corporate they have become and moved away from the foundations of Uncle Walt Disney himself.  That is the same thing that has happened to Star Wars the more they have moved away from George Lucas, who created the franchise. 

The mistake was that the modern corporate Star Wars approach had all the tools for success right in their breadbasket, but they approached it all with the wrong philosophy, which carries over to the more significant message here.  If all the values of institutionalism were as they assumed, the Star Wars Hotel would have been a slam dunk for Disney.  They had the money.  They had the best and brightest of modern college graduates.  They had a proven brand that spanned decades as a money maker.  What could go wrong?  Well, wokeism, for one.  But deeper than that, it’s the corporate approach that fails in all companies to some degree or another, whether it’s McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, or Nike.  Once a product becomes affiliated with a political movement, such as globalism, it loses its use as art. It becomes simply a tool of a detached class of people stuck in their own versions of quicksand in life.  Star Wars was always about rebellion against tyranny.

Here were the Disney people all too happy to be a compliance culture trying to make a Star Wars experience for people, complete with masks indoors in a state-run by Ron DeSantis, who has been the best against such idiocy.  Because of their political intentions toward liberalism, Disney masks their employees and guests on purpose.  They didn’t have to, but they wanted to be part of that “woke” culture they think the world will be driven by.  In the video, they put out there were no signs of masculinity, which is essential because Star Wars was always designed for boys 8-12 years of age.  Trying to create an “expanded market” with outreach to girls and people of color has only destroyed the original base of the franchise.  So now Disney has made something that nobody wants.  Their target audience for this hotel experience would have been the Comic-Con types who would spend thousands of dollars on a Star Wars experience.  But now, they have all those types of people against them as they are insulted by Disney’s approach.  And after watching all this, it looked like our nightly news and the perplexity that many global institutionalists are having when they wonder why people don’t want Build Back Better, the CDC, or to be controlled by the United Nations.  When institutionalism and the necessities of individuals are not aligned, we can see these kinds of failures everywhere.  But what’s essential about the Disney case is that it proves that no amount of money can solve the problem and make people think something they don’t.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Turning Point of the War: When conspiracies turn out to be true and we learn the Constitution and guns are all that really matter

The Turning Point in the War

I have been talking about the FEMA camps that we are now seeing happen in Australia and Austria for decades.  Of course, they call them something else in those places, but in essence, the tyrannical intentions of those governments have been unleashed over Covid, and we have seen attempts in America toward the same.  Recently, in fact, two times in the year 2021, I took my wife through Indianapolis, where the FEMA camp railyards for my sector of the country we’re supposed to transpire.  Given the world’s blueprint, it’s pretty obvious now what the plan was.  I could never figure out how our constitutional republic would ever pull off a FEMA camp imprisonment similar to what Hitler did to the Jews, but after 2021, we now see who and why they would be sent to FEMA camps.  It would be the unvaccinated, of course, and similar government disrupters such as the rioters at the January 6th event that has violated all kinds of constitutional liberties for those still imprisoned.  And in many ways, I feel like the fever is breaking, that there is a tide turning in this war that many never knew was even happening.  But it was, and it goes back a long way. The way that Australia and Austria have been behaving over Covid and how the media has shown themselves to be agents of their corporate sponsors, we now see what many thought years ago were just conspiracies. 

But I’m not all doom and gloom over these revelations; I’ve always known about them.  My problem was that I couldn’t prove it to people who were much more interested in getting their kids to soccer practice and having a block party for the Ohio State/Michigan game than in getting to the bottom of why our government would have planned FEMA camps for innocent people decades ago, only to come true now, in the early 2020s.  Then we saw the unthinkable in September of 2021 when the Biden people put out an Executive Order mandating vaccines for a virus our government created as a bioweapon in a Chinese lab, for most employers in America targeting all the people who work for them.  It was perhaps the most aggressive overreach of the federal government any of us have ever seen outside of wartime escapades. It was alarming to Americans not used to such an imposing government.  People really didn’t know what to do because they had never been challenged legally in these ways.  In the country’s history, we had never seen conspiracies like this playing out before our eyes, and it was scary stuff.  But I said then as I say now, it was always unconstitutional, and that is what sets America apart from the rest of the world, is that bit of constitutional philosophy that is so wonderfully debated in two of my favorite books ever written, The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers.  I personally prefer The Anti-Federalist Papers.  Even though I’m from Hamilton, Ohio, which is named after Alexander Hamilton, of Federalist Papers fame, I’m a hardliner for the Anti-Federalist Papers.  I admire those works in the context of history. I’ve been to the site in England of one of the Magna Cartas.  Our American Constitution wasn’t just put together yesterday; it’s the culmination of many years of human intellect which modern progressives are trying to toss out the window.  But it’s the law of our land, and so long as we stick by it and defend it from attackers by using the Second Amendment, everything will be fine.

That’s precisely what broke this sickness; as I said, it would end eventually when the legal system caught up to the crimes.  Up to this point, December 8th of 2021, the crimes of international governments were far outpacing the ability of our courts to deal with them, which was part of the strategy, a standard Cloward and Piven tactic of overwhelming a system and forcing it to collapse.  Just like blitzing the quarterback in football, that is what attackers of America have been doing to us all, including some within our own government, such as the Biden administration.  And like everywhere that Covid protocols by overreaching politicians have attempted it, a judge in Georgia put a hold on the federal portion of the Biden executive order, pretty much killing the unconstitutional mandate as soon as it was born.  That has been the case in all Covid cases, but that hold on the federal mandate was the big one, and from this point, it will establish all case law in the future.  Governments have limits on their powers on purpose, and that doesn’t go away when there is a panic; even a government-created one like coronavirus has been.  The plan was to suspend our constitutional rights with Covid and replace direct military authority with medical authority, which was always a plan by those types of people.  This is why we have a constitution that protects individual liberty from those declaring collective salvation.  Because it was always a power grab, and those who didn’t follow along would be sent to FEMA camps to enforce compliance to this new global authority.

But that’s not how it rolls in America.  It took people a few years to get their feet settled in America, but finally, people are learning about the Constitution in ways they should have always known.  Government schools that wanted to acquire power for themselves, of course, will not teach constitutional value in their classrooms.  We were crazy to think they ever would.  But people have learned through this Covid nightmare the value of limits on government which the Constitution provides.  Finally, people have the context they can relate to.  Our rights do not get put on hold because the world’s governments can’t manage a silly virus.  Their inabilities do not constitute imprisonment, sorrow, or a loss of enjoyment of life.  And that essentially is what judge R. Stan Baker granted from Georgia regarding the federal portion of the Biden Executive Order.

A president doesn’t get to make orders like some king from the White House.  Governor DeWine in Ohio tried similar stupidity during Covid, which the legislature had to take away from him.  In America, we understand we need government for the basics.  But we must put limits on the powers of government because if stupid people get to be in charge by some deficiency, then people need insulation from that stupidity.  And that has certainly been the case with Covid-19.  There is plenty of stupid to go around.  And while the stupid people sort out their errors, people need to live their lives.  And in that way, I am happy to see more people than ever understanding finally what these differences are.  It is dangerous to let a government become all-powerful and even consider that FEMA camps were a possibility.  If not for our Constitution, the government certainly would have tried to send me to one of those camps, and we would have had a lot of unnecessary loss of life in the process.  It would have been tragic.  But because of the Constitution and our ability to defend that law with gun rights behind every door, we still have a functioning country.  Not because of government, but despite it.  And that is why the great machine of America has not been turned off the way our attackers globally had wished.  And now, Americans have seen these intentions for themselves, and it looks like they are finally poised to do something about it.  It’s about time!

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Self Government Starts by Being a Good Person: Politicians are not leaders as Tucker Carlson says, they are representatives

You Need to Be a Good Person to Have a Good Government

It’s not enough to just talk about it or make names for it.  The real problem is a fundamental one of philosophy and not recognizing the basics of human nature.  What is self-government?  Then, how do you fund it, this something that nobody really understands?  For me, it’s about the difference between a republic and a democracy.  It’s about breaking the Vico Cycle.  In a republic, our politicians are our representatives, extensions of ourselves that buy us time to do other productive things in the world. At the same time, they manage the affairs of our country, states, and counties.  We do need government, but what does that mean for people.  Some, especially those who aren’t so bright and are timid about spiders and other bugs, don’t want the responsibility of self-government. They’d rather have a “leader” running things so they can complain about the results, one way or another.  For self-government to work, all individuals must be empowered to understand how to maintain a republic as opposed to democracy and to spend their lives productively, not worshipping others in the process because they fear personal responsibility.  So the key to everything past and future, including the present, is to define responsible living and how that translates into responsible government.  You can’t expect politicians to behave if the people who put them in decision-making positions truly represent the people who voted for them.  If you want a good government, you first need to be a good person. 

These are the thoughts I had while watching a local school board meeting.  I don’t mean to pick on Brad Lovell, whom I have covered in other articles about the politics of changing our school board from a liberal body of government to a more conservative one. He’s a local guy; every school district has its own version of him.  There are many people like Brad Lovell in government at all levels most of the time.  They are little power-hungry attention seekers and are easily corruptible.  Electing people like that and turning them loose, thinking they are leaders, is one of the most dangerous things society could do to itself.  To be mad at Brad for being what he is isn’t really fair.  We elected him at some point in time because we were suckered as a society into what he said he would do, which was bring big government to our community by wasting endless amounts of money in the process.  When I heard Brad talk this past week, it was just as dumb as what we hear from our own congress over budget considerations revolving around Build Back Better.  This article is not the one to talk about the communist intentions of Build Back Better.  It’s about how weak people spend money and are lazy and too unmotivated to manage money given to them as taxpayers properly. They essentially don’t understand their roles as politicians, and the people who voted for them don’t either.  Even Tucker Carlson gets it wrong all the time.   We do not elect our “leaders,” we elect our “representatives.” No politician is a god to be worshipped.  None of them can be elected and turned loose to do all the hard work while we sit around watching reality television. 

Based on my experience in life, especially in a corporate setting, I would say that half the money we spend on taxes at the federal, state, and local level could be cut in half right now.   If we use the same methods used to approve basic overtime in a corporation, we could reduce the tax burden by at least half by asking our political class basic questions.  Now, where I live, and this is not by accident.  People call me the Tax Killer for a reason.  I would say that I’m a pretty nice guy.   My family loves me.  I think people respect me tremendously.  But when I walk into a room, I would not say that people like it.  Everywhere I go, I am called the “tax killer,” which is a nickname that people who don’t like what I do have persisted to call me because I do question our taxes, especially at the local level.  I think everyone should do what I do; it is the primary responsibility of self-government to elect representatives and ask those reps to be responsible in the same way I would.   When I get mad at Brad Lovell, the local school board tax and spend liberal, it’s not that I don’t like the guy as a person. I’m sure his wife loves him and his kids, and that’s fine.  People care about him out in the world, but we are talking about management here, and being liked is not a value; it’s a lazy retreat and a shift of responsibility for those afraid of it.  I would say that I am known as the tax killer locally because I ask questions the same way I would in a business.  I don’t get invited to many Christmas parties because the goal is to get drunk and act like idiots, and I am also known as a buzz kill.  Sometimes you have to pick being liked to being right, and to my mind, being right is all that matters.  If many managers brought me the overtime needs for over 100 employees who needed to work 10 hour days and 8 hours on a Saturday, I would challenge them.  I would ask them why they weren’t getting the production they needed in an 8-hour day.  Are you short headcount?  I would then ask why Saturday was necessary because it’s a lot more expensive to operate on a weekend than during the week.  Now everyone who knows me understands that productivity always trumps comfort.  I expect people to do whatever they must do in life to be productive, even crawling through broken glass naked.  I ask people to do what I would do in life, and it’s my job to set the parameters to define success.  Most of the time, those managers retreat from their overtime requests and figure out how to get the work done without overtime.  Why? Because the overtime requests were lazy and driven by chaos, not logic. 

I could write books and books and books on this topic of self-management and the values of a republic, and over time, I just may do that.  But for now, understand that the areas I live in, the school district, the townships, and my county all are operating at a surplus, meaning they take in more money than they spend because the money they spend is challenged.  Just think of what a nice world it would be if people everywhere challenged their politicians in such a similar way.  The goal is not to elect a leader then go to sleep playing video games.  It’s also not to be liked. “Oh, here comes that person who will ask us all kinds of uncomfortable questions.” But once we manage to understand our role in a republic and not a democracy, we can begin to improve lots of things for the better.  I don’t think it’s difficult at all, but people go wrong in the world when they’d rather be liked than to be respected.  And in that basic function, so many evils in the world are conducted.  What needs to happen often doesn’t because people, including voters, would rather be loved than to be right.  It doesn’t matter if we have term limits or an R next to a name or a D.  If we elected idiots to office, then stop asking them to represent us, allowing them just to lead us, no wonder costs run out of control, and a government develops a bottomless pit attitude about taxation and its worth to society.  The way to fix it isn’t to complain; it’s to demand answers for the spending, then to watch them flail when they can’t explain it, and in that way, the conditions of our republic improve dramatically, and for a fraction of the cost. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Pioneers of Promotion: How the press became so liberal and the need to undo it

Pioneers of Promotion and the Modern Media

I’m a little old to be saying things like, “something changed my life.” Instead, it’s more like I’ve been looking for my car keys all my life, and I finally found them in the least expected place.  And you could probably tell after finishing up another great book called Pioneers of Promotion that I really enjoyed reading that fantastic book.  It’s another one that I picked up at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, this past summer, and it turned out to be a real treasure.  When I first found the book, I held it in my hand for a long time, considering whether or not it would be of any use to our modern times or if it would be just a fun history lesson.  As it turned out, it was the skeleton key I had been looking for to many of our modern problems, the evil we were all witnessing turned on its head in such destructive ways.  The book is about press agents Toby Hamilton for Barnum & Baily Circus, Moses P. Handy for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and John Burke for the Buffalo Bill Wild West show essentially all who wrote the rules for modern marketing, which hasn’t changed at all over the last hundred years.  It was strangely relevant to me as the first professional career I wanted to do growing up was as a film director.  So I have some detailed experience with the inner workings of the media, which I have used for the current freedom movement that was a tough decision for me over a decade ago.  I had many connections forming in Hollywood; I knew agents on Wilshire Blvd, but I had to become someone else to play that game, and I grew to resent those forces.  Now I understand how those forces were put in place and what they are protecting to this very day.  To say it was a fabulous book by Joe Dobbow would be a magnificent understatement. 

Even more relevant is that over those years where decisions had to be made, did I want to form my life around the unsaid rules of a career, or did I want to use my natural talents to fight for justice?  My involvement in wild west shows that impersonated micro versions of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West were central to my life.  For a few decades now, I often talk about my reset weekend at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Greenville, Ohio, where I participate in the event directly inspired by Buffalo Bill.  I have a personal friend who looks so much like Buffalo Bill Cody that they hire him each year to be their event mascot.  And I got involved in this group because one of my favorite movies was Bronco Billy by Clint Eastwood growing up.  I have been thinking about these themes for a very long time.  This lost America was at the heart of the themes I was always in love with.  I saw more of it than most because I had traditional farmer grandparents and parents who exposed me to these dying elements as a kid. But it always left me a little bit thirsty and never quite satisfied.  When I became an adult, I latched onto these old western images for clarity into a time when America was great, was the envy of the world, and was growing into an economic threat to the various aristocracies that had been jealously guarding their power in whatever little groups they resided in.  I have always loved the idea of a Buffalo Bill America, but I didn’t understand why or how relevant it could and would be for me later in life.  It’s just something I knew and, to this day, is at the core of everything I do, more than ever. 

Life moves fast, and I had been out to Hollywood pursuing that career when justice called.  I learned the games and how to play them, but ultimately it came down to me something the Ned Buntline used to say about authenticity, which I’ll talk about later.  But I didn’t want to be one more phony out there just creating images for a commercial industry.  I didn’t just want to be in a show.  I wanted to be the real deal, almost in reverse of how Buffalo Bill came to be, or the promotors who brought pulp fiction to the preservation of the Wild West, which has preserved in so many ways our modern understanding of America and prevented its complete destruction from the various elements of the world who absolutely hate it because they didn’t think of it first.  So going down that path didn’t allow me to travel the west as I had wanted and explore the things that interested me most.  It took me many years to block off the kind of time I did in 2021 to discover everything that was always right under my nose.  Looking back on this year, it was just a bit of a miracle that I was able to spend a day at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West for a day with most of my entire family, grandkids included.  We went to that region in our RV to explore Yellowstone, which we did.  But going to the rodeo there in Cody, Wyoming, then the Center of the West turned out to be like finding those car keys that I had always been looking for.  And it wasn’t just the museum, which was fantastic, but it’s the books I bought from there which were so unique and specific to problems I was always wondering about.  Pioneers of Promotion turned out to be everything I was looking for when we set out west to retouch ourselves with America after the 2020 election disappointments and get a firm understanding of what America was.

The modern villains essentially hated the Buffalo Bill Wild West. They turned the tables on what Burke, Hamilton, and Handy had done to launch the contemporary press agent concept to the world, which is at the center of all commercial enterprise to this very day, including website development.  There was a line from Pioneers of Promotion that John Burke said to critics of the Buffalo Bill Wild West show that I found tremendously appealing and relevant to my own view of the world when he lashed out, “Damn it all!  What we are doing is educating you, people!  I am not afraid to say, sir, that the Wild West symposium of equestrian ability has done more for this country than the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the life of General George Washington.  Its mission is to teach manhood and common sense.  We are not traveling to make money, sir, but only to do good.”  Those who wanted to destroy America copied the methods of these pioneers of promotion and sought to do the opposite.  To uneducate America into a conquered condition, and it’s there that we must focus on undoing the mess.  And that started with Trump, a P.T. Barnum type himself who had served as a platform to return to these American ways of thinking.  Burke and his friends from that period of the late 1800s knew what they were doing.  It was attractive to me all my life, and now it’s quite clear what the weapons have been to undo America through the same method.  And the intentions toward our own demise that much clearer.  It’s one thing always to know it, but it’s quite nice to have it all summed up in a moment of revelation that solidifies thought and inspires action in ways that just weren’t possible before knowing something firsthand. 

Rich Hoffman

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