Month: June 2022

Liberty Township Trustees Pass Resolution NO 2022-062: Taking leadership to preserve constitutional guidance based on what we learned from Covid

It’s good to talk about positive stories and the excellent work by the Liberty Township Trustees, Tom Ferrell, Steve Schramm, and Todd Minniear, to pass Resolution NO. 2022-062 (the Reaffirming Our Commitment to Constitutional Principles) on June 7th, 2022. It was something unique and memorable. It was good to see government on the local level taking proactive action that was meaningful. And as I pointed out in speaking in favor of it, after Covid and the many government failures in reaction to it, the investment world needed something to reassure everyone that should something as disastrous as Covid ever happen again, there was a plan to deal with it. We, at this point, have to plan for some form of that eventuality in the political world we live in, that at the very least, local government will work on behalf of the people of their community to at least ask constitutionally based questions on the merits and legality. It was a horrible circumstance that all our laws and regulations were turned away from our systems of elections and were turned entirely over to health officials in Ohio and Butler County, which were unconstitutional in many tragic ways. So it took a considerable amount of leadership from the Liberty Township Trustees to take a proactive measure to reassure the public that local government was still in charge and would be in the future.

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At first, when this idea of talking about making Liberty Township something of a Constitutional Zone it sounded to me like a redundant message. After all, all public officials take an oath to the Constitution, both federal and state, so by saying that they were a Constitutional Township was like saying the sun was out on a sunny day at the beach. That is until I went to Liberty Center to have lunch and noticed that the playground there was still shut down after two years of Covid protocols. Many of those protocols look ridiculous in hindsight. Still, when the playground was shut down, there had been movies about pandemics and various zombie apocalypses that had satisfactorily terrified the public, which health officials exploited for global gains of political power, which is a subject that we could write books on. Those books are emerging to tell those stories of deceit and corruption. But as to kids and the playground at Liberty Center, it’s a nice place in what I consider one of the best shopping destinations in America. Parents have enjoyed taking their kids there to let them play indoors and in air conditioning. The food court is right there, so it is a nice place for the community to come and interact with each other. But after two years of Covid, it was still shut down, even as most of the rest of society had gone back to normal. As I ate my food, the lights were mostly out, many of the upstairs portions of the mall were vacant of store activity, and it looked like a pretty sad situation. 

So I called up Todd Minniear, who is one of the newest Liberty Township Trustees, and asked him what was going on with the mall. Were Covid protocols still keeping these guys from opening up their play area? As it turned out, mall management wasn’t sure how to proceed. They were waiting on someone from the government to come and tell them that it was alright to reopen. But of course, nobody was ever going to come from the government to do so, so the poor playground was left in limbo, leaving that whole upstairs portion of the mall to have very little social activity.   I couldn’t help but add up in my head how many potential investors who might want to open a store in the mall saw this sad sight and moved on. If they had seen kids playing and parents enjoying talking and eating from the food court, they might have made a few million dollars of investment into a new store at Liberty Center, which it needs. Brick and mortar stores are a challenge under great economic conditions. So under a Biden economy, that only gets trickier. After some telephone tag that went on for a few weeks, Liberty Center found it was able to reopen its play area to the public, so it’s open now. Shortly before attending the Constitutional Resolution for the next Liberty Township meeting, I had lunch there again. This time it looked like I remembered it: kids playing, parents enjoying watching them, and having a nice place to sit and have some food. The lights were on, and things looked alive again. There was some exciting new construction on the second floor, somebody had made some investments, so it was a good story. One that should have never been bad in the first place, but it would be good to see something good happening that people could now enjoy. 

For many, it is a terrifying prospect to have to go through something like Covid again. I have several copies of the state and federal constitutions that I refer to often, and by reading them, there is no reason to be concerned. I felt that way during the entire Covid shutdowns in Ohio and across the nation; every case that was put before the courts challenging the health directives was losing. We should never have done half the things that were done in reaction to Covid. The real science shows that there were medicines available at the time that could have easily contained it as a public menace. The problem was in the new way that we allowed health experts to gain control through an emergency, the management of our country. We had never seen something like that happen before, and it certainly wasn’t the fault of Liberty Center in following the orders that flowed down to them from the state.   But in the aftermath, no leadership from those same experts came out in public and said, “it’s safe again.” Or, “sorry, there was never really a danger; we overreacted. Sorry if we destroyed lives and cost everyone billions of dollars, trillions of dollars nationally. We’re sorry.” No, they just stayed in their offices and left everything to the rest of the world to figure out. So Liberty Center was in limbo until Todd Minniear started making phone calls and asking questions. From the mall management side of things, they would expect someone from leadership in the community to ask those questions and get the answers, which is how the playground reopened. And the story ended up being a good one. 

Resolution No. 2022-062 passed with a surprisingly large crowd clapping, and all the Trustees seemed to enjoy a positive thing for a change. After the meeting, I was able to talk to Steve Schramm and Tom Farrell, who were eager to tell me about all the things that go on behind the scenes where they fight for the Constitution and the protection of Liberty Township all the time. The trouble is that the public doesn’t see all those phone calls and questions. All they know is that Covid shut down the world once, and they needed to know that someone who represented them would be able to ask questions and challenge health directives in the future should something like that happen again. Because without that guidance, those investment dollars might just stay someplace safe and not flow into some new project. As we saw with Covid, the uncertainty of medical tyranny might just return. Only this time, the Trustees had proclaimed that they were there to help and would ensure that the rules of the Constitution would prevail in Liberty Township. Which, for many people, was a reassurance they desperately sought from somebody offering leadership after two years of scary indecision and protocols that were abruptly un-American.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Arrest of Peter Navarro is Unforgivable: Compliance to a corrupt government is not an option, Revenge is coming

I’m glad to see that Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon are pushing back against the obvious harassment they have had to endure as a result of the bogus January 6th committee in congress, especially after the arrest of Navarro at the airport in front of everyone when it was clear they meant to embarrass him to the furthermost extent they could to make an example of him. Navarro, the author of the excellent book In Trump Time and a member of the Trump White House team regarding trade policy, is a similar target as others have been, such as Roger Stone, where the government, guilty of many crimes of their own, have been seeking to destroy members of the Trump White House to send a message just like mobsters would, that they were not welcome in town, and that if they chose to play in the world, they controlled, the targets would be punished. Well, that’s not how it works in the world, especially not in America. Peter Navarro or nobody else from the Warroom podcast owes the January 6th Committee anything. The Jan. 6th Committee in congress led by Nancy Pelosi and known scandalous characters like Adam Schiff is meant to hide their complicity in election fraud, which is the entire point of why people were upset on January 6th, 2021 anyway.   To talk about anything else is simply harassment and nothing else. The purpose of the Commission and the ridiculous arrest of Peter Navarro is to show the public that the government is in control and that if you step out of line, the power of government will come down on anybody, even against someone who has “executive privilege.” 

Taking the emotion out of the situation is hard because if there’s one thing I can’t stand in the world is a bully. But this behavior indicates that the other side is losing. For those who hear stories like this and get worried, or perhaps worry that the FBI might show up outside your house too and arrest you, understand that the reason for the show of force is because they must cover up their lack of integrity and value. And when you are missing those things, whatever side you represent on a matter is soon to fall. The abuse of government power is meant to hide the lack of validity that the perpetrators actually have. They are very vulnerable to their personal ideology; in other countries where people are much more compliant than Americans, overhanded efforts like what was done to Navarro work. But that’s not going to work in America. They have gotten away with it up to this point because Americans have had a pretty good life and tend to let other people live and let live. But when you mess with their lives and freedoms and put them under some heavy-handed authority, that’s an entirely different matter. A fraction of the population puts compliance ahead of justice 100% of the time, but in the United States, those people are much less common than they are in Europe or Asia. And what the January 6th Commission assumes is that compliance with authority is the priority of most people, which is a terrible miscalculation for them. Fighting back against the tyrannical authority is what is expected, at a minimum, and Peter Navarro, in reaction to what the FBI did to him during the arrest at Reagan International Airport, is doing just that.

To set a precedent for the future, the arrest of Peter Navarro at the airport, rather than at his home as he lives right next to the FBI building in D.C., and strip searching him, putting him in leg irons, in solitary confinement, and using John Hinkley’s cell to do it all—the attempted assassin of Ronald Reagan—was a panicked overreaction to the political conditions of the future. To punch the MAGA movement in the face the way they did only now opens the door to having much worse done to them in the future. The Trump administration tried to work with opposition forces to build more of a team environment, but the SWAMP creatures of D.C. wanted nothing to do with him. Instead, they sought to destroy the Trump presidency by throwing everything they had at him and his staff, Navarro being one of them. And now they are starting to panic because it’s evident that Trump won the 2020 election, the election fraud is being exposed, people do not like Joe Biden, even nonpolitical people, and the fear that Trump will be back is a real terror to these corrupt people. So, they should be worried because they know what they have done. But going so far over the top and arresting Navarro the way they did, knowing that they are only making the other side angrier, looks like a suicide plot more than a harassment effort. But to analyze their situation, they don’t understand how to do anything else but harass people. There is no second strategy. They have top-heavy force and nothing else. That’s the real indicator of their true position.

Any fantasies that the members of the January 6th Commission and their Beltway supporters had about China-style authority control over the population are out of the window. That kind of behavior is not going to work in America. Americans gave those authority figures the benefit of the doubt so long as they stayed out of their lives. But the genuine fear about the January 6th Commission is that people were mad that day; they were angry at election fraud and having their President taken from them. And by arresting Peter Navarro, for no reason at all, only to show they could, they have only ignited more anger. Compliance is not on the minds of these angry people. Everyone has learned some hard lessons over the last several years, as the relationships of many politicians with China have become more commonly known. We saw what the political class wanted to do as authority figures during Covid, which was an artificial pandemic that they are still holding on to; Americans aren’t going to sit around and be pushed by bullies. There will be payback for all this, and as it happens, the aggressors will only have themselves to blame. The election fraud that the January 6th Commission was meant to hide unleashed an anger that, at the time, only a few felt comfortable publically displaying. That anger is real, and even grandma living alone in her house with a shotgun and an old blind dog, is feeling it. They want revenge against this out-of-control government, and they will elect President Trump again to get it. People are counting the days until they can cast a vote against this tyranny, and if that vote is taken too, well, then January 6th will look like kids playing on the playground. The government is not in charge of the people in America. Just because people have been friendly to the government up to this point, it is because they didn’t believe that the government was as corrupt as it obviously is. But now everyone knows better, and the arrest of Peter Navarro only confirms what many have long suspected. And they aren’t going to just sit back and take it. They will fight back, and the other side won’t like the results. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Covid Deaths Were Part of the Strategy: An evil so vast that many can’t comprehend it

The difficult thing is to consider the vast level of evil we are dealing with here, to admit to ourselves that the Administrative State, for lack of a better collective term for the mass behavior, is vastly evil in incomprehensive ways and that they purposely have used that audacity to murder people on a global scale. Listening to Dr. Harvey Risch on the Warroom with Steve Bannon, it was the first time a person from the academic side of the discussion admitted in the open something I have been talking about since the beginning. But coming from him, it was shocking.   We weren’t talking about radical conspiracy theorists here; this was one of their own, from the academic viewpoint regarding the actions of the Administrative State and its preservation as an evil entity using Covid-19 as a murder weapon, what many had been thinking about, but had yet consciously admitted it in a news flash kind of way.   This topic was hot recently because of Neomi Wolf’s book, The Bodies of Others which digs into many of the terrible deeds and motives that occurred behind the Health Department’s push to gain administrative control over virtually every person’s life in the world and to ruin those lives as they saw fit. Other books had been out, such as Dr. Peter Breggin’s book, Covid 19 – We are the Prey that had been calling attention to this detrimental problem, but there was some great levity to this interview with Dr. Risch that was the culmination of all this investigation that pointed to just one all-inclusive word, evil. 

This isn’t the kind of information that you’ll find on Fox News or NBC, for that matter. Pharmaceutical companies and their advertising dollars completely control those outlets for the news. So they haven’t covered the biggest story in the history of mankind because they can’t. They are bought and paid for by the vast amounts of money that are behind this evil push to actually kill people to fulfill some global plot of population control. The crazy lunatics of the fringe climate change movement, such as Bill Gates, obviously have no problem with the mass murder of millions of people, and they have hidden that desire behind the invented Covid-19 virus that was created through gain of function by Dr. Fauci’s people in a Chinese lab in Wuhan. The virus was released during a hot election year where the perpetual plot to overthrow President Trump was a key need of the Chinese to avoid the trade war that they were about to undergo, and they didn’t like it. That history we have talked about abundantly, and as bad as it all is, that’s not the worst of it.

According to Dr. Risch, there were discussions of preventing the public from getting access to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as a corrective action to the impending Covid-19 as early as 2019. That means that they knew what they were planning to do, much earlier than even the Event 201 in New York that year, where they actually role-played the viral outbreak, which was followed completely just a few months later in February and March of 2020. The medical community was knowingly planning the murder of many thousands of people by denying them the medicine needed to fight Covid once it was released from China because they wanted the shock and awe of the death count to get the attention of the public and change their behavior toward a more favorable climate change public position. Without the deaths, there would be no public outcry for change, so the plan to kill people as part of the decision-making process was a substantial part of their strategy. And the governments of the world played right into their hands. It’s the worst death cult that has ever been unleashed on earth, and it’s every bit as bad as the imagination can support. This explains why all the media outlets were ready to project their death meters on their broadcasts and why so many governors and health departments were all ready to go early in 2020 with the lockdown procedures and the media narrative. While most people were shocked at what was happening, many from the administrative state side of things were ready to kill people to advance their social cause as viewed from the liberal mindset.

We often point to Hitler’s behavior in Germany toward the Jews as an ultimate act of mass murder and evil. But what happened with Covid-19 was far, far worse. Every advertiser in pharma, every government who thought that by killing off people that the earth might be saved from climate change, every scientist looking for funding from Dr. Fauci who knew the plan but kept their mouths shut so not to jeopardize their funding they, all knowingly committed mass murder by giving an innocent population a virus that was made through gain of function, by our own Department of Defense and released by a communist government that wanted desperately to torpedo the Trump presidency and to drive the point home, they needed deaths to get everyone’s attention, so to serve the needs of climate change, a religion for the political left that they are as fanatic over as suicide bombers who kill people in hopes of being greeted by an orgy of virgins in the afterlife. What we just experienced on a global scale is mass insanity from the mind of murderers, and the crime is so big that no government in the world can get its mind around how to deal with the situation. And until recently, nobody could even discuss that evil without sounding like a radical conspiracy theorist. But this is no conspiracy; it’s true and getting worse by the day as we learn more and more about what really happened. As I said initially, the information is getting out, the books are being written, and the guilty parties are being exposed. So far, I think the Robert Kennedy Jr. book The Real Anthony Fauci is the most damning of all the books. But the other books mentioned here tell the story we all need to hear. But there isn’t anything more powerful than hearing from people who were in the know, like that Dr. Risch interview on the Warroom. It’s a stunning revelation that the murder of people due to Covid was pre-planned and considered acceptable. And knowing that, we have to deal with these characters with a new assumption, not that other people always intend good, even if they make vile mistakes, which had been the assumption regarding Covid-19. In a dire situation, people meant well, and mistakes cost lives. No, we are dealing with people more evil than Hitler or any other mass murderer from history. Covid was meant to kill people, and the means to save themselves were denied from a planned beginning by people who clearly had evil intent from the outset. And until we deal with that, the world will continue to be vulnerable to more vile acts even more vicious. This is evil so bad that our minds cannot grasp it, and that evil counts on our lack of ability to conceal itself in our living world, through our news media, through our politics, through our rules and regulations to prey on the innocent and consume our very souls for the maniacal and twisted plans of infamy in some Hellish plot meant to end all mankind, and nothing less.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Important Lesson of Adam Black: All crime is worth fighting against, even if its a pack of gum

Police on the scene said that when a couple of good Samaritans stepped in to stop the criminal Anthony Brown from shoplifting at the Butler County Walmart in Fairfield Township, material goods were not worth dying for. That police officer was wrong, and it sends the wrong message to the criminal elements that are out there that shoplifting and crimes, in general, are acceptable in society. Two people were shot that day, and one died. But it is because of people like Adam Black, who was moving into the community from Columbus to be with his fiancé and usher in the birth of a baby, that makes the world we all live in better. It wasn’t just keeping the criminal from stealing items from the electronics department at that Walmart that made Adam Black step in to stop Brown; it was in stopping crime with a general policy of right and wrong that had the value. I hate to see anybody lose their life, but I am glad that there are people like Adam Black in the world and that during this particular attempted theft, two people engaged the target to stop it, which is a great thing. After the shootings, Anthony Brown was picked up down the road in Middletown and put in jail with a bond that would keep him there. And just a note to the gun grabbers out there, they may be surprised to learn that Brown was violating a weapons law by possessing the firearm he used to kill with while under a disability. How about that? A criminal wasn’t following the rules. Who would have figured? 

I can understand Adam Black’s motives. It’s a shame he was killed in the act of justice he participated in, but it was worth doing. The police were wrong. It doesn’t matter if the theft was just a pack of gum, the need to stop a shoplifter is more important than the actual value of what is being stolen. The police position obviously is to play into the Black Lives Matter position of social Marxism, where they advocate the complete destruction of western civilization and have been promoting shoplifting as a form of reparations for slavery, which is absurd. But it is for that reason crime is escalating under the current Biden administration because they have a permissive attitude toward the various socialist and Marxist groups that have been fueling the deranged minds of the criminal underclass like Anthony Brown. The police, when they say such things, only feed the problem. They may think they are saving lives and cutting down on the paperwork they have to fill out over incident reports. Still, by making such statements, they are just letting many other Anthony Brown types who are hiding in the cracks of society know that if they want to steal items in Butler County, they won’t be prosecuted.   That they could expect to get away with it. And that day at Walmart, where my wife and I often shop, Brown hoped to leave with the goods without being apprehended. When security didn’t confront him, and regular people did, he wasn’t sure what to do, so he panicked and had then fled the scene. 

Watching the poor policing in San Fransisco on the news, there is no question many criminals are getting ideas. And Democrats have been advocating for this behavior. That gave Brown the notion that he could steal from a local Walmart without getting in trouble. And once word gets out that crime is ripe in Butler County, then there will be hundreds of other criminals like Brown who will copycat the criminal enterprise. So, if the police could have done the worst thing after the shooting in Butler County was to say that material items could be replaced and that nothing was worth losing a life over; they did it. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s not the value of the goods that matters; it’s what people are supposed to do in society to get those goods. You can’t send a message that theft is alright, even over some minor little thing that could be replaced with spare change in your pocket. Standing up for what’s right and wrong does matter.   A life lived by accepting bad things is not a good life. That is how we end up with pockets of social degeneration. That is why we have accepted the massive amount of violence in Chicago because we have accepted as a culture that certain levels of crime are something we can accept, just so Democrats who run that city can hide their past as slave owners by bringing down the capitalist system that ultimately freed the slaves. Once you accept one bad thing, then a parade of bad things follows. And while the police may have accepted the limits of modern woke politics and institutionalized solutions to complicated social challenges, it was quite clear to good Samaritans like Adam Black what needed to be done when he saw the theft of something in a local Walmart. He had an obligation to stop it, even if it meant the ultimate cost. I’m sure his family has mixed emotions on the matter, but I would say a life lost defending honor and justice is a life well-lived, and I’m glad Adam Black did what he did. 

And I would expect there are many Adam Blacks out there who would do the same thing today and tomorrow. Crime is not acceptable, even small amounts of it. If a criminal breaks into our cars, the value of our property is worth defending with deadly force. Theft in stores is unacceptable and should be met with law and order in every case. Criminals should not be on the streets with low bonds just because of a person’s skin color, and that the legal system is afraid of race riots. We cannot accept the premise of reparations, as the Black Lives Matters has advocated for, as punishment for slavery which conservatives were not a part of. It was America that freed the slaves, and specifically, Republicans. Blue states and cities that are most guilty of the crime in the race wars show that guilt by the way they manage their communities.

In the suburbs, we will not accept that same bad behavior. Is it right to stop a criminal over a pack of gum or minor car theft? Well, of course. It’s worth defending the process of capitalism from a lazy criminal element that wants to hide their desire not to work behind some political or social cause, which the Butler County Police were advocating for. And it was that belief that Butler County would be weak on crime that let Anthony Brown believe that he’d get away with theft at Walmart on that tragic day. But thankfully, some people stepped in to bring justice to the criminal. Of course, it shouldn’t have ended a person’s life and injured another. But a lot more was saved that day; it was the reputation of life in the suburbs. That even if the police fail, the people will step in to bring justice to the criminals, unlike what has been happening in liberal areas around the country like the cities of Chicago and San Francisco. Accepting that kind of bad behavior isn’t going to work in Butler County. And it is because of good people like Adam Black that our communities stay safe. Not accepting crime in the first place is the first step, and defending law and order with life itself is well worth it. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

“The Disrupter,” Jennifer Gross, Gets an Award: Standing up for what’s right when it costs the most to do so

At the Patriot Awards at the end of May 2022, Jennifer Gross, my State Representative, received the Ignition Award. When I talk about Jennifer, I refer to her as “The Disrupter,” and she likes it. I don’t mean it in a negative way when I say it. I think she satisfies a much-needed role in Ohio politics. On the one hand, there is stoic politeness that is part of the process of writing and voting on new legislation. Bridgebuilding with others is very much a part of that process, and often, politicians find that by the time they compromise with everyone to get something done, there isn’t much left of their original idea. And during her first term as a House Rep for the 52nd District in Ohio, she has caused consternation. I wouldn’t say she’s made enemies because she is a very likable person. But she’s too independent for many people’s liking  in the Statehouse.

On the other hand, many are very critical of the political process and see all the compromises that have to go on as evil and part of doing the devil’s work. All the bridgebuilding that goes on with lobbyists and other members of the House and Senate is what many say give politics a bad name because the people they are supposed to be representing are not part of that process. From my perspective, Jennifer Gross does an excellent job threading the needle of all those forces to do what she thinks is an excellent job for all the people in her district, even if they didn’t vote for her. And she is certainly deserving of an award for going above and beyond when it counted most during 2021 and 2022. 

Things did get very hairy several times during the fall of 2021 when Joe Biden, the illegally inserted president who had no authority to do so, issued an executive order mandating that OSHA manage mandatory vaccinations and that all federal employees, anybody who touches a federal contract which is nearly impossible these days because the government sticks its nose in everyone’s business to such a large extent, would have to get mandatory vaccinations. This was a huge problem. It was detrimental for the government to insist that people put medicine in their bodies to work. It was undoubtedly a sensitive exploitation of the standard Chamber of Commerce position of employer sustainability. Employers needed to maintain their rights to regulate their own workforce and impose the things required for their business, such as proper PPE like steel-toed shoes, gloves, and safety glasses. The Biden order made it hard for Republicans to defend employee rights and still support the Chamber of Commerce’s position of employer obligations. Suddenly, the way the Covid vaccine shot was being proposed was meant to split those elements and put them in combat with each other. It was a complicated issue to navigate politically, which was part of the federal plan to take over the entire industry with ill-defined rights. It took months for the legislature in Ohio to respond correctly, and by the time they did, it was too late. The saving grace in the matter turned out to be court cases that were striking down the mandate in federal court as being what we all knew was unconstitutional from the beginning. Yet, that didn’t stop the federal government from trying. 

Before the Biden administration issued their executive orders mandating vaccine mandates, in September of 2021, Jennifer Gross sponsored H.B. 248, the Vaccine Choice and Anti-Discrimination Act in April. It was introduced to get in front of the problem, but it received a lot of pushback. Many legislators were upset by Jennifer’s approach to the bill and her unwillingness to do the kind of team building that was required to get that kind of legislation to move through the House. At that precise time, Jennifer was way in front of what was acceptable criteria for the validity of the vaccines. Many in the House leadership were not comfortable with the testimony that Jennifer was offering showing that the vaccines might be potentially dangerous. Like the election fraud issue, challenging the premise of the mandatory vaccines was a political nightmare because many wanted to believe that an answer to a major pandemic could be solved through institutionalism, not individual free will. So even Republicans were split on the matter.

Meanwhile, the tick-tock of the clock was pushing toward mandatory enforcement, and the House was stuck on how to proceed. Defend the individual person or the company where people are employed. Could people just vote with their feet and leave their companies only to jump out of the frying pan and into the pressure cooker. Either way, individuals were being imposed upon by the federal government. Jennifer’s positions, which sounded really radical at the time, turned out to be correct, which is the contents of the Robert Kenndy Jr. book, The Real Anthoney Fauci, where the danger of the vaccines, the government position on Covid, and the origins of Covid under bioweapons direction from the Department of Defense have all turned out to be true. At the time, nobody but Jennifer Gross even considered doing anything about standing up for individual people in a case of blatant government tyranny and extreme overreach.   

Jennifer can afford to be a disrupter, upset House leadership, and challenge them healthily. She has a nice husband. They are not in debt, and she has no care in the world at all to become wealthy. They are a happy couple who are not beholden to many people in the world and are free to make their own personal choices, which made Jennifer free to take a position on the vaccine mandates. When things really got heavy in those challenging moments of government overreach coming straight out of the White House, Jennifer showed what kind of person she was, and we are lucky to have her. There were a lot of lessons learned during that episode that everyone is much more prepared for going into the future. When things got really heavy, and it mattered most, Jennifer Gross was willing to disrupt a process that the Biden administration was clearly exploiting for power grabs meant to erode away the constitution through the nature of the bureaucracy of state government. And without Jennifer, there wouldn’t have been much discussion about pushback. When federal judges were thinking about what to do on this executive order ruling, there is no question that the national debate that Jennifer Gross was a part of bringing the legal questions that they had to consider to the front of the discussion. And when those judges saw how the case was shaping up, with state representatives like Jennifer Gross pushing back against vaccine validity when Ohio State University was going the other way, its clear that the value wasn’t in the legislation that would be passed in the House to become actual law, but that the debate was in constitutional validity which the judges saw would shape how history remembered the matter. And when it was most dangerous to have those opinions, Jennifer wasn’t afraid of the consequences. She did what was right, even if it cost her to do it. So in that context, Jennifer Gross, “The Disrupter,” did Ohio an excellent service. And the political world is much better off for it, and she certainly deserved the award she received at the Patriot Awards. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Review of ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ picking America over the illusions of globalism

For me, movies at the theater have always been measurements of social and political life. What films are made and what people vote on at the box office to see are often accurate predictors of what life will be three or four years away. For instance, I pointed out many of the woke problems that Hollywood would have in the pre-pandemic period where they got caught playing along with liberal politics only to nearly destroy their entire industry. As leftists, they were suckered and played to the future aims of Larry Fink and the Desecrators of Davos goals of global domination through the back door of finance. It was so bad that it has damaged the Disney Company in profound ways that will likely never recover. So it’s not enough for me to just say that the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is good, which it is. I’ve listened to all the reviews at this point, and I haven’t heard one yet that didn’t think the movie wasn’t spectacular. It was great, spectacular, wonderful, fun, and energetic; it was all kinds of great things. But there’s a bigger story here that everyone seems to miss, which is really the most critical factor. Top Gun in 2022 was noticeably, almost unapologetically, not “woke,” and that declaration was rewarded in huge ways at the box office. The film made $160 million domestically over Memorial Day weekend. It brought in an additional $139 million globally in all the other markets, giving it a roughly $300 million total in its first weekend. What does that mean? Well, people who don’t usually go to movies went to see this film, and it reveals the nature of an untapped market that Hollywood has ignored as they attempted to trade dollars for ESG scores. But this movie was tossing that measure out the window and going back to what worked, which is a significant decision.

Hey, I come from the 80s, where Hollywood used to make movies like Top Gun every week, and there was a new top 40s song released every Friday, or so it seemed. It was a rich culture where Ronald Reagan was president, and everything we saw and heard wasn’t tied to some political or social message like things are now. I had been looking forward to this new Top Gun movie since 2019 when it was supposed to come out in the summer of 2020. But that was interrupted obviously by the “pandemic,” which shut down movie theaters all across the country, and it looked for a while as if movie theaters would not survive to ever allow Top Gun the sequel to release.   Once they missed their 2020 release window, they might not have ever recovered it, so the movie has been held up for release for over two years, and a lot has changed over that period. Hollywood obviously was targeted by radical leftist globalists early in the process, going back to the 1960s. However, film executives still measured their success in dollars and cents, so that impact didn’t really hit the industry hard until Larry Fink and the gang started putting ESG scores to the film industry to secure financing for projects that would be the early formula for all corporate America after the 2008 housing bubble collapse and the start of the Obama presidency. After that, movies made a transition to hide the fact that they were pushing away domestic audiences and hiding the new numbers in global markets that were hoping to trade China for America, the way most corporations have been assuming would be the reality in every industry, from steel production to microchip manufacturing. 

Many have come to understand what I have been saying about the pandemic from the beginning, that it was always a fake crisis created by world governments in service to the Desecrators of Davos at the World Economic Forum, who wanted to push an economic change state that would give them control over the money flow of the world. Movies like Top Gun, which Paramount Pictures had already produced, were already done, and they were trying to adjust to this new market economy. They weren’t sure where their future audience would be and what kind of movies they would want to see. To appeal to the China movie market, the filmmakers had even taken off Maverick’s flight jacket the Taiwanese flag so as not to make the Chinese upset with the recognition. But fans of the movie noticed this in the previews and lashed out. So by the time the film was released, Paramount had put the flag of Taiwan back on Maverick’s jacket and pretty much threw caution to the wind. And what ended up on screen by release day in 2022 was an unapologetically American film, and it paid off big time for Paramount Studios. A bluff had been called in the world, and ironically, Paramount Studios was rejecting the premise of the World Economic Forum. They will go down in history as one of the first American companies to do so. The money for most economic activity is in the United States. Here was a studio essentially rejecting globalism and all its illusions for the gold of a domestic audience, and that is the biggest story of Top Gun: Maverick. And because of it, many other American companies are going to follow.

I call it the American Sniper market, which Clint Eastwood obviously revealed in the popular movie, the hidden Trump voters, the MAGA movement that people see on television waiting for President Trump to show up in Nebraska for a speech six hours ahead of time. Paramount Studios had obviously learned something from their popular streaming show, Yellowstone, that the actual money to be made in movies was from traditional American audiences. And they allowed Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer to make the movie that was pro-America the way they wanted. So what Top Gun: Maverick became was not just a throwback to the 1980s but an American flag-wrapped sentimental journey into the glories of American life that communicated to the world all the elements of American exceptionalism that the Desecrators of Davos wanted to destroy. And it put it on full display, which was remarkable. The last 15 minutes of the movie were quite audacious, especially to the way the world’s sensibilities are, especially in markets like London, Paris, and the Middle East. It was the kind of exceptionalism that only Americans would understand, and they certainly supported it by flocking to the movies in mass numbers to see it. And boy, was it worth it. I have not seen a better ending in film since the 1980s. Those last 15 minutes were the best since then and were quite remarkable. And it wasn’t by accident. Tom Cruise and the filmmakers knew what they were doing, and they put it all on film. Top Gun: Maverick was a special movie, not just in what ended up on the screen, but in what it says about the strength of American culture after one of the darkest periods the human race has ever experienced, a global takeover by the technocrats for world domination, starting with arts and entertainment. And Hollywood oddly chose the American people, the Trump-voting public, which was a bit of a surprise. Shockingly at the start of the movie, before the story even happened, Tom Cruise thanked the audience for coming back to the movie theater and the proclamation that they made this movie for them. And that he hoped they’d enjoy it. In other words, it was Tom Cruise asking for forgiveness on behalf of Hollywood. Which, based on the box office numbers, they were willing to do. And in that effort, we have just had a glimpse of the future, and it says many great things that are about to unfold.

Rich Hoffman

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Darbi Boddy Gets the Sam Adams Award: What people want out of school boards

It was ironic to attend the Patriot Awards at the historic 20th Century Theater in Oakley, Ohio, to see Darbi Boddy get the Sam Adams Award for constitutional preservation and outstanding patriotism while the radical elements of Lakota schools were petitioning a judge in Butler County to remove her from the Lakota school board. Two different views of the world couldn’t be further apart. Since Darbi entered her first term as a school board member at Lakota, activated due to her concern for the way things had been going in public schools, the politically left-leaning elements of the union-controlled Lakota were irate toward her very existence. And they have been pushing to have her utterly destroyed. Yet, there are lots of people happy to see Darbi Boddy fighting on their behalf, and here they were on a Saturday night during Memorial Day weekend, giving her an award for doing exactly what was making the radical elements of Lakota so angry. Darbi received her award and gave a nice little speech that clearly indicated she wasn’t about to resign from the school board, as the school administration was pushing for her to do. At the heart of the matter was a battle for who really controls public schools, elected officials or hired administrators. And the hired administrators were obviously fighting to maintain their assumption that they were in control and that the elected members of the school board were just token sentiments. So the battle lines were drawn up in Lakota schools for an issue that had emerged to be a national one most clearly expressed in the newly elected Darbi Boddy.

The teacher unions have established themselves as being in charge of all public schools. There has evolved a kind of mutual understanding that nobody questioned so long as parents had the free babysitting service of public education. A superintendent would be inserted to be a mediator between the progressive radicals of the union and the school board elected by the public. As soon as school board members were elected, they’d join the Ohio School Board Association and would learn the rules of conduct that the public would see. And the labor unions would then advocate for a more progressive political world shielded by the superintendent, who would take over the management tasks from the school board. While the school boards worried about all the rules of their endeavor, the radical progressives in the labor unions were putting the focus on pay, benefits, and whether or not there were gay rights celebrated at the school, and all references toward God and country removed from the instruction of the children. I’ve been pointing these things out for several decades, and it’s taken people a while to accept these conditions as a reality. I knew at some point there was going to be a wall that the whole thing would hit; I figured it would happen during the Trump administration. But really, it took Covid to bring it out, as mad moms saw what was really going on in the classrooms because the lockdowns broke the cycle of free babysitting that had been occurring. Parents had time to think about how serious the problem really was in public education. 

For all those who hate Darbi Boddy, I can report that there are many like her out there. Darbi is one of the best that I’ve run across who may be able to save some aspects of public education because she genuinely cares about the school and the kids in it. And their parents. But the fight to go back to what labor unions used to have, a superintendent who would run cover for all their bad conduct and continue to ask for perpetual raises regardless of performance, is over. Getting rid of Darbi Boddy won’t put that mess back together; it was always destined to hit the wall of public perception. Darbi is just the first brick in that wall they’ve come in contact with. Like bell-bottoms and disco attire were come-and-go fashions from the 70s, this period of union control of public schools will be viewed as archaic and embarrassing in hindsight. The future of public education is not in the union’s control of them. Like all institutions that labor unions have controlled, they have driven them out of business because they insist on the organization’s management control. But they do not make management decisions; they make emotional ones, so their efforts fail everywhere they are tried, especially in public education. To hide their failure, they use the superintendent to hide their incompetence behind high wages and get the school boards to chase their tails through rules and regulations—something I call “procedural camouflage.” Well, that’s no longer acceptable, and taxpayers are finally figuring out the story with public schools; they aren’t worth the money, aren’t teaching kids the right things, and are open sores in their communities for progressive politics. While the school boards try to play by the rules, the crimes of public schools are hidden behind the rules. 

That is why there was so much anger at Darbi Boddy for immediately going around the rules to get to the heart of the matter, in challenging the power structure of the superintendent and his protection over his flock of unionized teachers. Within the culture of Lakota, of course, Darbi was hated. And voters cast in her favor because they wanted her to do that particular job. They wanted her to seek media attention to get the story out so that it couldn’t be contained within the structure of institutionalism and concealed from the view of voters. And while she was being vilified at school board meetings and in the halls of the schools the way most bosses are by incompetent employees, at the Patriot Awards, Darbi was getting applause for patriotism under fire and doing what many didn’t have the guts to do, stand up to the corrosive elements of public education and dare to ask questions that nobody wanted to answer. I tend to see Darbi Boddy as the best thing that has happened to Lakota schools. Public education, in general, is undergoing major changes. The labor unions will not be able to remain in control as they have been. Soon, the public money that the schools divide up like pirates after a robbery on the high seas will go to the kids. It will only take the next Republican presidential administration with a Republican-controlled House and Senate that will take the power of the Department of Education away completely, as Ronald Reagan had promised back in the early 80s. His failure to do that has caused much of the trouble we see today, which new politicians like Darbi are coming forth to challenge. Soon, it will gain national steam, and the political capital will be present to change the entire structure. There are already 1.5 million kids who stepped away from public education because of Covid. That number is increasing due to the obvious CRT teachings and the transgender politics that so many parents find objectionable as a public policy. Public schools have done it to themselves. Lakota will be glad that they had these disputes with Darbi early in the future. Maybe they can use this conflict to get in front of the inevitable, and Lakota can find a way to be relevant in the ways of the future. Holding on to the past where the unions ran everything, and the superintendents ran cover for the unions is over. And that wasn’t the fault of Darbi Boddy. She’s doing what the voters want.   Lakota schools were the ones caught going in the wrong direction.

Rich Hoffman

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The Great H.B. 99 by Thomas Hall: Making schools safe by empowering decentralized security

It’s been in the background for a while; it’s how good legislation is done; H.B. 99 has now passed the general assembly and is headed to Governor DeWine’s desk for signature with a few minor tweaks. And with that signature, Ohio will step into a leadership role in solving the mass shooter problem in public schools. The bill itself was sponsored by Thomas Hall and has become known as the School Safety Bill and will essentially set a roughly 24-hour minimum training limit on allowing teachers and other adults to carry firearms in a public school setting allowing for first responders in the event of mass shootings which are all too frequent these days. Thomas Hall held a press conference for the event on June 2nd, 2022, once the vote had concluded in the senate the day before, to discuss the details, which started well over a year ago. It had been considered controversial by the same types of people who have left schools so vulnerable to attacks by essentially making them gun-free zones, which isn’t practical these days. While school resource officers are always preferred, we have seen that their effectiveness is not always stable, such as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where official police were unsure how to deal with the crisis. The truth of the matter is that security is best when it is decentralized, as is the case with the general practice of concealed carry. Having public schools gun-free zones or limiting security to institutionalized options have not been successful. H.B. 99 creates a decentralized option that is the key to future gun safety everywhere in America. It was the hard work of Thomas Hall in working with a lot of people in Columbus to make it a possibility. 

The best way to think about the situation is to consider a house cat that has been declawed because the owners of the cat do not want the pet to rip holes in the furniture. But then the owner finds the shedding of hair to be something they don’t want to clean up, so they put the cat outside for convenience. That might cut down on the hair inside the home, and the owner thinks they are doing something nice by still keeping the cat as a pet. But it’s the worst thing to do for the poor creature, the cat. Putting a cat outside without any defense is a death sentence for the declawed cat. Without its ability to defend itself, other more aggressive cats will pounce on the creature without mercy. It won’t take long for the declawed cat to be killed by a rival without an ability to defend itself. Sending a declawed cat outside a protected home environment is irresponsible and vicious. The cat owner first destroyed the creature’s ability to protect itself from other cats for the convenience of life in domestic bliss until it was decided that the owner could change their mind. Sending the creature outside without a means to defend itself allowed the owner to feel morally righteous without acknowledging the hostile nature of cats in general.

In 1990 Congress passed the Gun-Free Zones Act that essentially took guns out of public schools, which was equivalent to declawing a cat and putting it outside. Since that ridiculous law for public schools, gun violence has escalated to levels that nobody finds acceptable. Those who pushed for such a law continue to believe that guns should not be in schools or other government establishments and continue to pursue their efforts without reality attached. Gun-free zones have proven to be a menace to all logic by people who essentially value the furniture of public education more than the benefits of the cat under their care. Public schools have evolved into a platform for progressive institutionalism, and within that worldview, there is a desire to remove guns from society in general. That is just as ridiculous as insisting that outside cats in the world treat each other fairly and not try to kill each other over spilled milk and territory. Yet when that system fails to produce the results that liberal politics desires, a maniac and killer often is born, and the next mass shooting occurs. Thomas Hall has some experience with mass shootings; his father was a school resource officer who stopped a mass shooting in Madison schools a few years ago. So that was a case where the extra security worked in favor of the school. But to be successful, the officer must engage the target. Some paid security have shown a tendency to consider under emergency conditions that life is worth more than the paycheck and fleed the scene. It has happened too often in school shootings not to consider mitigating circumstances. 

The best measure for dealing with school shootings, just as it is witnessed in general society, is to put guns in the hands of adults, educators, and even administrators who are most incentivized to fill the need when a crisis arrives. It makes it much harder for potential shooters to block off their targets when they aren’t sure who security is; it could be anybody in the school. With that simple change in dealing with gun violence, a much safer public-school environment is established. Those against guns in public places, particularly schools, are against guns generally and have ideas that society would be better off without them. That is equivalent to the pet owner who does not regard the nature of wildlife outside the home’s safety, where other cats, raccoons, and coyotes will challenge any house cat with violence and worse at every opportunity they have. Guns and violent people are abundant in the world. Uninventing them and the nature of people who would use them to inflict unnecessary harm to others is not an option. Progressive politics simply aren’t considering the nature of violent human beings who fall through the cracks of their overly institutionalized society. They produce a lot of anxious characters, and by having gun-free zones, they leave lots of opportunities to make victims out of the innocent, all to fill an ideology of political nature that is not conducive to existence in general. H.B. 99 is a remedy to that problem and one of the first in the United States to take such a step forward. And under the current language that the legislature has shaped, Governor DeWine is poised to sign it to make it law. We are presently witnessing a complete degradation of institutionalism in general, specifically with the Biden administration’s problems publicly on all fronts. And the aggressive characters who linger in the world at the edges of sanity have been empowered to act in maniacal ways. Kids cannot be left vulnerable to these failures, so action is needed by our political order and society, in general, to bring real solutions to the matter. Teachers who are willing to take the 24 hours minimum course to carry a gun in the schools and be first responders to the next mass shooting are those most inspired to use those skills in a crisis situation. To be part of a decentralized solution is the best way a teacher can make their classroom environment safer and make it harder for a potential aggressive personality to exploit a weakness that otherwise might provoke them to action. The surest way to inspire that potential for violence is to make the target defenseless, which is what the 1990 Gun-Free Zone Act did. Correcting that mistake is the task of our times and the efforts of great legislation produced by Thomas Hall and the Ohio legislature. 

Rich Hoffman

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Elon Musk Voting for Republicans: There is no way an intelligent person can support Democrats for anything

The sudden shock of Elon Musk saying that he is now a Republican or that he’ll vote Republican in the upcoming midterms is not a surprise. Actually, as a guy now in his 50s, he’s right on course for where many people arrive during their lives if they have reasonable intelligence. You really can’t be an intelligent person and be a Democrat. It’s impossible to reconcile intelligence with liberalism. Liberalism is a feeling not founded in logic, so anybody who has some level of intelligence will eventually figure out that liberal ideas are ridiculously stupid. Elon Musk has tried to make liberal ideas work. He was successful young and enjoyed the company of idealistic young people. He even smoked pot on the Joe Rogan podcast. But he has never been good with the Biden administration. Biden wants electric cars with massive government infrastructure. Musk has built several companies that are very independent of government influence, even if he did take government subsidies to start those companies. Ultimately, Musk has learned a hard lesson in life that the government wants to run private industry and their means to do that is always through labor unions under the protection of the Department of Labor. So the Biden administration has targeted Tesla with its wrath to protect their own investment into Ford and General Motors, hoping to use high gas prices to drive consumers to buy those dumb electric cars, the fancy golf carts. Tesla was the first, but the government wants them and Elon Musk out of the way because Musk won’t allow unions to run his shops, and a hard lesson has been learned that has caused the billionaire to look to Republicans for sanity.

This path that Musk is on, a gradual conversion over to Republican thought, isn’t new. Ronald Reagan went on a similar track. So did Donald Trump. There are lots of people who used to be Democrats who get to their 40s and 50s and life and realize that Democrats are takers, looters, and every kind of parasite that you can imagine. And they grow up and away from liberalism and become more conservative as they get older. Musk has been saying that he has stayed the same but that the political spectrum has moved radically to the left, which is true to a certain extent. The political left we see today is what I have been saying for decades was always beneath the surface.

But additionally, there comes a time when you realize that doing business with Democrats is impossible unless you give over everything you own to their view of collectivism. With Musk doing so well with Tesla and SpaceX, it’s clear that he will not be able to control those companies and still continue to vote as a Democrat. The illusion that Democrats are anything but professional looters in the world comes to anybody who lives long enough to reconcile reality. You hear a lot of Democrats who become Republicans. But you don’t see a lot of Republicans turning into Democrats. When you look at an electoral map of America, there aren’t many Democrat blue areas. There are massive groups of dependents made that way due to Democrat socialism, but people generally don’t choose to penalize themselves with liberal ideas. That is another reason why Democrats are always looking for young people and illegal immigrants to keep their political base intact. Democrats need people without much life experience or understanding of the American way of life to buy into their collectivist political philosophies because they lose many of their members to Republicans, especially later in life. For Democrats, the political game is just smoke and mirrors. 

Musk’s journey was inevitable. Traditional conservatives may not want to let Musk have a seat at the table due to his beliefs in transhumanism and non-Biblical thoughts. But in the world of ideas, all conservatives have some basic concepts in common, the understanding that government doesn’t make jobs. It simply loots off what others do create. For Musk, there is no way to go to Mars and have a human race that moves into space to live. No socialist community on Mars will be successful, so when you look at things like that, the only way to fulfill Elon Musk’s dreams of going to space and living on Mars is to embrace capitalism aggressively because there is no other way to start a prosperous society or to maintain it without capitalism. All the variations of Karl Marx’s philosophy were always rooted in failure, which is to say all of the modern Democrat party and anybody in the world who calls themselves a progressive. Many people go to college and learn a liberal education. They do all the dumb liberal stuff like party too much and listen to all the wrong kinds of music. They try to dedicate their lives to altruism. But once those people start having families and those families grow up, it becomes quite apparent to most intelligent people that Democrats are the wrong way to go, and they gradually turn into Republicans. I would go so far as to say that you cannot call yourself smart and not be a Republican. It’s not a matter of team politics; it’s simple logic. A person’s journey along a political spectrum is driven by what works in the world and what doesn’t. 

The contrasts between a Trump presidency and now the Biden mess will produce many more Elon Musk types who used to walk the fence between liberals and conservatives. I never liked the murky middle because it allows the looters of the world to hide among the good and hard working. Liberals are like the water boy on a football team that wins the Super Bowl. They get to be part of a winning team without doing much work at actually producing a win. Liberals suck the life out of everything they do, and when you build great companies like Elon Musk has, who are doing great things in the world, the problem moves from cosmetic lip service to liberalism to downright hatred.   Especially when you are the first to actually make electric cars to make all the environmental climate change fanatics happy, only to be shoved out of the market because the local labor union isn’t running the management of your company, once you realize how the game is played and what Democrats actually stand for, there is no way a reasonable person could call themselves one. I watched Donald Trump go through the same basic trajectory in his life. When he was doing The Apprentice for NBC, he was much like Musk, playing on the liberal side of things. But Trump married a conservative woman who pulled him in the right direction, and over time, during his marriage, he had no choice but to move toward the Republican Party. Many people were like Trump and Musk; they might be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. However, life has a way of demanding that fiscal and social policy must be aligned; there is no way to cheat the system. You can’t behave like a liberal at a dinner party and still run great companies, or a great country, or even raise a good family. You have to be conservative to do things well in life, which means that those who want to do well must become Republicans. Elon Musk is a smart guy and, late in life, has figured out the obvious. So it’s no miracle that he’s planning to vote Republican. And behind him are a whole lot of other people too, who have come to the same conclusions. They always do.   

Rich Hoffman

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One of the Biggest Challenges in Politics: Political groupies

I’m not the guy to talk to about cooking meat on the grill or sports statistics. Small talk to me is like getting stuck in the mud, and I hate it. And every time there is a holiday where typically there is a lot of small talk, I’m miserable in those circumstances. Normal stuff is the most boring kind of stuff to how I think about things. I appreciate it for the “life stuff” that it is, but I personally don’t like doing it.   What I do like talking about is how to save the world. If it’s a big all-encompassing topic, well, then I do like to talk about it. And because of that trait, I tend to know many people who are trying to save the world from their own particular view of it. That puts me in contact with many people who spend their time in leadership positions, especially in politics. As people who know me most understand, I have very specific rules for leadership that I apply to the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week for everything. There isn’t a minute in any day where I’m not thinking about leadership and how it can be used to make the world a better place, professionally, politically, or privately. Each week I speak to many hundreds of people, all of them in some leadership role. And there is a particular problem that they all have that never really gets talked about, no matter if the position is a political one or a professional capacity. The issues are always the same. I call their specific problem the “political groupies” that often loom in the background and seek to live through a leader because, for whatever reasons, they don’t feel comfortable in those roles themselves. Still, they want the prestige of such roles for lots of personal reasons. 

One of the hardest things for a politician to do is make that transition from an ordinary person to a public persona. To move from campaign mode into an actual leadership role without tossing away all the promises that were made to the public. Many political figures assume that they are two different things and that what goes on in campaigns isn’t practical for the actual leadership once the work begins. They end up split in many ways between campaign mode, which includes fundraising, and the business of consensus building to get votes. What ends up giving politicians a bad name is when they find that transition impossible to negotiate.

On the one hand, they have to put on a show for their donors, the people who actually go to the polls to vote, and the daily grind of whatever job they are doing. It reminds me a lot of a rock band where the sexy stuff is on stage where all the action happens, but most of the time, the business of writing music, getting good at performing on stage, and life between the gigs can be monotonous. Rock bands that are most famous often turn to drugs and other forms of personal abuse to reconcile their emotional swings. Politics is a lot of the same kind of challenge, but it usually doesn’t get viewed that way, which maybe it should. Building up the brand of a public persona is part of political life. And not losing yourself in that role is very difficult for most people. At best, it’s hard. Especially when there are people who come along with the political figures, and they help with the campaigns, they put out yard signs, donate money, and work behind the scenes in ways that may be helpful, but the emotional aspects of those friendships are often like an anchor to the public official. Anchors are great if you want to stand still in the middle of the ocean. But they aren’t so good if you need to move fast and dynamically react to the world. 

In all forms of leadership, I have a policy of hands-off. I will seek out leaders, but once they are in a position to lead, I give them full autonomy. The worst thing that could be done to such people is to undermine them with micromanagement. They need to think for themselves. For instance, out of those hundreds of people who I speak to every week, I do not give them my opinion on what I think they should or should not be doing. I will offer advice if they want it, but part of the reason you want to help put leaders in place is so they can lead. And micromanaging is not leading. Micromanaging is trying to live through other people because there is something in the micromanager that wants the glory of leadership without the responsibility of actually doing it. I call those types of people political groupies. They are like the groupies that you find in rock bands; they like to tell people in the audience that they are with the band, that they know what song they will play next, and in that way, they might get to be famous too, without the burden of actually being on stage and the pressure that comes with it. Many political figures have to learn that interacting with people in the audience is different. They don’t want someone who will respond to social media; they expect some representation of the brand that was created during the campaign to represent their interests at all times and having too personal of a relationship with the world violates the unsaid aspects of leadership that are so important. Being too accessible destroys the illusions of leadership that most people want to have. And what the groupies often do that is unintentional is that they act as a bridge between the theatrical role of the leadership position and the normal meat grilling audience who are always looking for leadership in everything they do in life. 

I personally like to help leadership birth its way into existence through people. If there are doctors out there who want to deliver babies into the world, I would best see myself who is the doctor who delivers leadership. But once they are born, I do not make it my mission to tell those lives how to live. To tell them how to be leaders. To do so is to erode away the validity of their own existence and rob them of the joys that do come from leadership. Often it’s not the various lobbyists who end up causing so much corruption among political figures; it’s the friends and tag-alongs who come with a candidate who holds back the fruits of leadership most because its impossible to take them on the complete journey, especially when it comes to building up the personal brand of the leader and maintaining that brand through all public interactions. It’s a balancing act that doesn’t get a lot of attention under any psychological scrutiny, but it is one of the most common frustrations that occur in political leadership roles. It’s a manageable condition, and there are ways that everyone can come away as part of the success story. And it’s worth doing when it all comes together. But it isn’t easy by a long shot. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business