Category: Book Review

The 4th of July is all About Defiance: It lets the world know that the government works for us, not the other way around

Without question, the 4th of July is one of my favorite holidays throughout the year. I always talk about my love of The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers; why wouldn’t I love the celebration of starting a new country built on that philosophy? Yet this year was different. In years past, there is a lot we didn’t know, perhaps suspected, about the motives of government and some of the diabolical characters that make themselves known through traces of corruption. It’s always been a problem, but now, more than ever, the hostile forces against America have been caught doing their ill will. China, specifically, and their parents in the World Economic Forum have been caught buying off politicians, attempting to change rules, such as in California, where celebrating American patriotism is under experimental regulation. We have just survived the attempts of a global takeover of the entire economy where many millions of people died from a bioweapon built by governments for the purpose of centralized control through communism in Covid-19. The compliance threat has been baked into our culture through government-run healthcare and governors who grade well under China’s spy network that ranks them according to their compliance with global communist standards. We are seeing attacks on our culture and country, unlike any other time in history, whether it’s the Revolution itself, the Civil War, the War of 1812, or the Spanish American War; this modern warning of passive-aggressive communism introduced to us through those we’ve hired to protect us, our politicians, our corporations, our media consumption is a real threat. We have just witnessed the coup by our intelligence organizations of an American president who lacked the blood of the Kennedy Assassination but was more arrogant and culturally destructive in many ways. So many were correct to wonder what we were actually celebrating on the 4th of July. But I wasn’t one of them because it’s all obvious to me.

The 4th of July is all about defiance, which ultimately, all these attempts against our culture will fail because the Chinese, the World Economic Forum terrorists, and the finance activists for progressive Luciferians of their sacred Morning Star do not understand the nature of the 4th of July, as Gavin Newsom learned by trying to regulate 4th of July celebrations in California only to see from a flyover anywhere in the state a lot of people from all political persuasions defying the mandate with personal firework shows in their back yards. Fireworks displays are not about community-organized events where everyone comes out and wastes a whole evening sitting on a blanket to watch other people blow things up. The 4th of July is about defiance. About buying illegal fireworks and lighting them off and letting the police and all authorities know that there isn’t anything they can do about it. The message is that we are a nation of laws, but only to a point. And in 2023, we are at that point. The attackers of American culture are expected to capture our nation like in a game of chess. They would capture our country and win the game if they captured our king. But in America, we have a representative government. If our king gets captured, we just find another one. We don’t work for the government. The government works for us, which is different from other places worldwide. And on the 4th of July, people buy fireworks happily to send this message to the government, which is probably one of the only things people generally agree on. That defiance is the key to American culture, and it is something we celebrate with great enthusiasm.

These global attackers, after all, had just tried to suppress Americans under stupid Covid rules, with mask mandates, with social distancing, with government-driven vaccine mandates of dangerous medicine, which has caused people great harm and has the government in trouble due to liability for its terrible decisions in breaking constitutional law for a grab for power, we would be a very different world right now if not for the American trend toward defiance. Of course, we gave the government a chance by listening to them up to a point. But once we realized how dumb everything they were doing was, people rebelled and stopped following the law with the mask mandates; they found ways to push back against the vaccine mandates and conspired to undercut the government that works for them as a natural reaction. And during that critical year of 2021 going into 2022, Americans had been tested, and they held up and destroyed the plans of Bill Gates and his World Economic Forum terrorists. And we discovered that China had been behind the release of the virus from the beginning and did so knowingly. The attack on America had been an expectation of human behavior and that if our “leaders” were captured, then Americans would fall into a line of compliance and do what they were told. But what actually happened was entirely on the opposite side of the expectation scale. Americans expect to be free, and anything that takes that option away from them, they work to undermine in their lives. There is no way to capture American culture with communist tyranny in the same way it has been done in China and elsewhere in the world, and discovering that these modern attackers have forced the globalists to hit the pause button on their diabolical plans.

I have my favorite fireworks store that my wife and I like to go to; it’s the one on the border of Indiana and Ohio in Richmond, Indiana. I enjoy the drive, we usually stop somewhere in Eaton, Ohio, for a bite to eat, and we make a nice day of our journey every year to that fireworks store where I don’t mind paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars just to blow stuff up in our driveway. I enjoy the experience of buying them, they are so happy at that fireworks store, and we usually go a few days before the 4th of July when the parking lot is full. What’s interesting about that particular Shelton’s fireworks store is that the parking lot is actually in Ohio, but the store where you actually buy the products is in Indiana. They have a line about 15 feet from the door across the whole length of the parking lot that makes it clear that after you buy the fireworks, that you are breaking the law in transporting them across state lines. Breaking the law is part of the fun and a gentle reminder to the government that they are not in charge. Ultimately the people are. They govern by our consent. But the 4th of July reminds them that they are ultimately not in charge and will never be. I never get tired of seeing all the different people there spending small fortunes just to prove that rather large point. The buying, transporting, and discharging of fireworks is not just a useless enterprise from a rich society that can afford to spend expendable income on such a destructive pastime. It’s a message of defiance that laws are followed up to the point that the people decide they are either too stupid or too corrupt to follow. And that the ultimate check on power out of control is defiance, a culture that rejects the power of their politicians even as they have now been brought under the control of foreign interests. And that makes blowing up fireworks, and buying them, one of the great treasures of any culture that I never get tired of.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

There Will Be No Gun Control in America: Biden’s speech proves that His White House is smoking crack

I’ve been on vacation and catching up on various news stories; I had heard the summary of Biden’s anti-gun speech, the one where he said at the end, “God save the queen, man.” But I hadn’t seen the original speech until recently as I’ve been catching up on the various news stories. And this anti-gun speech is worth some discussion because it brings up an assumption that the Biden administration has about its role in the world that is rather humorous. In that speech, Biden said that the government would ban assault weapons as if that were an achievable goal and that they had a right to do it. Now, of course, Biden is the representative in the White House of globalism, and naturally, for globalism and its communist platform to work, people wouldn’t be able to have guns. That is why the Democrats and some Republicans who have fallen for the temptations of globalism are so eager for gun control. Because they can’t get their centralized authority until they have control of the guns until people must turn to government for their fundamental security in life, so long as Americans are independent and armed, communism can’t work in America. They are desperately trying to apply it, but there is no enforceability if people are privately armed. So, in that regard, Biden is simply saying what the communist goals are under the influence of his Chinese owner’s demand. Before there can be a one-world communist government, guns must be removed from American society, which is no easy task. Because guns are at the core of American culture, and people have an increasing understanding of that, which is setting up for quite a standoff soon as the government tries to implement its communist agenda fully.  

It should be noted that not that long ago, as Mike Pompeo was Trump’s Secretary of State, he reported to all 50 of the governors in America that China had a scorecard for each one of them. China is watching all aspects of American life, trying to figure out how to bring us down from the inside out, and they are grading our state governors as favorable or unfavorable to their communist platform, just as they would do in their own country. And, of course, one of the key issues that China finds favorable or unfavorable is the position on gun control. We are not dealing with threats to our country in the traditional way; the Chinese do not fight war the way we have been trained to expect it. They work behind the scenes to undermine their targets, and they have been doing that to us for a long time, and we have let them do it largely because we expected our paid-off politicians to defend us. Instead, they were enjoying the honey pots and the filled bank accounts that come from creative financing at the World Economic Forum, which is the real villain working behind the scenes, propping China up to be the baddie while they implement their mechanisms of control behind the scenes. There is quite a lot of deception going on, but everyone needs to understand that the ultimate goal is a trick to convince Americans to give up their guns so that the thieves of the world can feast on our gullibility. Americans have been gullible, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s been a luxury on our part because we are a gun culture. We can afford to be nice to other countries and make hostile efforts to overthrow our country because we ultimately hold the supreme power, personal defense, and the ability to fight back against a tyrannical government.

What’s humorous about Biden’s anti-gun comments is that he assumes and believes in the power of government, the same military that has cross-dressing drag queens running it, he thinks are going to be able to go door to door to arrest and confiscate firearms under force. You can’t have it both ways, old man; you can’t defile America’s military on the world stage with a bunch of transvestites and simultaneously evoke fear of such awesome power that they wield. Showing weakness in the American military with woke policies might have made your Chinese bosses happy, but it certainly hasn’t instilled fear into Americans who might see their military turned against them by the power of government to impose martial law. That’s not going to work out too well. Biden constantly references airstrikes against political opponents who might be resolute on the Second Amendment with the same audacity that he has used his own Department of Justice to go after political rivals; meanwhile, Hunter Biden is recording himself breaking the speed limit and doing crack to show how above the law he is. And the White House has a cocaine problem; a bunch of dumb druggies run it, and we are supposed to be OK with that as a culture? No, that’s not how it works. Americans have had the comfort level to look beyond these issues because they have private ownership of guns. Without that security, it would be many times worse in the city streets than we currently see in Paris. Once Americans realize the kind of control that these communist global governments want for them, that happy talk will go away rather fast. 

There won’t be any gun control in America. The 90s assault weapons ban that Biden talks about will never happen again because we are essentially a different country now. We witnessed what this government did with vaccine mandates, Covid in general, election fraud, and how they treated a popularly elected president in Trump. Any notion that the government is the key to a safe society is gone, and gun control, or convincing people that gun control is an option at all, would require complete trust in government. And the more that government has tried to use force to impose itself on people, the worse they have made that argument for trust. It would take many decades for people to trust the government again after all we’ve seen over these last several years. And Biden’s goals for gun control are simply him reading off the playbook of the globalists who know they need it to further their plans. But Americans know that that number is growing in intensity, that guns are the backdrop to their freedoms, freedoms they have taken for granted. Freedoms they took for granted because they had guns. Florida recently became the 26th state to implement Constitutional Carry, something I thought would be a fantasy just five years ago. But people see what’s happening, and now nearly half the country knows that the key to surviving all these globalist impositions is to widen gun coverage to individual people. The power of government isn’t big enough or organized enough to do what the globalist forces want them to do in America. Because on the ground level, America is still run by Americans. Not by the central banks. Certainly not by the politicians. Not by the media.   But by, gun-wearing Americans who outnumber all the guns of the world and stand in the way of what globalism wants to achieve because of their gun ownership. And because of that ownership, we will remain free in America. Which more and more people are figuring out based on the actions of this corrupt government whenever it opens its mouth. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Communism in our Culture: What we learned from the Darbi Boddy interview

The failure on all fronts is the breakdown of the logic of communist philosophy as it has been accepted and taught to us through our public education system. This question has been asked of me many times since I did the video interview with Darbi Boddy, the Lakota school board member that the institution itself wanted to eliminate before she ever had a chance to do anything in the job. This idea that the system is in charge and not the voters is obviously a problem that was witnessed with President Trump, as the Deep State worked aggressively to get rid of Trump before he even had a chance to get into the White House. On a more local level, the same approach came at Darbi Boddy; it’s baked into the assumptions we have as a culture, one that slowly, over many years, accepted a communist view of the world as opposed to the efforts of a meritocracy—talking to her and hearing her point of view it’s easy to hear where the problem is. When she was first a school board member in those opening days, the institution aggressively sought to romance her into friendship, and the goal was then to use that friendship toward the aims of group consensus. Actually, the entire education system, as Dewey designed it, is designed to break students down into their forever social compliance roles; whether they would be the popular kids, the scrappy worker bees, or the garbage heap bottom-of-the-barrel types, public education was meant to break kids down into their social roles, and the same application would, of course, be applied to the leadership to get the same results. We weren’t teaching kids or their teacher’s exceptionalism; we were teaching sameness and class structure. The goal was class and to put people in those classes so they’d be easy to control.

After that interview with Darbi, I had a number of people call me and warn me of the terrible thing that I had done; I had given her a platform to speak from. I had allowed her to function outside of the class structure they felt was necessary for the maintenance of a public school, and it was determined that she was going to be smoked out because she had resisted the compliance culture of sameness that was expected in public education, especially on the school board level. Of course, I answered that was precisely why I ran an alternative news and opinion site because I hated communism and wanted more people like Darbi to be able to get their word out and let people see who they were, not what some communist caricature of her interpreted for the audience. It was a good interview with her, and you can know how much by how many people were upset by it. It wasn’t anything she had said, but that she had the means to say it that they were so angry with. And within that sentiment was the solution and fix to the entire problem. The weakness of communism, of course, is a society that functions on merit. When people earn their reputations and aren’t controlled by the consensus builders based on behavior, that’s when the system breaks down quickly because communists never figured it out. They simply implemented it as Karl Marx designed it, then put it out for society to follow in every way that institutions had formed in relation to the communist position. But that’s what we are dealing with. That is the goal behind globalism in general and why they expect to run the world with China-style communism as the tool.

I’ve studied this topic for a long time, including tracing the footsteps of Karl Marx and his studies in the British Museum. I had to see it for myself where the most destructive philosophy ever introduced to the human race was created. It has only been recently that communism has lost some of the stigmas that it naturally had against it in American culture because now the cat is out of the bag, and the China model is not a well-kept secret anymore. I pointed this out to everyone when Lakota schools started an exchange program to send teachers to China to learn how the communist China model would work. I was against it, and many bellyached about my comments. After all, China was our friend. I’ve openly talked about communism in our culture for my entire adult life, and the mechanism it uses is this consensus-building method that you see on every school board, every board room meeting, and every approach that involves groups of people working out common problems. You especially see it in politics, where sameness is expected. The message is that people come and go. What we need is institutional stability by taking away the peaks and valleys of performance. It was the institution that mattered more than individual input. That was the communist message to America, and by now, almost everyone involved in group activity utilizes those methods to maintain control of the institutions they serve. 

Of course, people like Darbi were elected by people who expect a more free market approach to the social management problem, which is the same for Trump as well. The public has not accepted that communism maintained through social interactions (friendships) is as big of a problem as it really is. Because they believe in America as a merit-based society, they still believe that individuals can move mountains if allowed to utilize the best and brightest ideas among them. At the same time, communism seeks to protect the institution from those pesky fluctuations of individualized input. This is why the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s were so critical and criticized by those trying to bring communism to America. The reason communism is dangerous is that we have fought several wars trying to protect ourselves from removing social interactions with individual input into a compliance structure where inputs are interchangeable and worthless. Darbi was elected to bring her individual character to the school board to represent the voters who put her there. But the school board itself, from the OSBA and down to the president, which is a person I know personally, was to get control of her. And once they realized they would never have control of Darbi, the resolve was to use the institutional protections of communism to get rid of her, with group pressure. And so many people who call themselves conservatives fell in line with the communist way of thinking. They were so far gone they could no longer see the situation objectively. And that made them hate Darbi even more because she made them realize how anti-capitalist they were in their lives. The way that communism expects to command the world through centralized authority is by controlling the expectations of what institutionalism actually does. When individuals spend their time on institutional compliance rather than the contributions of individual merit to a group debate, the power structure has shifted to centralized authority rather than merit-based input, which is the root cause of many of the world’s problems presently. It’s easy enough to fix once people realize that’s what’s going on. And in my own school district, the reaction to the Darbi Boddy interview told the story clearly for all to see, which is why she has been so good as a school board member.   We are working to get communism out of our public life, and schools are the first place to start. And to do that, we need good school boards and many more people like Darbi to bring value to managing these public assets. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

They Aren’t in Charge, We Are: Violence is the only form of communication the political left has to express themselves, because their ideas are horrendous

Here’s all anybody needs to know about the present situation around the world, the desire for radical lefties to have a one-world government and the conflict of that imposition running up against a country with over 300 million guns owned by people with really short fuses.  Unlike in the past, where a benefit of doubt would have been applied to people in government management positions, in this post-Covid world, where this push for a one-world government crossed many lines, the skepticism that traditionally has been applied to government has switched into open hostility.  There is a broken trust now loose in the world that wasn’t there before, an assumption of guilt instead of forgiveness.  We have seen what the radical left wants to do, and now in the aftermath, the Saul Alinsky book doesn’t work quite the same way because that innocence that it required to exploit in people is gone forever.  Instead, in a world where information is open, and it has to be, the truth of what the radical communists of the world always intended is exploited, and now, because we are an information-based world that rejects centralized control of that information flow, the word is out, as it has been moving for many years.  The same trajectory that put President Trump in office in 2016 is the same one that is now much further along around the world in 2023, and now they have history at their backs instead of just suspicions.  And that grim reality for the communists who want the China model in every branch of government worldwide is that the political left always only had one playbook: to use force to impose compliance.  But if that doesn’t work, which it isn’t, then what?  What happens when you have a world where people have information and weapons to defend themselves with?  Well, the Liberal World Order falls apart, which is where we find ourselves presently in history.

I said it to someone yesterday who was asking me about it.  The political left is ruthless and violent.  Their entire political platform is built around fear and compliance.  They aren’t trying to win people over to their way of thinking.  They want to destroy your options, rob you of choice, and impose on you a life they control by removing all other alternatives.  And they expect to keep you in line with sheer fear.  That is why there is only one way to deal with them, with more ruthlessness.  They don’t deserve a fair shake, a turned cheek, and a sentiment toward coexisting.   They deserve what they have been giving to the rest of the world dished back at them and then some.  Don’t feel sorry for them; they will exploit it as a weakness.  Crush them politically, socially, and financially, and smash them into dust because they deserve it.  Their intentions for the world is one that cannot be forgiven now that we know.  These communist plots have been playing in the background since the mid-1850s, not that long ago, and they have spread around the globe as communications increased and made sharing information easier.  But what kept the world safe was distance from each other, so it was a slow burn over the next century.  Yet for all the same reasons, the stupidity of communism has been exploited and shared in real-time, and people have decided they don’t want that One World Government strategy and they are looking for elected representatives who will defend them from it, which is why Trump, even with all the lawfare that has been thrown in his direction, is only getting more popular, not less.

The trick was to create the illusion that a radical few could control the many with sheer intimidation, the way cows or sheep are herded with the sound of the crack of a whip.  The communists of the world thought people were that stupid.  The people that the media calls obligingly “the elite.”  The original aristocracy has been trying to stop a revolution against their existence for thousands of years.  But those revolutions failed because it was too slow to communicate with other countries.  The American Revolution happened because of that sweet spot in the world coming closer together but was yet still too far apart for mass communication.  Now information is instantaneous, and the communists thought that would work to their advantage.  If they controlled the internet to dumb people down with pornography and trivial nonsense, then we would all be easily corralled like simple-minded animals with every bio-lab-created virus they could unleash to shove the world into a Great Reset.  But instead, that compression of information and the rate of sharing it has worked against communism, which they should have seen coming.  Their plans were always going to fail, and the acceleration of that failure becomes very clear when it is realized that they are very few trying to control the many who do have the means to fight back, and the only reason they haven’t yet is because they still assume that they have free elections where they get to pick their representatives.  However, since 2020, when election fraud was blatant, the media’s complicity in election fraud was seen by all, and we were given Joe Biden almost as a slap in the face of our republic form of government to show us that we were not in charge, the assumption was the same as it is in all communist countries where the people have been conquered, such as Brazil, Venezuela, China, Iran, Europe and many other places where the words of Karl Marx have become their social foundation. 

Yet when those same communist ideas have tried to be implemented in America, the big difference has been the expectation of a Bill of Rights, of free speech to criticize the liberal effort, and guns to stop the only method the left has to communicate their message, through force and violence.  It’s one thing to host a demonstration with a bunch of pot-filled youth on a college campus or in a town that looks bigger than it is on television.  But spreading that force out across a vast country of 300 million people is a bit more complicated.  It’s like spreading butter on toast.  You can taste the butter well if you just eat the part where you applied it, but if you spread it across the whole piece of bread, it thins out rapidly.  And this fantasy of taking over the American military and going door to door to impose some leftist orgy of martial law is preposterous.  The truth is that there are a lot more of us than them, and they now know that we know that.  And we now know that their intentions for us have been hostile, and any presumption that we had previously had about playing nice together in the sandbox is gone.  With the tools of modern society, the message of freedom is much easier to sell, especially when the message of communism has failed so spectacularly, and people have realized that it’s relatively easy to stand up to.  The communist movement doesn’t have enough butter to spread across the bread, and they aren’t recruiting more to their cause.  The only grounds they have ever made were through force and manipulating things in the background.  Now that there is no longer a background, they have been exploited and are losing ground, recruits, and their message.  The old games will not work in the future, and those who have been caught deserve the hell they will have to pay because that is the trajectory of political sentiment, which will never go back to the polite society of the past.  They aren’t in charge; we are.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why Should We Vote for Trump if He Got Suckered During His First Term: Fighting the organized crime of captured governments worldwide

I have many books that cover conspiracy theories that, before 2019, nobody would have believed. After all, who in their right mind would have believed that the government, “our government,” was involved in the creation of a bioweapon that ended up killing many millions of people worldwide and that it was unleashed in 2020 from China as a way to destroy the American presidency and red-hot economy? And that Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates knew what the plan was, and they purposely suppressed medicine to fight the bioweapon virus, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, so that more people would die, and that the goals of a Great Reset, as imagined by Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari from the World Economic Forum, a group of terrorists posing as a kind of charity organization who are seeking world domination without having a country to represent, but rather all countries united under globalism for their maniacal plans of mayhem and destruction of capitalism by communist insurgents. Yet that is precisely what happened, and what was worse was the timing, during the 2020 election season so that the emergency mode that swept over America could be used to suspend Constitutional norms and push states into changing the law for how elections were conducted so that American intelligence agencies could orchestrate a coup against a sitting president, a person hated by all the forces of globalism, both foreign and domestic, yet loved popularly by most of America who wants the sovereignty of their country back, so they trusted their election process as opposed to hitting the streets with violence to preserve their nation. Covid kept everyone hiding in their homes from the government-engineered virus, terrified that they might be the next victim of death. It was a very elaborate scheme involving many thousands of horrible people in governments worldwide. But who would have believed it before that time? 

Well, I did; I screamed it from the mountaintops. I find it amazing, for instance, after seeing the new Indiana Jones movie many times at the theater now that most people are having a problem with learning that the United States hired Nazis for the American space program. Really! That is supposed to be a well-known fact. The American space program that started NASA was full of old Nazis from Germany who worked directly for Hitler. And in addition, they were radical occultists way over the deep end, connected to Alister Crowley and the New Dawn cult that involved sacrificing all kinds of living things to ancient gods for supernatural aid. Everyone should know that because it’s been talked about in conspiracy circles for years but talking to people coming out of the Indiana Jones movie seems to be the most shocking thing to them. They didn’t know. It’s not what you talk about at Starbucks, especially before 2019, before Covid was unleashed on the world. Yet it was true, all of it was, and much more. I would not say I was ever a fan of conspiracy theories; I have always wanted a straight-up society of good people running our government and that our society was something we could all believe in and be proud of. I wanted to be proud of NASA. I wanted to be proud of the CIA. I used to have a nice hat I wore everywhere, showing my support for the CIA. But the more I read about these groups, the more you learn about these conspiracy theories and how true they really are. 

And like the talk about Nazis who founded NASA, many of those same people are now saying that we shouldn’t vote for President Trump because he was suckered so much by those around him. Obviously, Trump did get suckered by Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci. Trump trusted people, and they knowingly took advantage of his lack of knowledge regarding Covid, tricking Trump into destroying his own economy for the benefit of the aggressive Chinese. I called it a Pearl Harbor attack at the time. But I was the only one. Everyone else was grabbing a mask and hiding in their homes because the dumb government told them to, the same people who caused the problem in the first place. Then Trump thinking he was team building put a lot of Rinos on his staff to appease the various factions that were against the Make America Great Again movement. And those people sought to appease Trump’s ego to his face while working behind the scenes to undermine his presidency. So why on earth would we want to return Trump to the White House if he was so easily suckered? What would prevent him from being suckered again? Why should we give him another chance, or even worse yet, shouldn’t we appease the gods of globalism so that they stop unleashing bioweapons on us and trying to destroy our economy by picking some lightweight like Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, as endorsed by Fox News and the gang in New York are simply the controlled opposition for global politics with Chinese style communism in mind. There are serious problems that may require appeasement as opposed to transformative leadership in the Executive Branch. 

Long before Obama was in the White House, there were massive conspiracies engineered by lots of hostile forces to destroy America from the inside out, to destroy our laws, put international criminals in charge of our money, and to rob the value of our country and redistribute it around the world. But when Trump was elected in 2016, and the forces of globalism panicked because that was never supposed to happen, they showed their cards to the rest of the world that by the time 2020 rolled around, they were no longer concerned about concealing these vast conspiracy theories. And now that we can see them openly, we can now talk about defeating those forces. And no other presidential candidate is more motivated to fight these aggressors than Trump. He wants revenge for what they did to him personally. And many of us want a peaceful revolution against these hostile forces for the threat we have always known them to be. But because of Trump, more people now know them. Trump knows who the players are because they personally burned him, he understands how the corruption machine works, and if he had just four years to deal with it, he could do great things that have needed to happen for decades. But only now are people ready to see what those things are and comprehend just how hostile those forces against America, both foreign and domestic, were all along. “Yes, Nazis built our moon rockets,” I said to a very nice man after seeing the latest Indiana Jones movie. “Without Hitler’s Nazis, an American space program would never have existed. What they showed in that movie was actually true.” He was stunned. I could have continued, “and Covid was created to destroy America and capitalism in general from the inside out.” Maybe someday someone will make a movie about these things, and I’ll have a similar conversation with people like that 50 years from now. But until then, Trump is the best way to change the course of history back to an American nation that is the light for the world. And only he could have a chance to perform the task because he learned the players from actual, real-world experience that forced these conspiracies to the surface for all to see.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ is Fantastic: The way they used to make movies, family-friendly, happy endings, and a real love for the audiance

The really good news is that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a wonderful movie. I have said it for years, and it’s certainly true here, one of the extraordinary measures of a society’s health is its box office because it tells the world what people are buying at the movie theater as an entertainment option. It accurately describes what kinds of things people really like in the world and provides a measure beyond political beliefs to the truth of public sentiment. It’s much more difficult to understand when you get into television ratings and streaming services. And I think what happened with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is something that we talked about last year with the release of Top Gun: Maverick, another movie that, like Indiana Jones, was delayed for many years in production before being released to the public. I’m sure that Steven Spielberg will deny it, along with the diversity crew at Disney, but clearly, what happened with Indiana Jones and the newly directed James Mangold Dial of Destiny is that they learned some important lessons with Top Gun, one of the first big hits coming out of Covid. And as a result, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a fantastic film that seeks to be more like Raiders of the Lost Ark than the more slapstick Last Crusade. If you understand Indiana Jones like I do, and many people who have been with this character for over four decades now, and have watched all the television shows, read all the books, read the comics, played the video games, this Indiana Jones movie does a great job of showing a very complete character in a way that Hollywood has never had to deal with. And the movie pulls it off spectacularly and very respectfully. As only Harrison Ford could play, this is a very complex character, more so than most reviewers could wrap their minds around, and the result is something extraordinary with a very happy, family-friendly ending. I don’t think there was a single curse word in the entire film, and it didn’t have anything woke in it. It was an offering from Disney that was begging for forgiveness from the movie-going public.

What was clear to me was that this new director, James Mangold, loves Indiana Jones as many of us do, and he understands the character and his significance to actual history. I’ve also said many times that Indiana Jones has done more for science than almost any other resource in the history of the world. The publishing industry has really flourished because of Indiana Jones, not by direct correlation, but the hunger for the kind of content that is often discussed in Indiana Jones films and in Dial of Destiny; a lot is going on, things that work at many different levels that were built around a movie with a true love for the world of Indiana Jones and the way that fiction carries over into fact. I would go so far as to call Dial of Destiny as brilliant and ambitious while being very safe in the continuation of the character. As many have discussed, Indiana Jones is an old man in this movie. Harrison Ford is 80 years old, so we aren’t talking about a swashbuckling Errol Flynn type mixed with Humphrey Bogart as Raiders of the Lost Ark was often characterized back when it was first released. This is something unique and entirely of its own making that now has its own history that everything is measured from. And some of the real Indiana Jones types that are out there in the world doing great work, clearly inspired by these movies over the years, like Graham Hancock, the Joe Rogan Show, and even the religious writer Jonathan Cahn have shown that most of the thrill of Indiana Jones isn’t a youthful man fighting bad guys and escaping under speeding trucks. Over the years, the greatest thrills in Indiana Jones movies are more intellectual than physical, and that’s why Dial of Destiny works so well with an old Indiana Jones doing what only he could.

Instead, I would have Disney not made this Indiana Jones movie before I saw it. I raised my children on these movies; now, my grandchildren are tremendous fans. I enjoyed Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an ambitious film that many didn’t like because it stepped out of the formula established in the first three films that were all released during Reagan-era politics in the 1980s. As much as people didn’t like the movie, and that Steven Spielberg didn’t seem to want to make it, there were a lot of positive things that came from that fourth film, such as the History Channel’s show Ancient Aliens, which culminated in the lives of great writers like Zecharia Sitchin and Erich von Daniken. These Indiana Jones movies open the broader market for these kinds of unique adventures into history, such as The Gold of the Gods so wonderfully portrays. Indiana Jones may have started as an adventurous playboy grave robber in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But he evolved quickly into the pent-up frustrations of George Lucas himself, a very smart person who wanted to live the lifetimes of dozens of the most brilliant people in all of human history, that over the years was attempted to flush out in all forms of media available to tell these stories. This movie, Dial of Destiny, does all that while still managing to keep Indiana Jones the person we have always known. He shoots guns in this movie, which I thought Disney would avoid altogether. There are fistfights that are not unbelievable for an 80-year-old man. And the development of Helena Shaw was respectful, fun, and dashing. I would easily see a movie that featured her as a main character. Played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she was a fun character, and I could see a sequel to Dial of Destiny where she is the feature, and Indiana Jones makes a guest appearance to help the movie along. This might be the last Indiana Jones movie, but I don’t think it will be the last Indiana Jones appearance by Harrison Ford, based on how this movie ended. 

It will be interesting to see how much business this movie does for Disney. Disney has severe brand damage now with their commitment to woke politics. But this movie is a clear peace offering to the ticket-buying public to help repair that brand. To invite people to come back to the theme parks. This is Bob Iger attempting to get Disney back in the public’s good graces. At least this film deserves to be in the billion-dollar club. But the Disney brand has made some people very, very angry. Yet this movie is as good as movies can be made and does not destroy a character the world has fallen in love with. And it leaves the door open to a happy ending for him, given that Indiana Jones is old. And that John Williams, who does a fantastic job with the musical score, as usual, is now in his 90s. This happy movie gives fans what they are looking for, and I couldn’t recommend it more. This is the kind of film that movie theaters were made for, that we used to get all the time in the 80s and 90s, but are now very rare. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is something special, and it was wonderful to see that movies like this can still be made. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Miracles of Free Market Capitalism at Put-in-Bay: When the market seeks to satisfy customers, good things happen

My wife and I have a great appreciation for the RV life. With our fast-moving lifestyle, it is the method that works best for us, and it’s uniquely American in that we have as part of our lifestyle an expectation of freedom that is certainly dominant with RV travel. We like taking part of our house with us when traveling, which we do extensively throughout the year. It is great to have your own bathroom, your own refrigerator, tools, and storage. And as far as camping, I prefer it to the static existence of hotel life where you depend on everyone else for everything, from food to rest. My camper has my own pillows and sheets that my wife keeps very clean. It makes travel much less stressful when you have your own stuff while staying in places far away. And that’s how we found ourselves up near Put-in-Bay, Ohio. I was at a competitive fast draw competition near that area, so my wife and I camped in our RV for a few days to participate. Then in our downtime, we went over to South Bass Island, where Put-in-Bay is, to look around. I wanted to go to the Perry Museum because I love the Oliver Hazard Perry story of stopping the English during the War of 1812, so because we were camping, we had the flexibility to do that kind of thing while in the area. Plus, there was a really nice campground over on South Bass Island that we have been thinking about as a family trip, as a way to explore all the area islands in the near future, so we wanted to see how the ferry system worked for taking RVs over to the island. 

Of course, Put-in-Bay is very nice, they call it the Key West of the North, and as everyone knows, I like Key West for the audacious independence that it expects, as related to other island lifestyles elsewhere in the world. What’s astonishing about Put-in-Bay is that it’s so close to the border of another country, yet it’s in Ohio, and it has all the island vibes of Hilton Head Island and Key West all wrapped up into a kind of Charleston presentation. It’s a very unique place, and my wife and I enjoyed our visit after doing well in the competitions. For me, it was a rare down day that I greatly appreciated. But what was most impressive to me was the Miller Ferry system itself. I have had the benefit of traveling worldwide and have seen many ferries, many of them creatively stuffing as many people as possible onto their boats to make as much money as they can. But the Miller Ferry had the added complication of maintaining a high American lifestyle. South Bass Island has cars and, as I said, RVs. There is a really nice campground where you can RV camp, and people take their big rigs over to the island routinely. While going over and coming back, I watched the Miller Ferry crew completely load up one of their craft with many millions of dollars in personal RVs, and I couldn’t help but think of the complexity of insurance risk. Most places in the world, especially communist countries, would discourage such travel, where people expect to haul their own personal property over to a tiny island with such an expectation of freedom. That expectation is a particular trait that you find at RV campsites all over the United States and is very consistent as opposed to the type of people who stay at hotels and are dependent on that type of entertainment structure.

Those elements came together nicely on the Miller’s Ferry, where dozens of RVs, many of them over 53 feet long, loaded onto the ferry quickly and traveled across the lake as casually as people ride an elevator up a skyscraper. It was astonishingly competent to watch the ferry crew, which are all very good, load and unload the many millions of dollars of personal equipment so casually. Most organizations and countries that govern them would be much slower and more regulatory-bound. But within moments of landing, the ramp came down, and giant RVs of great worth were leaving the ferry to resume their journeys wherever they intended to go. I found it an astonishing display of competence driven by high personal expectations of customer service based on a lifestyle of freedom. It was audacious to have the ability to take your house to an island to stay for an extended period. Most places in the world would have a lot of regulatory burdens to overcome, and by the time they did, the option would have just been thrown out the window. Why do all that just so people could take their RVs over to a little bitty island? Why couldn’t people just rent a hotel room or stay in a condo? Why did people have to haul their RVs over to a place for such audacious expectations of freedom that were clearly the core of the lifestyle? The island is so tiny, only a few miles across in any direction, that golf carts are the most dominant form of travel. People do drive their cars around, but golf carts are the way to go. The exhibition displayed the difference between government-run facilities and private ones.

The Miller Ferry organization, a private one that has grown to meet the market demand, had no trouble handling even the most complicated loads they did all day without incident. People loaded onto the ferry without crashing and causing other people any trouble, and they did it day in, day out all day, well into the evening. The crew wasn’t overly regulatory and panicked, as you see in many government facilities when they have to deal with crowd management. With the Miller Ferry and the culture of South Bass Island, the expectation is to take care of the customer experience as well as possible, which certainly is not the case with any government-run endeavor. The market serves the consumer and doesn’t seek to control the consumer. If the consumer wants something, then the market finds a way to satisfy that market need, even if it’s as audacious as taking your own home over to a remote island for a day or two so that the traveler can enjoy the comforts of home in their own private way. The amount of cost and investment needed for that experience to happen is ostentatious. Yet they facilitate that life at South Bass Island with the option of the Miller Ferry. As we were experiencing all this, I had to think of where in the world such a display was shown in this way, the level of competence, the expectation of delivery with such a large payload, and people’s private homes. Europe and Asia do not facilitate lifestyles that even have those options as tangible. Their roads aren’t big enough for our RV lifestyle in America. Let alone have a ferry that can take those big vehicles over to an island for vacation. And if the governments were in charge of the ferry, it would take all day to just run through all their regulatory checklists. But at the Miller Ferry, everyone loads up in minutes. They are off just as fast. Nobody crashes. Nobody fights. Nobody worries. People just do what they do and enjoy doing it, which is a wonderful example of how it should be everywhere in the world if only free market capitalism were as vital as it is at South Bass Island.

Rich Hoffman

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A UFO Over Middletown, Ohio: Right where I said one should appear

It’s always news when a UFO appears in the sky in your community, especially a well-defined one as occurred on June 21st, 2023, in precisely the location that I had dared one to appear just a few days earlier. One of my locations for recording VLOGs for my website is the LeSourdsville Lake Park near the campus of Butler Tech. I had been covering the increase in the news of UFO sightings, precisely the one in Las Vegas recently where reportedly a UFO crashed in the backyard of some witnesses, and 10-foot-tall aliens were running around trying to conceal the crash by driving around construction equipment. All this was reported to the police, captured on video, and had multiple witnesses. As I report these things, I say that UFO encounters are much more common among many more people who typically don’t get recognition for them, so it was odd that there are many more reporting than usual and that they are occurring with more frequency with multiple witnesses. My purpose for talking about it wasn’t the phenomenon itself but that the government was admitting to it. And my offering was that the government was in trouble with all these other scandals, horrible inflation, globalism gone bad, a Covid story that wouldn’t go away, election fraud, and abuse of the Department of Justice; there is a lot that the American government would like to get out of people’s minds, and usually when you see a rash of UFO stories, that is the card that governments hide under their sleeve for just such emergencies. 

So to take the edge off the story, I pointed to a spot on the ground and dared a UFO to appear, and a few days later, just a few hundred feet away, a really good UFO appeared in the sky to multiple witnesses who were able to record it on their cell phones. The UFO hovered in the sky near the Speedway, which is nearby with very defined lights turning in a counterclockwise direction before jutting off to the northeast at impossible speeds for conventional physics. Early offerings on the matter were that it could have been a drone or a series of drones. But whatever it was, it was certainly something, and many people saw it. Of course, my first reaction was that someone had seen my video and had the idea to create the situation to answer my challenge. Because there were too many coincidences to consider, out of all the latitude and longitude coordinates in the world, this UFO appearance was just too perfect considering my challenge. And out of all the times in the year, this one appeared just a few days after I had asked it to. That left the question of who and why because the UFO that appeared in the sky was undoubtedly a what and a where. I have recorded UFOs in this general area before, but this one was very well-defined and had all the cinematic elements that are typically associated with UFO technology, spinning, colorful lights, impossibly high speeds, and the ability to hover in place. It was a classic UFO sighting that was entirely too perfect to be real, yet there it was. 

I wondered about it being a drone, about it being an experimental craft from nearby Wright Patterson Airforce Base. One of the reasons that there may be many UFO sightings in the Southern Ohio area is the many Indian mounds. This precise area has many markers in the shape of mounds, as I have talked about them being references to points in time that were created to help a navigator understand due to star alignments with them “when” in time a space traveler might want to know. Specifically, in this case, the nearby Fort Hill alignments that are over 5000 years old align to the constellation Aries and involve the Pleiades star system at a time when people shouldn’t have had such ideas about astrology. And just a few miles to the north of that UFO sighting is the Middletown Mound which is related to the massive Miamisburg mound just upriver a few miles. So, these UFOs aren’t as uncommon as people might think, nor are their reasons for appearing in the Southern Ohio skies. No matter how advanced onboard equipment might be, even for a society that is millions of years further along technologically than we are present, there is nothing like a good signpost in the ground to tell you when you are somewhere because space travel can get funky, as time does not move the same way for everyone, everywhere. It helps to know “when” you are, not just “where.” Most of the UFOs I have seen are very high up. One of my daughters is very tuned in to these kinds of things and always finds them. Most recently, there was one she recorded and sent to me right over my house, but very high up. I remind people that there is a lot of advanced technology that people have, governments, crime syndicates, pedophile rings within the World Economic Forum, crazy lunatics obsessed with bizarre sex practices where they drink adrenochrome, which could simulate a UFO occurrence with holographic projections, which is what I think this UFO reported on August 21st actually was. We are dealing with very hostile people who have gained the advantage in recent years of a technology-based world that is easy to manipulate through images. And those who control what you see are prone to abuse that power.

Understanding all that, my statement on UFOs and all other potential hostilities, no matter where they come from, is that the American Constitution is a philosophy that is the law of the land and that we do not suspend it just because aliens from other planets happen to show up. It’s the same kind of debate that we had when the government purposely mismanaged Covid by denying victims of proper medicine such as hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin as treatments, allowing people to purposely be killed by the virus released by the lab in Wuhan through government cooperation globally. In America, they tried to suspend our Constitutional rights over Covid and implied the same regarding UFO encounters. If we come face to face with an alien species, then we are expected to cleave to the government to save us, and under such conditions, our Constitution would be suspended. My argument is that “no,” we never suspend our Constitution and turn our lives over to the government, which is what I had been saying was the root cause of these increases in UFO appearances. The fact that they were happening, and more frequently, was the government’s way to corral people behind their cause, to get them to seek the safety of the government’s skirt like a frightened child. I would further offer that our American Constitution would be valuable to teach aliens from space.

Just because they are technologically further along than us doesn’t mean they are smarter. They could learn a thing or two from the American Constitution. But we don’t suspend it just because of some emergency or visits from an alien species. And ultimately, that’s why I think the UFO sightings are happening. To remind people that government is there to protect them from unknown forces and that those forces are just hovering around anywhere, anytime. What defense do we have if not for the government? Well, my statement is that the government does lie and that they are far more dangerous than the aliens. If the aliens want to come, go ahead and land, and let’s have a chat. But suspending the Constitution, or our investigative First Amendment that looks at all the bad dealings of this corrupt government isn’t going to happen. Based on what we know now, the government isn’t something we should be running to for protection. They are what we should be running from, aliens and all. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Government Endorsed Attack on America: Sexual Perversion and drug poisoning to destroy our entire society

I can just say that I’m not going to put up with the kind of garbage that went on in Middletown, Ohio, over the last weekend of June 2023. There was a drag show in public that went on, which is shown in the pictures here, that was just disgusting. But these went on nationwide, this assault to desecrate sexuality with unhealthy lifestyles that this current government in America fully endorses. I see what these sexual deviants are doing as an assault. It’s one thing to have sexual lifestyle choices behind closed doors; it’s quite another to weaponize it and to stick it into all our faces as an assault on the very foundations of civilization. So on the very next day, I met with some friends down at the Courthouse in Hamilton, Ohio, for a stake in the ground of goodness to March for Children as a moral position as a response to these horrendous intrusions. It was nice to see so many people there, and I was surprised that there were so many officeholders present who weren’t afraid to put their names next to the issue. Essentially after some speeches, shown here, in front of the Courthouse, we marched around the old building three times, just as in the attack on Jericho. In this case, after three times, we didn’t want the Courthouse to fall, as did the walls in that Biblical city, but for the barriers to law and order to fall away so that justice could be established to protect children under full assault.

Without question, the most emotional speech of the day came from Mark Murphy, who is part of the leadership of the Republican Party of Butler County. Mark recently lost his daughter due to a fentanyl overdose. It only took one time for it to happen, and if it can happen to Mark, it can happen to anybody. What a lot of people fail to realize is that a lot of these evils that we are seeing, whether it’s the drag queen shows or the drug cartels deliberately poisoning our youth with drugs like fentanyl, these are military attacks against American culture. They are deliberately targeting the youth of our culture to destroy them and, as a result, American culture as a whole. Listening to Mark talk, the number of people losing children to fentanyl overdoses is astonishing. The silent killer is the biggest threat in the world today. If ground troops did these deaths with tanks and guns, we’d be outraged by the attack and would seek revenge for the aggression. But the attack is coming in a way we don’t typically think of as an attack, but as a leisurely activity, drug use. Yet the intentions couldn’t be more obvious. We have a media culture and a government that is actually helping the situation along, and there is no other excuse for it. Drugs have always been a problem for the attackers of Western Civilization; the motive is to exploit the free culture with poison so that the competing cultures of the world can then thrive without comparison. Usually, we’d hear about these stories as soldiers who died in the field somewhere. But this attack is on our doorsteps, in all of our neighborhoods, and is all too common. Unfortunately, Mark’s story is not unique. It is so common that people are numb to it that they’d instead think about everything else but this topic. That’s why it was nice to see so many people show up for the March for Children because until we admit that there is a problem, we will continue to be vulnerable to these globalist attacks run by the organized crime arm of that effort, the drug cartels. 

Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to stand up for children, but that is precisely the threat in our schools these days. Public education has become a predatory environment, which is most publicly articulated in the PRIDE event in Middletown. The outlandish behavior seen there is being bred into kids in public schools, and very few people are standing up to it, and apparent evil that is an all-out assault on cultural norms. Darbi Boddy was at the March for Children event as politicians like Jennifer Gross and Todd Minniear spoke about the challenges of doing what’s appropriate for kids despite grotesque social behavior that the masses have now accepted as a reality. But the kids are counting on the adults in their lives to protect them from these predators. And what else could you call people so obviously addicted to a sexual deviation with the intent to engage with underage children? It’s a clear case of evil as far as I’m concerned, and when we are confronted with such things, we must do something about it. There is no common ground with these types of people who have only destruction and mayhem on their minds. A purposeful corruption of the youth toward a life of ill-advised sex addiction; nothing good comes from such a lifestyle, yet we are expected just to take all this desecration politely and without anger? I don’t think so. Everyone who facilitates these types of activities, from officeholders to teachers in the schools, are accommodating sheer evil. It’s not tolerance to accept destructive sexual lifestyles; it’s irresponsible. 

For me, it’s not an option to be accommodating. If we are going to see these kinds of attacks against our American culture, then it should be expected to have an equally hostile response. When the attack vector is so apparent, and the death and mental destruction of an entire nation of people is the target, then nobody should expect to be treated nicely in their desecrations. We are not obligated to kindness when faced with such evil and the intentions of malcontents. If they are free to express themselves in such grotesque ways, then we are also free to have an opinion about it and to let them know that we are judging them on their bad behavior, at the very least. We are not obligated just to take it and accept it out of some guilt by a leftist definition of privilege. Sexual addiction is bad under any condition; nobody should be thinking about it as much as the trans show in Middletown clearly is. But the point isn’t health; it’s destruction. They are selling our own destruction to us through the temptation of pleasure, the most ancient door to evil known to all civilizations. Whether it’s through drug abuse or sexual lifestyles, our current government is helping America’s enemies destroy our country from within, and the casualties are real. And it’s not just the adults they are targeting, but our children. These days, they aren’t even bothering to hide any longer. They do it because they don’t respect us or think that we’ll do anything about it. So the effort is on us in this present time to engage the enemy and redefine the terms of destruction. We cannot co-exist with evil, nor should we expect to. Instead, we must make our opinions known, judge the bad behavior for what it is, and commit ourselves to save children to save our nation because the attack couldn’t be more obvious.

Rich Hoffman

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Isaac Adi Gets Violent Again: An Interview with Darbi Boddy

It has been interesting to watch the trajectory of two school board officeholders who essentially started at the same place but took two different paths upon being elected to satisfy the parameters of accomplishment. Obviously, there is more to the conflict this past week between Isaac Adi and Darbi Boddy on the Lakota school board, where the police investigated a condition of assault, where Isaac, yet again under pressure, lashed out at someone trying to record his public behavior. Darbi is a tough young lady who can handle conflicts just fine. But what’s interesting is how RINOs are created because once elected, Isaac went into an appeasement mode of the very kind of people he was supposed to be engaging with, whereas Darbi has stayed faithful to her campaign promises. I talked to Darbi about all this while we were both at a March for Children rally in downtown Hamilton, Ohio. Darbi never advertised herself as anything but a fighter for children’s rights, whereas the same was expected from Isaac. But once elected, what was witnessed was an instant barrage of influencers who often inject themselves into the newly elected person’s life, and the temptation to appease these new faces is powerful, and most people never develop resistance to it. When I see these clips of Isaac Adi acting violently toward people who put cameras on him to record aggressive behavior, I see that conflict in his actions. Isaac is not alone in this problem. Being authentic has a freedom of its own which was quite apparent when I was able to talk to Darbi on camera about her first few years as a school board member at Lakota. You can see freedom of conscience in her because she has stayed true to herself. But others have not, and that often leads to the kind of obvious frustrations on the face of Isaac Adi in the footage of him lashing out at Darbi.

I worked with both Isaac and Darbi during their campaigns because many of us wanted to help Lynda O’Conner have conservative votes to work with on the Lakota school board. We felt sorry for Lynda and tried to help her. Isaac and Darbi essentially ran together as a package during the campaign, and they won their elections easily. But as soon as the election was over, Lynda started talking about controlling the school board members in ways that didn’t sound very Republican. And immediately, the OSBA (Ohio School Board Association) started to do its work; it’s like a club. They invite new school board members into the warm embrace of friendship, and it doesn’t take much for that type of romance to entice lonely people or people with a natural personality to want to please others. Admittingly, that was a concern I had about Isaac during the campaign; he was so friendly and so outgoing that I was concerned that he would find the desire to appease the other school board members too lucrative when conflict was the best approach. One thing that we did talk about that didn’t make it on camera was Darbi’s support network, with Kelly Kohls at the National Leadership Council (NSBLC), which offers an alternative to the support of the more labor-union-controlled OSBA. Lynda O’Conner and I have talked specifically about the OSBA; she thinks it’s a good organization. I think along the lines of Darbi and Kelly on the matter. But the obvious results are in the influences that led to Darbi doing what voters expected on the Lakota school board and Isaac looking to appease all these new friends, which is the game of politics that happens at every level.

As I explained to Darbi, I am proud of her, as many are. I’ve been doing this kind of thing, supporting candidates in many ways, for many years, and most of the time, it results in a dud. It’s like going to the fireworks store for the Fourth of July and buying a bunch of fireworks that never blow up. You have great expectations, but they just fizzle out when you light the fuse. Whereas with Darbi, she has exploded in all the right ways that were very satisfying and surprising. Every now and then, your hopes and expectations are met, which is the case with Darbi. She was not seduced by all the forces that have taken public education in the wrong direction, and that has been great to see. The ratio for me is about 10 to 1. Of every ten candidates I have worked with over the years, you occasionally get one Darbi. Of course, I knew when such an honest person like Darbi, who simply wanted to do an excellent job as a school board member, confronted a system with so much bad behavior in it, and that bad behavior was hidden from the public through friendships that were designed to conceal it; then there would be conflict. I get emails from people all over the country from people who are political moderates who are jealous that they don’t have someone like Darbi Boddy on their school board. I am very proud of her and would love to have three or four more like her, people who could resist the temptations of group consensus at the expense of voter responsibility.

I brought this up during our talk, how one player for the Reds inspired many others to get better. In many ways, Darbi has been that person for Lakota

We don’t elect people into politics to get along, which is becoming more evident in national politics. We don’t expect physical altercations either, but one of the problems that lead to so much corruption is the appeasement of peers, which is at the heart of the problem at every level. At Lakota, at the fundamental community level, we can see two people who started in the same place and quickly went in entirely different directions. From both perspectives, they had good intentions, yet during our talk, Darbi hit the nail on the head; much of the evil that starts in the world of politics doesn’t come from some pitch-forked devil; it’s often the friendly face who wants to buy you dinner and treat you like a king or princess. Of course, they expect something in return. But it’s often hard to see because it feels good to be liked. Some people will do anything to be liked; once others know that about you, they own you. And at that point, elected representatives often go bad when they fall in love with being loved because, just like a manipulative spouse, once they start jerking around your feelings, you lose the authenticity of why people voted for you in the first place. And at the heart of the conflict between Darbi and Isaac, two people who ran for office together and had been friends, is this villain of appeasement. The lucrative nature of being accepted in the warm embrace of friendship within institutional confinement is a nector all its own. And thankfully, in our community, Darbi didn’t fall for it, much to the frustration of those who wanted to seduce her into it. That’s why people tell me they are jealous of us in Lakota because they see the clear value in elected representatives like Darbi Boddy. The controversy only comes from those who want to steer her in a different direction. But she has stayed with the voters authentically, and people appreciate that, as they do with all people who do so. And with Isaac, it’s frustrating when you can’t please everyone, and that comes out in these outbursts caught on camera twice now. As Darbi said to me, she gets tired of how people talk behind closed doors and speak in public. That duality is the source of the problem because an honest person would be the same in any format. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business