Category: Computers

Yes, Harsh Language Was Just the Right Tone: The Freedom Rally at Big Bul Roadhouse

Freedom at the Big Bul Roadhouse

I know it’s scary out there.  The news is one constant outpouring of crises every day.  With the debacle of Afghanistan, the threats from China, the power of our out-of-control government going complete tyrannical rule over mask mandates and vaccines, it looks pretty hopeless. But when you unplug from the television and go to places like the Freedom Rally we had in Butler County, Ohio at The Big Bul Roadhouse and listen to Sheriff Jones and Corey Lewandowski speak along with some good music, cold beer, and lots of American flags, you will find that our country is still there.  It’s just that the rest of the world doesn’t see it because our media won’t show it on TV.  But it’s there, and I saw it for myself.  I include above and below videos of the event to share.  I have many people from other countries who read here daily, so this is meant for them.  Especially in Taiwan, where there is some genuine terror that America will fall and not be there for them, China will gobble them up because that is what the media propaganda is saying there as we withdraw from Afghanistan.  For those in the United States, I’m sure you can find a similar Freedom Rally like this in your neighborhood.  Although Butler County, Ohio, is a special place, there are similar events all over the country.  But those in other countries like Serbia and the Netherlands, where I have several readers every day who turn to this site for hope and encouragement, I’m happy and proud to share how life is in Butler County, Ohio, where freedom and liberty are still very much alive. 

A night at Big Bul’s Roadhouse in Ross, Ohio

It’s always great to have our Sheriff Jones speak at these kinds of things.  He was hilarious.  I only filmed a portion of his comments, mainly because I was right up front with the camera, and I didn’t want to ruin his speech with a constant recording.  Sometimes with these kinds of things, you want to let the intimate setting between the speaker and the audience have its way, and Sheriff Jones was off the chain funny.  Even more so after I turned off the camera.  But in the clips here, you get the point.  And should he be talking like that, you might ask?  After all, he’s in his fifth term as Sheriff, and he has no plans to retire.  Well, yes, he should talk like that.  He is the last line of defense between the people of Butler County and the kind of tyranny that comes out of the federal and state governments.  Sheriff Jones, over the years, has earned my respect the way he stands up to governors and presidents, reminding them often before anybody else in the country that power flows from the counties up to the federal level, not the other way around.  In many ways, your local Sheriff is the most powerful office holding job in the country, even more so than the President of the United States.  We aren’t taught that in school, but in reality, that’s how it is.  And we certainly have a good one in Butler County, Ohio.  I am very proud to have him on my team!  He can say whatever he wants as far as I’m concerned because the situation warrants it.  We can’t play pattycake with the enemies of America.

Sheriff Jones of Butler County

Many of us who live in Butler County, Ohio, think of it as a small town, a northern suburb of Cincinnati that is off the national radar.  But in truth, it is the epicenter of conservative politics. I’ve been to most of the states this year, traveling extensively, and I can report that no place else is the politics and organization of the Republican Party better and more passionate.  Other cities have pockets of conservativism.  I am thinking of Cody, Wyoming, where I don’t think there is a Democrat anywhere.  They were very solid there, but in Butler County, there are over 400,000 residents, and things could be much more complicated.  Yet, it’s all pretty simple.  We have great office holders because we maintain them well in Butler County.  We have events like this freedom rally where officeholders and the people who put them in power can talk to each other and have fun. It’s a relationship that feeds both the politics and the community healthily and unusually.  And it’s always refreshing to experience.  Sheriff Jones is the perfect embodiment of all those needs, and he plays that role to the best of his abilities, which shows.

Sheriff Jones making fun of the Biden Administration

That’s how a prominent national figure like Corey Lewandowski from the Trump campaign found himself speaking that night at the Big Bul.  If there was Trump country anywhere in the world, Butler County was it.  And he probably needed to talk to us as much as we needed to hear from him.  Everything coming out of the news was negative these days for America, and we all needed to remind each other why we were still honoring our flag.  Because Woke politics was in full bloom, and everything has been attacked.  It was good to listen to good country music and gather in the heat to recalibrate our sentiments to the fight ahead.  And Corey showing up to tell stories about working with Trump was just the right thing at the right time.  He was the closest thing we had to Trump at a time when we were hungry for solutions.  I had been dragging my wife to many political events lately, all of them good and essential.  But she was looking for a night off.   When I told her Corey Lewandowski would speak at this Big Bul event, she was eager to go.  And there were a lot of people there who came for the same reasons.  Corey Lewandowski was a door to Trump, and people were looking for a rallying point to grab on to.  While he was on stage, they had found it.  Corey was great.  Again, the language was a bit harsh, but then, so are the circumstances.  People want to fight back against the wokeness, and Corey understood that and gave the crowd just what they were looking for.

Corey Lewandowski talks to Butler County

As I said in the video above, many diverse people were there; the Bikers for Trump were there in force.  There were big donor millionaires there, and at the same tables, people could barely wipe together two nickels to get a quart of oil to change in their cars.  Such people would never associate with each other equally anywhere globally, but they do in Butler County, Ohio, and certainly that night at the Big Bul.  Everyone agreed that they loved America; they love Trump because he’s willing to defend America, not attack it like most of our politics wanted to.  And we were wargaming for future elections where Trump types of Republicans would take office seats, and we would fight back against this invasion starting in our communities, then our states, then at the federal level.  We would put Trump back in the White House, and the world can’t see that yet.  But at the Big Bul in Ross, Ohio, deep within Butler County, it was apparent.  The words were strong, the applause even louder.  The beer was cold.  And the path forward is quite clear.  America wouldn’t lose this war; we would return even more significantly now that we see the cards on the table.  And we’re playing to win this time, not just trying to get along.

Corey Lewandowski tells stories about Trump

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Success of Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium: The failure nobody wants to talk about

The Cost of Election Fraud

The number one question I have been asked over the last week hasn’t been about Afghanistan, but instead, it was about Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium held in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  My answer is that I felt it was successful and a great benefit to the process.  I also think Mike Lindell was likely disappointed because he, like many, is looking for a cleaner, more Hollywood-like result where everything gets wrapped up in a bow at the end.  The Supreme Court suddenly gets a backbone and does the right thing, where the media has their ah-ha moment and suddenly becomes one of the good guys.  I don’t think those things will ever happen because that’s not how humans are doing things. They might write stories and make movies showing that kind of reality, but that’s part of the fun of fiction, is that you can have things the way you want them.  The real world is wrapped up with many other emotions dispersed over time and space much more harshly.  And that is precisely where things stand after Mike Lindell’s Symposium.  Yes, election fraud happened, there are vast amounts of proof of it, and the people involved should all be going to jail.  Only there aren’t enough jails in the country to hold everyone involved.  The election fraud of 2020 was just the final, desperate attempt by a corrupt society to end the presidency of Donald Trump for a lot of reasons.  Based on their behavior before the election fraud and after, in the world of the Wikipedia types who had the future all mapped out toward a progressive horizon, what happened with Trump and his voters was a massive rejection of their way of life.  And that is something that they can’t hide any longer, even from themselves.

There is zero chance that America will unite behind Joe Biden or the current government swamp.  We have learned too much about how the Deep State works and that our present elected representatives have not worked on our behalf.   They rejected Trump as the disrupter and mistakenly thought that people would forget about all this stuff regarding self-government if he were removed.  They thought that mask mandates, vaccinations, election tampering, and economic terrorism sold by compliant and lazy media would be the name of the game in 2021.  The mistake from the start was believing that it was caused by Donald Trump, not in the desire of people to have a character like Donald Trump in the White House.  Trump had been doing such a good job that many of these antagonistic forces, whether they came from within our country or outside of it, thought they could still rule through authority.  Such as the intentions of China to schmooze their way to our complete conquest forcing them to reveal their intentions in aggressive ways they never even planned to admit to themselves.   So as bad as things look today, I only see hope in tomorrow because, at least now, all our interactions are honest.  We know now how much people like Mitch McConnell hate traditional America.  He has dirtied himself up in politics for so long that there is no turning back for him.  That is the case for many political people who have traded a nice and easy life for ethics and justice.  The worst of it was that they thought so little of us that they didn’t think we’d see them lying to us.  But they aren’t very smart themselves, so of course, they wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to see what was happening.  They thought they could conceal their actions with a media censorship that China has already and that we’d accept that in America.  Which, of course, was never going to work.   We ended up with a corrupt society in government who moved toward the global control of everything, leaving behind half the nation they expected to follow them.  And now it’s clear that they will never follow.  So what happens next?

Fast Draw

The success of the Cyber Symposium wasn’t in the revelation; it’s more in the reality of coming to terms with what happened.  Whether or not Mike Lindell had the Cyber Symposium, or whether all methods of investigating election fraud were censored from public debate, people would still question the reality of the election.  They would always doubt the results.  The difference between America and other places in the world is that we can gather and ask questions.  Even if the authorities deny that election fraud happened, in America, we can question those authorities.  We can assemble and have something like the Cyber Symposium.  And so long as those things can happen, there will never be a complete takeover of society in countries where election fraud occurs but don’t say anything about it because they fear being killed.  Those same kinds of intimidation tactics have been attempted here in America.

Mike Lindell has undoubtedly felt that sting.  But in actuality, whenever one side has to resort to threats to get you to accept a truth, they have already lost the case on merits.  They might force you to keep your mouth shut, but they can’t change what you believe, which is the case here.  With all the effort to conceal election fraud and intimidate people into believing some state-sponsored results driven by social media doing that state’s work, all the people who were going to believe in the election results have done so.  From here, conspiracies like those of Rosewell and the JFK assassination will result for centuries.  But the country will not unite.  They smell a rat and will always work to undermine that rat for the rest of their lives. 

For me, much of what we see, I think, is better because it has forced all the bad guys to show their playbook.  Many had hoped to pull those plays out of their communist playbook much later after Americans had been made more compliant.  I don’t think that would ever happen because it’s never happened anywhere else in the world.  Why would it happen in America, but let’s entertain the hypothetical quandary, people could be intimidated into complete submission, the way people are in China, for instance.  In my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I argue that the Chinese never recovered from the conquest of the Mongals or the Han Dynasty. Even today, they are easy to defeat as a people by a communist government.  America is a much different place, it was founded by people leaving behind authority rules, and the world ran out of real estate.  There is nowhere else to run.  They aren’t going to accept authoritarian rule.  They complied with the masks because they were gullible and believed the government was somewhat trustworthy in a crisis, even if it was invented.  But the Kotter change state wasn’t ever going to stick, and society would be switched over to communism.  And if only Trump were out of the White House, the tyrants of the world would live happily ever after.  We learned from the Symposium that people would never accept cheating and lying from a government with blind compliance.  This is the best the Biden administration can ever hope to get.   Life will only get worse from here and all the people who propped him up as well.  And that’s what happens when you cheat; you don’t get the White House honorably, the government will fall apart, which is occurring now. It’s the Humpty Dumpty story all over again, and the pieces will never go back together.  The authorities should have known better before they ever tried, but now we all know, and nothing will change our minds at this point.  The coup’s failure is there for everyone to see, and most people see it clearly and will continue to, well into the future.     

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Good Guy J.D. Vance: There’s a long way to go, but he’s certainly one you’d like to see get there

A Good Guy, J.D. Vance

Nancy Nix continues to be a great example of influence leadership in Butler County, Ohio.  I attribute the success of any endeavor, whether it’s a successful business or a political community, to the strength of its influence leadership, which I spend a lot of time talking about in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  Influence leaders are not the ones who put a spotlight on themselves; but instead, they work as leaders in ways that aren’t traditionally measured for the success of any enterprise.  And that’s what Nancy does, and how I finally was able to meet J.D. Vance after many other opportunities to do so came up short.  I had wanted to meet J.D. since he is running for the Rob Portman senate seat.  I had been writing about how much I like Jane Timken in that role.  I had liked Josh Mandel because I know him as a Tea Party guy.  But I’m not crazy how he has managed the pressure once he did get essential seats.  Timken just picked up an endorsement of Kristi Noem, which meant a lot to me, but the big drawback there is that she’s too close to Mike DeWine.  When I have talked to her personally, she is quick to explain the complexity of that relationship.  I give her some room there because everyone has to have some representation as a party leader even if she doesn’t agree with everything they do.  But the question is, to what effect would other things be accepted in accepting a few screwballs here and there?  Some other candidates for this Rob Portman Senate race are not viable, likely under 10%ers who just muddy the water.  But J.D. Vance is one whom I’ve wanted to like because I liked his book Hillbilly Elegy when it first came out, and I have thought he did a great job in the media covering that book and talking about Trump’s White House.  Yet he seemed too good, so I have had questions for him that you could only tell upon meeting someone, and until Nancy managed to get us together, I would have never otherwise known. 

When reading the Hillbilly Elegy, I had thought that it was precisely people like J.D. Vance who should be managing our affairs in government.  After all, he checked all the boxes; he was a lawyer trained at Yale, worked in the tech industry, was a Marine, and rose from the ashes of Middletown, Ohio, which is literally in my back yard to move into great things of personal achievement. They made an interesting Netflix movie about his life and family based on the book, and I wondered if his wife was as sweet and understanding in real life as she was in the book and movie.  As it turned out, she was.  And when meeting J.D., you can tell without a shadow of a doubt that he is a good guy.  A very good person and the reason for it is that he had a good family.  Sure, the Hillbilly Elegy was about severe dysfunction at certain levels. Vance’s mother is now known so well for her history of substance abuse.  He had a wild childhood that crushes most kids in most families, most of the time.  As J.D. says in his book, he is astonished to come from his childhood and into this new life as a normal person.  I don’t think I am too surprised that J.D. is such a good person because even with all the dysfunction with his mother, he had a very good family otherwise.  Many people inside the Beltway politics don’t know that those from the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, on down into Tennessee and Virginia, are pretty intelligent.  They have been ridiculed and made fun of in every way that society can make fun of a people.  But I’ve known them all my life, and I have had family members go through the same kind of thing as J.D. has.  Luckily my parents were rock solid, but I have cousins and aunts and uncles who were every bit as troubled as J.D. Vance’s mother was.  It often comes from being too smart for their own good, which gets them into trouble, and they turn to drugs to shut out the voices of logic that run counter to a crazy world.  Reality is just a little too real for them, and they collapse on themselves.  But in J.D. Vance’s story, his strong and deep family is pretty standard among the people I know, and yes, they are Trump voters.  They listen to Alex Jones in the garage through a rebel radio network.  I have family, in fact, that still lives down in the areas of Kentucky, such as Slade and Buckhorn, who are so suspicious of census workers that often those government workers disappear, never to be heard from again. 

I had a few copies of the Hillbilly Elegy; I bought the updated paperback when it came out after the Netflix film was released, and J.D. had added the new afterword at the back of the book.  There he explains that he took his book proceeds and bought the property down in Jackson, Kentucky, where his grandparents were buried, and stated that he wanted to preserve the land so that his kids could enjoy it as he did.  I brought that book with me for him to sign at our meeting, which he did.  Yes, J.D. Vance is a really good and sincere person.  He is the real deal.  But my concern was how would he hold up under the pressure of politics once the honeymoon was over and his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment was over.  After all, it’s not a question as to whether he can get elected.  J.D. has some great campaign people.  He has great fundraising and support.  He is great at television and other forms of communication.  He has a supportive wife.  You can check all the positives.  Is he tough? Well, he had to be to come out of childhood without being a mess.  Can he stand up to corruption?  I think he has no tolerance for corruption and can afford to stand up to it, knowing that he has a good family to lean on no matter what happens in his life.  So, I asked him the question I wanted to ask, why I needed to meet him. “So what will make you different than Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, other Mr. Smith Goes to Washington types who get into the Senate with great intentions only to get buzz-sawed in that corrupt culture?” And he said the only thing that could be the correct answer; he said, “well, it’s going to take a coalition of about 8 or 9 people, and from there, we can begin to turn the tide.” It was good to hear that he understood that beyond just campaign talk.  Everyone has great ideas when they are trying to get elected.  But very few know what to do once they get there.

J.D. Vance on the Warroom

J.D. Vance was ready for the buzz-saw.  His wife was there, and I could see her look; it was the look of a supportive wife who would have enjoyed being anywhere but there because all the handshaking was not her thing.  But in her was that same kind of unconditional and dependable love that J.D. had with his Mamaw.  How do I know, because I have a wife like that, and I had a grandmother much as J.D. did.  Appalachia women from the mountains and the wild men they married and tamed.  It’s a Middletown, Hamilton, Ohio kind of thing.  And when you find a wife who understands, then it can make a person nearly invincible.  And for those reasons and more, J.D. Vance is a good option for that much-needed Senate seat. There’s a long way to go in the race yet. Still, I would love for a person like J.D. Vance to fill such a seat when the world is desperately hungry for those kinds of people to manage our government with influence leadership and a tremendous personal foundation for truth and justice for all.  I want to see how all these candidates hold up under the pressure in the upcoming months, but I can at least say now, I am cheering for J.D. Vance.  I hope to see him intact at the finish line.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

My Thoughts on Afghanistan: Facing down evil once more

Its Time to Face Down Evil

I love Jags in West Chester, Ohio, and some of my friends who love to chew on cigar smoke while contemplating the complexities of life.  I found myself at the bar enjoying the atmosphere after one of those nights dressed the way I always am in my videos, like the one shown above, enjoying a Guinness.  A receptionist had come for me to take me to my table, so we walked through the posh interior headed for that destiny when an older, very affluent couple stopped me to compliment me on my hat.  At first, I thought they were poking fun at it a bit, but I realized they were quite sincere in their compliments after a few moments.  I don’t talk about it much, but I started dressing this way for one primary reason.  Our country is under attack and has been for a while.  Now is not the time to pretend like everything is fine and dandy.  I wear the outfits I do because it helps other people feel better about what’s going on, that there is still strength and courage out in the world, which is precisely what that couple was referencing without being able to put the words to the moment.  They just knew they liked it. We’ve allowed our culture to slip away from us by playing too friendly with the world.  And in doing business all over the world, I knew something that the rest of us have forgotten because our media culture makes sure we ignore it.

The efforts at toxic masculinity and other progressive pushes were meant to unarm us physically and intellectually.  My approach is to make sure that all those enemies know that, at least with me, that classical American values are at the core of my personality.  I’m happy to project that to anybody who wants to listen, like that couple at Jags.  And they appreciated it for lots of unsaid reasons.  What they could say was that they loved my hat and my leather vest.  Of course, I said thank you.  As another perk, I never have enough pockets for all my things, so the vests serve a practice role, most of which is to conceal my carry, which I never leave home without.  But more than anything, in these times, it did help to project to others that it was alright to let the progressive insurgents know that pushback on their Woke policies was a reality that they would have to deal with.

I’ve been asked hundreds of times over the last few days what I think of the Afghanistan situation and when I explain it, I think of that couple who loved my hat and western attire at Jags.  They didn’t know why they liked my outfit so much; they just knew they did.  Enough to make a big deal about it.  But I understand why they liked it so much; they were older, maybe a little older than me, so they had at some point in their past access to the western, which were the foundations of Hollywood for most of its life.  Westerns were also the first thing that progressives have attacked in our culture, which loves them still.  Only westerns have been satirized relentlessly for the last 30 years because they project what communists call “Toxic Masculinity.” Well, what happened in Afghanistan was that the good guys went there to bring western civilization to the world’s villains, and we helped many Afghan people do just that.  Women were freed for the first time in their aggressive Muslim culture.  America was that needed sheriff that came to town and brought justice to the dens of evil who wanted to continue to function as a backwater crime pit, and we staved it back for 20 years and allowed people to evolve without those fears.  Westerns from American culture have told this story repeatedly, from just about every John Wayne movie to Clint Eastwood’s Fistfull of Dollars.  To The Magnificent Seven, and many more.  The good sheriff coming to town to instill justice and natural law were what most westerns were about. They were specific creations of American ideas and western civilization in general.  And when people see the way I dress, it’s reassuring to them.  Not so much to the youth, although they do respond positively.  They are craving protection and order in their lives.  But we have these needs deep within our culture, and we have over a hundred years of stories about these themes that we’ve created and broadcast around the world.  The bad guys know it and want it undone, which is what Afghanistan was and why it’s such a tragedy.

The mistake purposeful or by sheer accident is irrelevant.  The political left ran by a Marxist ideology, even in radical Islam, expects the bold sheriff’s merits to be replaced by consensus building through the “international community.” The Biden administration has made mention of that strategy over and over as Afghanistan fell apart.  It was a plan built into the political left through echo chambers within academia, and they have made it their hill to die on.  That all countries are equal.  America should not be that white-hatted sheriff for the rest of the world. Instead, all nations would be managed through peer pressure of being out of alignment within the international community.  In other words, the cool kids would not let Afghanistan play in the reindeer games if they fell out of line.  Well, that’s their ideology, and it sounds good in the backyards of Georgetown while grilling hot dogs and sipping on red wine, but it doesn’t work in real life.  All it has done is give the biggest aggressor a chance to pick on all the peace lovers trying to kill the world with kindness.  China has been stoking these fires in the background for their ambitions of world domination, and their next target is Taiwan.  It’s easy for Americans to see all this, at least subconsciously, because of our long history of westerns in cinema.  We were raised to see good and evil in these ways even though our academic educations have put the blinders on us to make us blind to the intentions.  But deep down inside, we know what’s going on.  The minute the good Sherrif leaves the town, the villains come out and pillage the innocent. That reality was put into sharp focus as we watched Afghans pile onto C-17s in a desperate attempt to flee Afghanistan and the Christian-hating Taliban before they were all butchered, raped, and killed by the latest villains on earth. 

Without China, there would be no Taliban; they are the unsaid provocateurs here who planned to use this defeat to shame Americans into staying out of their business when it came to Taiwan and Japan.  And while America was killing itself worrying about whether or not we were using the proper pronouns when referencing ourselves, or in feeling guilt over racism, for which America is the most diverse nation in the world, China could make their move to run the world with communism.  So as sad as Afghanistan is, even that is part of the Chinese plan, to shame America so severely with a 20-year war that sent us packing with nothing to show for it and let Afghanistan destroy itself through its civil war without American involvement.  Then China could quickly kill off the winner to take over and have the mineral rights to the north and stimulate the opium production from the region to further poison the world into compliance with everything communists desire.  That is why I love moments like what I mentioned at Jags in my town of West Chester, Ohio.  It reminds me of times past when good sheriffs had to run the bad guys out of a city like Deadwood, Dodge City, or Tombstone.  We are there again, and over a beer, cigar smoke, and the banter of bold camaraderie, we are prepping ourselves for another fight in the streets.  Afghanistan isn’t the end of the fight, but the cue to strap on the guns and face down the evil villains.  And most people, even if they aren’t gunfighters themselves, know and understand the need because at least recognizing that need runs deep in American culture.  But now, instead of watching it on TV, we will have to do it in real life.  And that is the hope that the world is desperate for.  Afghanistan is just the latest proof to what degree only America can save that world from itself.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Woke, Inc. and The Gunfighter’s Guide: Meeting Vivek Ramaswamy and entangled fate

Woke, Inc. and The Gunfighter’s Guide

I was introduced to Vivek Ramaswamy by the great Butler County, Ohio treasurer Nancy Nix.  You might ask what makes her great; well, she has the books balanced in Butler County, where we all live, Vivek, Nancy, and about 400,000 other residents, and we are operating financially at a surplus.  Not a small town, but she and others like her serve Butler County as a fine example of good government, proving that it is possible.  She knew some of the things I have been doing, and she certainly knew Vivek as he was a very wealthy ex-CEO of biotech firms who wrote a book called Woke, Inc.  He was the featured speaker that night at the Middletown GOP office, which I had attended to hear what he had to say.  Nancy thought Vivek and I might have an interesting conversation. That’s when I learned that Vivek had been in attendance at a big campaign rally that I had organized a year and a half earlier where he had an epiphany to change his life, quit his job, and write this book.  Because at that rally which was saturated with political correctness, he saw a very good friend of mine, a CEO who at significant risk, came out publically in favor of Trump, and Vivek thought that was pretty cool.  It inspired him, so he sat down and wrote Woke, Inc for the next year and a half.  I accepted a warm handshake from Vivek and got along well with him for the rest of that evening, enjoying the early preview of his book that wasn’t due to come out for a few more months.  I made no mention of my own book, but the more he spoke that night, the more I realized that something weird was going on in Butler County.  After all, J.D. Vance was from Middletown who wrote the Hillbilly Elegy who practically lived in my backyard.  Now Vivek was a multimillionaire investor and biotech wiz who had decided to turn against woke culture and spill the secrets of that inner sanctum, and of course, my various projects. That’s a lot of exciting debate for a relatively small part of the world in southern Ohio. 

Vivek’s book came out on August 17th, and I immediately read it a few times.  I love the book, there are many things I could debate, but in essence, it’s a great book with a mass-market appeal that I want to cheerlead on as much as possible.  The more people who read it, the more people will understand what kind of fight we are in to balance out the needs of government with the needs of capitalism and the corporate alliance that has drifted away from America and merged with the Davos crowd of international conspirators.  I will likely read Woke, Inc. several more times because it is written at a high level and is filled with great information.  But the more I read it, the more I felt that my book, ironically comes out on August 28th, just a few days after Vivek’s contains the answers to many of the questions posed in Woke, Inc.  I found it incredibly ironic that two people from roughly the same area with different backgrounds would independently identify essentially the same problem and attack it almost like a question then answer.  For instance, a couple of the chapters from Vivek’s book, most notably “The Rise of the Managerial Class,” were the very aspects I was targeting in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as a way to contend with.  Ultimately, what was driving woke culture was fear, and I intended to teach people not to be afraid.  Once fear was conquered, many of the mechanisms mentioned in Vivek’s book would be eliminated.  But here were two people who independently arrived at a driving need and only shared a few chance meetings in getting there.  How inspired Vivek was from the event I hosted, I don’t think, will ever be measured.  But the irony was not lost on me. 

Where my mind has gone, however, is based on my background, not so much as a business manager and poker player with investor house money, but from my own experience at managing fear by taking away the option of people being able to scare you.  So I took my experiences as a gunfighter, for sport, as a foundation for approaching woke culture, just the latest rendition of socialism and Marxism.  Where I planned to give a review of Woke, Inc., which I’m sure I will at some point, I couldn’t stop thinking about how his book almost ended with a segway into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.   Yet mine is targeted to influence leaders, not necessarily a mass public.  That would be the case for most of my stuff.  But in all these explorations into an epistemological philosophy, you have to start with identifying the problem, which Vivek did.  While I could tell that Vivek was working out some things in his approach, he comes from a background in India where ideas of capitalism were romanticized as a way to opportunity.  In Vivek’s world, arranged marriages were very much a real thing.  My approach was to strip away the façade of the progressive era and set my book in the Old West, a period of American history that most people can agree on and have some relationship from which to build.   We live, after all, in a time when wokeness is seeking to erase our history, so we forget who we are.  Where toxic masculinity is illustrated so that Western civilization’s fall can be ignited without challengers, the danger is very much real.  So I set my scope there and then used that platform to teach people how to be all those great things again to attack this new “Managerial Class” that Vivek spent much of his book talking about.

I did enjoy Vivek’s book a lot.  If I didn’t have the experiences, I mentioned I would still feel that way.  One thing I talk a lot about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the value in “ghosting it,” and if something I did a year and a half ago inspired such a brilliant mind like Vivek’s, that makes me happy to hear.  I would suspect that Vivek, a big-time insider, had been thinking about these topics for a long time before he took his plunge into independence.  Reading his book, it sounds like he is making a platform for a political campaign for the future, where he wants to fix these kinds of woke problems as a legislator. That’s all great; it takes all sorts of people independently to make things happen, which is evident in some of the writing coming out of Butler County, Ohio.  Nobody was talking to each other, yet here come all these exciting ideas to contribute to a social need that has been brewing for a long time.  I tend not to spend much time thinking about that kind of thing.  Whatever divine intervention is doing its magic, I welcome.  My goal is to do what I can every day to make the world a better place in whatever way possible.  And in that regard, I am proud of Vivek.  He could have chosen a cushy life and easily become a billionaire by just riding the coaster into the station, especially for a guy like him, charismatic and full of energy.  But if I had any part in inspiring him to write Woke, Inc. with a political rally, well, I can say that his book inspired me of just how vital the themes in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business are for a hungry public looking for answers.  In that way, the world may just be finding a way to step out of the smoke and into a prosperous new tomorrow. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

There is Nothing Worse than Saying Something Cannot be Done: Managing unknowns for victory

Sometimes the Answers are Where Nobody Looks

For perspective, I feel like I say it 1000 times in a week; limits are meant to be overcome, not yielded to.  When I hear someone say, I can’t do this because of this, or I can’t do that, I immediately hear laziness in the terminology. It’s a lazy approach to life because skills are often needed to be developed to achieve a task.  And when people tell you that something can’t be done, it’s because they are too lazy to do it, plain and simple.  I understand limits, but as I talk about constantly in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, perceptions of what is achievable today will be shattered tomorrow with lots of practice.  That is certainly the case with various fast draw competitions that go on all over the country that are less known to most of the world because they exist in pockets of Americana.  We seem to understand these kinds of things in sports, where rookies improve with experience, and that few people expect a newly drafted football player to go straight to the NFL and be a superstar.   It takes time and development to become great.  And that is true too in how we make all our livings.  When I hear someone tell me that it takes this much time to do this kind of thing, that is never a fixed value.  But is only a point of reference that should always be pushed for and achieved.  That is why I suggest that all business people stop thinking in controlled statistical ways and always look for innovation opportunities to explore what can be done, not what lazy people tell you can be.

Bullwhip Speed and Accuracy

Every year that I do the Annie Oakley Wild West Show in Darke County during the last weekend of July each year, I go through this process.  It’s always one of the fun weekends that I give myself to keep the world in focus.  I love Darke County, Ohio.  It reminds me of many towns out west and brings the heart of America close, so it’s easy to see.  And this year was no different.  We have the bullwhip competitions that I always participate in, where many of these ideas about business have matured over the years and eventually evolved into the themes of this book.  Now that I am one of the elderly participants, the competitions have become a period of self-reflection for me rather than a nervous do-or-die thing with legacy performers from years past.  As I also talk about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, young people need more than anything a reputation to launch them into life.  Well, I have my reputation well intact, and nobody can ever take that from me, even if the thing we are doing is relatively tiny in the scheme of things.  The bullwhip competitions of Annie Oakley for me were always a big deal because the people who do them are unique.  The activity is out of the box, and you develop a genuine respect for the people who share that space with you.  And the competition pushes you always to get better.  And once you push yourself to get better and have success, you realize that the same holds with just about everything in life, including decisions that cost millions of dollars either way if success or failure is utilized.  That may be the life I’m in now, but over the years, my grounding in these cowboy arts always kept things authentic to me and gave me perspectives that nobody else was considering, even though they probably should have. 

The two videos I’ve included in this article are from two bullwhip competitions from this latest 2021 Annie Oakley show.  I always do pretty well in those, but the value in winning has diminished a lot over time.  What matters most to me, what has become an obsession of sorts, is managing all the competition variables in these kinds of things.   In both competitions, the goal is to cut as many cups off the target stands at the fastest rate that you can.  One competition, the Speed Switch, requires you to do so with both hands.  The other, Speed and Accuracy, is all one hand and in sequence.  If you miss a cup, it’s a 5-second penalty.  You get two attempts at each cup.  You have to stand six feet from the target and not cross the line with your feet.  The time starts on your first crack.  Those are the rules.  That is the way participants interact with the competition.  Like in all things in life, that is how we plan to achieve success, cutting as many targets as possible in the fastest time you can.  What fascinates me is all the variables that come up in pressured events that can wreck those plans.  The people who usually win at these things, whether they are in bullwhip competitions or big business deals, can manage those variables. 

Bullwhip Speed Switch

Many talented people are good at the exhibitions in the bullwhip world, but not so good at the competitions.  Without the pressure of time, where they can show off the skills that they’ve practiced for hundreds of hours, they are magnificent world record holders, and it looks great for an audience.  But when they apply the same methods to a timed competition, things go bad and don’t look so good.  It has always fascinated me how the difference between the two is so applicable to life in general.  People who study and practice a lot in life can put on a great show.  But when the pressure is on, they usually choke.  That choke is what people tell me thousands of times a week and expect me to accept because that has become fashionable in the world, to accept failure. Instead, my thing is to get comfortable with pressure and danger and learn to manage the variables.  Not to yield to them.

I have done those contests for many decades now every year at the Annie Oakley event, and not a single one has ever been the same.  Sometimes the popper blasts off the end of my whip.  Sometimes the whip gets caught on the target stand, as happened this year.  Sometimes we perform on grass, sometimes on smoothed concrete where the whip slowly slides all over the place. Sometimes the wind kicks up and throws off your aim.  Sometimes, a speedy guy will have luck catching most of the targets on their first run, forcing you to go faster than you are comfortable with.  All those variables are what make the good from the bad.  It’s not the skill; everyone who competes has talent.  But it’s in how you manage the variables that matter most.  

Its all in fun, but is it……………………..?

Ultimately, that is one of the big takeaways from The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I’ve been a professional in the industry for more than three decades, and I work with people who also have a lot of experience.  Everyone has lots of experience; they go to college, get trained and try to do the best they can.  My point is that little things like these extra little competitions I do, such as bullwhip competitions force you to adapt to all the things they don’t teach you in an orthodox society.  How can you use your skills to accommodate all the things that happen that you don’t control?  Can you still win then?  Well, of course, you can.  But what makes me madder than a hornet that some kid has stuck a stick into its nest is when someone tells me something can’t be done because they have not learned themselves how to manage variables in their life.  That they accept that anything outside of their skill level is a mystery that they automatically yield to.  To me, that is just the kind of thing they should all be training for, in having the skill to do the job, but in honing those skills so that they can adapt to the variables that come up along the way.  That they can successfully manage the situation when it’s never optimal and still succeed. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How To Lie With Statistics: Bill Gates and his big secret

Bill Gates and the Way to Lie with Statistics

I’ve been watching all the press for Vivek Ramaswamy’s new book Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam and Mark Livin’s American Marxism, and it has been frustrating.  They are poking around the rim to a much deeper problem, and that’s a baked-in ingredient to the original scam.  And that scam is very much a part of all our lives, a recent invention that touches us at every possible level.  For that very reason, I set the conditions of my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, at a time before the progressive era.  We need real answers to these problems, not just asking the questions. That’s not to say Woke Inc or Mark’s American Marxism are not good books.   They are great books, and everyone should read them.  But they are short on solutions.  We all know that first you have to ask the questions, but like most things in our modern world, the answers are never entirely within reach, and many people spend their whole lives looking for their fulfillment.  But they can’t get it because of a bit of scam that started at the start of the academic age where technology passed over the airwaves and into people’s living rooms.  Where television and advertising attacked people’s intellect in ways they had no previous intellectual defense mechanism.  And an age was created where billionaires and corporations could function in ways that no king of England ever could, through subversion of all national sovereignty hiding behind a façade of free-market capitalism when in fact, the villains are among the worst dictators the world has ever known.  Bill Gates comes to mind.  Gates is a guy who gained a lot of wealth early in his life.  So he replaced the ambitions that typically occupy paying off mortgages and raising children with climate change and vaccination obsessions. Over time, it has warped his mind into a villain for all liberty lovers everywhere. 

I guess I had read it before.  The book was so old that I read it first years ago.  But I didn’t know until recently that Bill Gates had put his blurb of approval on the front cover when the book was released to the public in 1993, at the height of Microsoft’s rise to power.  The book How to Lie with Statistics was initially published in 1954, and much of it reflects a time long forgotten when the average income for most American homes was much lower than it is today.  Seeing one of these modern versions of these books with Bill Gates’ name on it, after all the Covid mess, the election discrepancies, the push for a Green New Deal, the multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, it was to me like a Batman villain leaving behind some hint that the source of the crime was within reach, but that the villain knew people were not smart enough to figure it out.  It was as if Bill Gates was saying, “the answer is right in front of you fools, but you do not have the minds to see it.” His endorsement of this old book by Darrell Huff is pretty much mockery if you look at it in reverse, from the comfort of hindsight.  What Vivek and Mark and many other modern political pundits and writers missed when analyzing contemporary events was that the villains of our day were using the methods of this little obscure book.  Well known among the billionaire activists of the world are books like this, to commit open crimes right in front of our faces.  Rules for Radicals come to mind, as well as The Communist Manifesto.  They have positioned themselves as the most intelligent people on earth who have the most money, so naturally, we assume they know what they are talking about.  But what they want is revenge for being geeks or domination of the world, such as George Soros has always been after.  If there is any law we need in this world if we are not going to have honest elections and put our billionaire in the White House, then we need to eliminate certain kinds of donors whom we know use their money for evil to undo our Constitution.  George Soros certainly falls under that category, but then again, so does Bill Gates. 

Bill Gates little Secret

Lying with statistics didn’t start with those modern terrorists.  Human beings worldwide never really figured out how to filter media such as radio and television once our private time went from fixing tractors to suddenly watching I Love Lucy on tv each week and the ads that accompanied them.  Suddenly, we were inundated with statistics of every kind because statistics told a story, such as how many people like to ride school buses and how much meat men and women eat on Tuesdays.  We never solved the validity of statistics in any society on earth and who tells the story.  What happened to us was that honest people continued to earn honest livings on farms and factories, coming home to their families each day as dutiful Americans. Still, the scum bags, the shysters, and scam artists of every kind and the activists who wanted to rule the world found a new game in town, the art of manipulation through mass media and the ability to lie with statistics so that social movements could be moved toward those who wanted power.  Bill Gates knew what he wanted to do with his life.  He was already rich and could have anything he wanted in the world.  But what his money couldn’t buy was public sentiment for his religion of global warming.  But he could use his money to influence opinion with all kinds of statistics, and that is how it started with him and where we find ourselves to this very day. 

How the scam works

All the villainy we have seen involving Covid-19 is described in the book How to Lie With Statistics.  Without question, Bill Gates endorsed this reprint of the book as a kind of hint, a game he was playing with the world, a catch me if you can sort of thing.  He did it again in 2015 when he put the book on his summer reading list with other books about vaccines and other troubling issues.  It’s an easy book to read; it’s certainly not complicated.  Other books like it have been written since, yet Bill Gates picked this one to endorse personally.  Not exactly the book of a modern genius. Instead, it’s like the Rosebud from Citizen Kane, where Gates would destroy the world to save it from human beings and their statistical improbabilities of climate change, only to leave everyone confused as to how it all happened.  But Gates can laugh and look in the mirror, declaring that he initially gave us all the hints.  But we were too stupid to see it, so in that way, he can then transform all his guilt onto us.  After all, he was the honest patron who told us how evil he was and what he planned to do.  It was our fault that we let him do it.  Do you see how that works?

All the math on Covid was wrong, purposely misleading just as they say to do in How To Lie With Statistics.  When colds used to be counted by deaths, this new method measured everything in cases.  Like the example in the picture of the farms that increased over a five-year period, it wasn’t farmed property that changed.  It was just that the rules were changed to give more properties the qualification of being a farm.  What governments worldwide did following Bill Gates and his money began to measure things differently regarding colds.  They did it because they wanted Bill Gates funding, something that Gates had the money to give away even though he could care less about any of it.  Money could buy for Bill Gates love or homes.  But what he wanted was influence over power-hungry people who didn’t care what statistics Bill Gates gave them.  For a fee, they’d take it and run with it, and in so doing, people like Gates were able to purchase up most of the media culture.  And people never noticed faulty statistics from honest ones because everything was hidden behind a common assumption in all media, that other people more intelligent than we were made all the statistics we heard about.  But what the gag and crime were always meant to hide was that the people making the statistics weren’t so smart.  They were vicious and evil.  But to mask it from themselves, they even gave us the method they planned to use against us, to our doom.  But they knew we would not even look at it and would fall for their scams anyway.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote For Mark Welch: Shooting guns, solving problems and making the world a better place

Vote for Mark Welch

If West Chester wasn’t one of the best places in the world which demonstrates what small government looks like and how much prosperity can occur when proper management at the level of government is applied, I can’t imagine what it would be.  West Chester, Ohio, has the population density to make it a city, but over the years, it has stayed small, where just Trustees run the community’s needs, and it has flourished.  What started as a kind of Tea Party dream, with two members getting elected to the Board of Trustees and applying fiscal responsibility and limited government concepts to the day-to-day business, George Lang and Mark Welch, West Chester has been proof of what good government looks like.  Even during the government-induced pandemic over coronavirus.  Even as many businesses struggled to stay open all across the country or find employees to fill their vacancies, West Chester has managed to see astonishing growth in some ways.  Much of that points back at the policy set by the conservative trustees who have been running things in West Chester for over a decade.  Lowering the cost of doing business, reducing bureaucracy so that things can happen, West Chester would be, for me, the example of what good governments everywhere in the world should look like.  When we debate about government so much, we could always offer West Chester an example of where the government goes right.   

A lot of that credit goes to Mark Welch, who has been with the trustees in West Chester for a while now, a few terms. He’s been that critical second vote when George Lang set the stage for much of West Chester’s success.  Then as George moved on to a position in the Senate, Mark carried the torch for the next generation and continued the policies that made West Chester wonderful.  Mark has been great at the significant and minor issues, so much so that often you never even hear about the things he is doing.  I often say, especially in management positions, that if you are good people won’t even know you are there doing a good job.  Its when managers in government make themselves part of the story that things start going wrong.  Then, the more people you add to a process, the worse it gets.  And thus, that’s how you get a bad government.  The federal government that we are always talking about is just such an example.  It’s big, nobody takes responsibility for anything, and they always make themselves part of the story on everything.  Their goals are usually to make themselves known by looting off the efforts of others, while Mark has always been a facilitator of other people’s dreams and needs.  He doesn’t get in the way of some big project that wants to come into West Chester.  Instead, he finds a way to get rid of the obstacles so that something new could be born.  Whether the project is a significant new company or a hot new entertainment venue, West Chester has thrived because Mark and other conservatives have created an environment where productive output wasn’t penalized but rather encouraged. I’ve been all over the United States, and you’d be hard-pressed anywhere to see four highway exits that are better than the ones in West Chester with a diversity of options, per capita income, and future opportunities.

Shooting with Mark Welch

Mark Welch is up for re-election this year, which he should have no problem with.  But for many of the new residents of West Chester who don’t hear much drama from their trustees, especially with a community with such a high population density, they wouldn’t know about it because the government isn’t in their face about every little thing.  Yet I think it would only be wise to pull back the curtain a bit and share with everyone what I know of Mark Welch, a guy who goes shooting with me often at Premier in West Chester, a great gun range at Port Union off RT 747.  Included here are a few video clips of our last trip just to let people be a bit of a fly on the wall.  I go to Premier often to shoot various guns and to blow off some steam.  I enjoy almost everything in West Chester, from the steaks at Jags to the fine dining and shopping options at Voice of America.  And I love Voice of America Park, another great story that we could write books about.  But commercially, I spend most of my time at Premier, and often Mark is there too where we manage stress at the gun range and often contemplate the origin of the universe.  The other day, it occurred to me that people don’t get to see that side of Mark, and they should because it’s what makes him unique in government. 

When Premier Shooting first opened, Mark and I were there for the grand tour, which was very special.  To have a classy gun range in such an elegant town with so many business and residential options was such a treat, and we’ve enjoyed it now for several years.  They have added a nice walking trail around the big fishing lake and turned the whole property into a country club setting that is great for escaping from business during a lunch break. That’s how I use Premier Shooting as a place of stress management.  And now, primarily because of the policies Mark has nurtured and a small government approach, Harley Davidson is building a new superstore next to Premier.  Adding this business to the rest of the options in that area is an incredible achievement. It is just another example of what can be done when the government doesn’t make itself the story but gets out of the way.  Mark likes to see new things being built as much as I do, but he’s as far away from the type of intrusive politician who always wants to stick their nose in everyone’s business.  That is precisely why Harley Davidson is building such a large store that will be a great gift to the community. 

Shooting the Colt .45

Talking to Mark the other day while we were up at Premier shooting the guns in the videos shown here, we talked about the new Harley Davidson store as we watched an excavation team work machinery leveling the site for a foundation.  Mark was like a kid brimming with excitement at what such a place would mean, and I sort of thought for a moment how unusual it was for a politician to have that kind of attitude. I’ve been around many politicians over the years who would look at a situation like that and find some way to insert themselves into the story and try to take credit for all Harley Davidson’s efforts.  But not Mark.  In an actual small government, conservative fashion, he likes seeing things happen.  If he can help them along, he’s happy to do it.  Yet, it never crosses his mind to loot off the efforts of others.  He wants to help make things happen, which is one of the premier ways in which West Chester has remained one of the best places to live in the world, even as economic downturns have hurt communities elsewhere.  West Chester is lucky to have Mark Welch.  But to Mark’s mind, he truly wants what is best for West Chester in the ways good management always does, by getting out of the way of those who make things happen in the world.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Kings Island Goes Cashless: Communist China is leading the world in controlling financial transactions

Communist China is Leading Kings Island into going Cashless

I understand why Kings Island, as a company, would want to go cashless.  Forget about the conspiracy theories for a minute of a global cashless system run by a communist regime.  They have many people under 22 years old that they employ, and cash is messy.  Everywhere there is something to buy at Kings Island, at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, Kings Island must act as a major bank and carry a lot of cash on hand to operate.  It is a tricky problem to put all that money in and out of a safe.  Then there are all the mistakes that the employees make during a typical business day, and they lose a lot of money at each station where goods are purchased.  Then, of course, money is dirty, all kinds of people touch it, it never gets washed, and it becomes a cesspool in the pocket of someone’s dirty, sweaty pants.  For the convenience of Kings Island, one of the biggest amusement parks in America located in Northern Cincinnati, getting away from cash and moving to credit cards makes their job a lot easier.  That is part of the big global plan to push for a cashless system.  Companies like Kings Island have tremendous overhead just in dealing with employees who handle cash on any particular business day, and it’s a real pain, especially if there are options.  I understand why Kings Island wants to be cashless.  I know why global communists wish to be cashless, which we’ll talk about in a minute.  But what nobody was asking is, what do the customers want?”

Well, I can tell you my thoughts, I was infuriated when I was stuck in the Festhaus of Kings Island with all my grandchildren, and my wife couldn’t buy any food because we just had found out while paying for that food in line that they were only taking credit cards.  No cash allowed.  We were all hungry and tired.  We had been swimming, so we didn’t bring anything that might be easy to lose into the park.  We put a hundred bucks in our pockets for food but otherwise kept all our valuables in the car.  Now we couldn’t use that money to pay for food, and we were highly inconvenienced.  The guy at the checkout apologized and explained that Kings Island had made the switch due to Covid restrictions, which infuriated me.  Because I knew it wasn’t Governor DeWine who was pushing a cashless system.  It was Cedar Fair Amusements who were using Covid as an excuse to go cashless.  An advantage to them that I explained above. That’s when we left the park to get food somewhere else, which became a nightmare all its own for similar reasons.  But needless to say, that was the end of our day at Kings Island, and it will likely be my last time going for a while.  Going cashless for me is a breaking point, a take it or leave it a moment, and I’d just soon leave it. 

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The push for a cashless society comes from communist China.  They are already doing much of what Kings Island is working to do, so why not do it.  Why are they doing it? Well, it gives them control over their people.  It allows for the concept of a social score to accept or deny financial transactions.  For instance, if you speak out against the communist government in China on social media or some other traceable way, they can lower your social score, which might prevent you from riding a bus or going to see a movie.  Just think of the censorship of Twitter and YouTube but apply it to things you need to do in life, like go to the grocery store.  If you have a terrible social score, you may not be able to buy food.  That is how China plans to control its population of over a billion people, and it’s why many American corporations are leaning toward a cashless society.  Having that kind of consumer control is very attractive to some of the variability in any financial transaction.  I have seen this cashless thing attempted at several tradeshows and other venues around the country, and so far, it hasn’t been working very well.  There are still many people who still want to use cash, so vendors have to make accommodations.  What it always comes down to is whether or not someone wants a customer.  The consumer desire drives the behavior, not the other way around.  It is for that reason that cash will always be king in America.  Cash is freedom.

I give an example in the video above about me wanting to buy a beer at Kings Island.  Typically, I enjoy going there to look around and think.  If I pay ten bucks for a beer, I pull the money out of my pocket and pay whoever is selling the beer.  The transaction is between the seller and me.  No bank in New York even knows about it.  They might understand that Kings Island sold a beer, but to whom and for how long someone like me took to drink it, nobody knows.  And I like it that way.  So do a lot of other Americans.  Part of drinking the beer is a minor rebellion in it that is specific to American culture.  Just drinking a beer to be drinking one is pretty dull.  Also, using anything but cash means you must trust the system and all the employees who handle the transaction.  While traveling around, it’s happened to me that my wife might go to buy something, and she gets to the counter to pay with a credit card, and the company has shut down the card.  That happened to us while I was traveling in Japan, I had made a suspicious purchase, a tiny one, and the credit card company thought it was a stolen card testing it out on something less risky before making a more significant purchase.  My wife in the states was the one who got stuck without a way of paying until we could resolve the issue with several phone calls and a lot of embarrassment.  Carrying around cash as a secondary or primary way of paying is an obvious solution.  But if we have a cashless society, you must trust the entire system to get everything right, and we all have stories we could tell.  The burden shifts to the consumer while the corporations and governments of the world get the ease of control they so much desire. 

I expected a lot more out of Kings Island, and for them to blame the decision on Covid was just too low of a blow to accept.  I generally love Kings Island and Cedar Fair Amusements.  All I could think of was when they announced that they were not leading in the world but was only copying what the communists in China have already been doing. It diminished them significantly to my mind.  It felt like a betrayal.  My family was out of that park within 10 minutes of that attempted food exchange.  They do have cash conversion machines that can put a value on a card, but then your cash becomes like a gift card, and you must start figuring out how much money you put on it for all your transactions, and the whole thing becomes a significant pain in the neck.  Not that a few hot dogs and a hamburger cost $40, but they were making people stand around and use all these cashless systems was too much.  So, we left, and I can’t say I’ll be going back any time soon.  I go to Kings Island to enjoy myself, not to go to communist China.  Because that’s essentially what it has become—too many rules, too much control, and way too rigid.  And lazy.

Rich Hoffman

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Covid is the New Excuse for Laziness: Turning America into socialist Europe

Covid is the New Excuse to Hide Laziness

I told the whole story in the video above, but I’ll have to say, it’s been a long time since I was that angry.  After a long, hot day and a constant stream of Covid related excuses in service, a car full of kids who refused to eat anything but chicken nuggets and waiting in line for 45 minutes to get them from a Wendy’s in Kings Mills, Ohio, I was about to lose control and go on a rampage.  Both Wendy’s and McDonald’s had their dining rooms closed due to what they were saying was Covid concerns, but I knew better. It was apparent when we finally made it to the drive-thru window to find two lone workers busting their butts on a Saturday night dinner rush from Kings Island doing their best to fulfill all the orders coming in much faster than they could deal with them.  What made it worse for me was that I knew exactly how those kids felt.  Many years ago, when I was an up-and-comer, I worked at that Wendy’s, only it used to be across the highway.  This new one was recently built to deal with the large amount of traffic that came from being so close to one of the largest amusement parks in the United States.  Back then, I was known as one of the fastest grill people in all of Cincinnati.  Those were the words of Wendy’s management, not from me.  I frequently ran both meat grills, the dining room, and the drive-through, all by myself.  I also ran the fry station and handled all the chicken, and I never got burnt.  Working fast food was one of my many second jobs as I raised my kids, and to make it even more compelling, my wife and I didn’t have a second car.  We couldn’t afford one, so I rode a bicycle 12 miles one way every day in addition to my primary job at Cincinnati Milacron, which was just down the hill near South Lebanon. I’ve been in situations like that many times, and I know what good is supposed to look like. 

Only back then, there was no Covid.  People got colds, and they came to work anyway, and nobody ever died.  If they did, we never heard about it.  I never called off work for anything.   If I had a broken arm, a broken leg, and open lacerations, I’d come to work anyway.  If the pain was too great, I’d take a few aspirins and plug through the night.  I never killed anybody with my work ethic or viral loads.  The world was much better off when people behaved that way than it was now, that was for sure.  And here I was at a fast-food restaurant that I had worked at before, watching a new generation of kids struggling to do a quarter of what I used to do all the time.  I worked for McDonald’s too one hard summer where the world was crashing down around me in every way you could imagine.  The pressure was so great that it would have killed a lot of people.  But I came to work every day without a car and worked my ass off, literally.  So, when I see both restaurants with drive-thru lines wrapped around their buildings with 45 minutes to one hour wait times, I was more than a little furious to be stuck in that situation.  I would only do it for my grandchildren; let me say that. 

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Even today, and I can’t officially tell anybody to do this due to all the socialist rules and regulations of the government class, I often repaired my own serious injuries, including a time where my knucklebone came right through the skin.  I wrapped it up and finished my shift.  Then went home and fixed it up. Still, if I get a severe cut or those around me who think the way I do, we superglue the wound and get back to work.  In cases where 8 or 9 stitches would be needed, I have frequently just pulled out a tube of superglue and glued the skin back together, only losing about 15 minutes of work.  These days, such an idea is not even conceivable to anybody.  Everything is a lost-time incident.  Everything!  But what made this particular night bad was that both McDonald’s and Wendy’s had closed their dining rooms and expected to blame it on Covid regulations.  The expectation by management was that Mike DeWine would go on lockdown mode again, so without a fight of any kind, management wanted to show health officials that they were going to be proactive and get in front of the protocols.  But, as I also said in the video above, I knew Mike DeWine wasn’t going to dare do anything about Covid.  He had already used his political points last year, and he came up a loser.  He couldn’t afford to fall for the Covid crap again.  And if I knew that, why didn’t the executives at Wendy’s and McDonald’s?  Well, of course, the answer is a dumb and disappointing one.  Do you know what it is?

Most of what made that particular Saturday miserable, even at Kings Island itself, was staff shortages.  The government now empowered companies with lousy management to blame their terrible recruiting methods and high turnover on Covid instead of their internal problems.  Covid had given everyone these days a free doctor’s excuse to get out of work, sit home on their lazy butts, and cry every time it rained outside.  And that was the real problem.  It had nothing to do with Covid being an actual danger.  It was all about the government sticking its inefficient nose into the lives of businesses and ruining initiative and gumption, further eroding the work ethic of an already soft generation.  Granted, the stories I told about my own experiences were extreme even back then, but they are unfathomable now.  Nobody does those kinds of things because our work ethic has been virtually destroyed by a heavy government culture that has tampered too much with human initiative. And that is why I was furious getting those chicken nuggets at Wendy’s on a hot Saturday night in Kings Mills.  Even as I was about to blow my stack on the employees, I could only see in their eyes as they handed me the kid’s meals, defeated faces who were about to throw in the towel.  There were no managers there that night that we could see.  Nobody was being called in to help.  There was no pressure from corporate to get their act straight and to do better.  You know why, because now everyone could blame Covid for their problems.  The government had given the lazy a new excuse that gave them a free pass, Covid.  Anytime something wrong happened, everybody had to say “Covid,” and everyone was supposed to understand.  Expectations were supposed to be tossed away, and we were all supposed to expect much less from our consumer experience. 

Well, let me say this, I worked way too hard in my life to arrive at a point in time where I will ever accept the kind of lackluster effort I see these days.  And Covid will never be an excuse.  The government screwed up by injecting itself into our health and wellness for all kinds of duplicitous reasons.  But if I can’t get my grandkids their chicken nuggets in a fast and productive way, then it’s war! 

Rich Hoffman

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