Category: Conspiracy

Dirty Tricks by the Pro Levy People at Lakota Schools: Trying to sneak their issue under the door at the last minute

Just a few observations about the upcoming Lakota school levy, the biggest and most ridiculous in the state of Ohio, where they essentially want to tear down a bunch of schools and rebuild all new schools, to make the classrooms smaller and drive up payroll by hiring more teachers to teach the same number of students.  It’s expensive and stupid, but what do we expect from these people?  But there is a lot more to notice than just how flat-footed their campaign is.  We always talk about how liberal they are who run and manage the school, and as they are pushing for their levy passage, they look to have taken their entire campaign out of the Kamala Harris playbook.  They have waited until essentially two weeks before the election to put out their signs, and what they have put out is a minimal number.  I’ve been all over the district and was looking for more signs in places more friendly to their position, but they are pretty flat, and where they do have signs, they have tried to appear bigger and more of a mainstream position.  Especially in places where Mark Welch has yard signs, they have been attempting to put the limited amount of signs that they do have next to him to give people the illusion that he supports the Lakota levy, when I know for sure, he does not.  These are not politically savvy people running the Lakota campaign for their massive tax increase, which is fine with me.  I want to see that levy crash and burn more than anybody.  But things have changed a lot over the last ten to twenty years, since I was on the front line of these things, and it’s certainly worth talking about.  Of course, anything can happen in an election; it will all depend on turnout.  But the Lakota people are certainly on their back foot on this one.

The pro tax people are trying to associate with the No More Taxes position of the very popular Mark Welch

It costs a lot of money to run these campaigns, and usually, Lakota schools have plenty of mad moms trying to hide how terrible they are for their kids from the public by supporting the schools that give them a free babysitting service, because they are too lazy to be good parents themselves.  It’s a well-known personality type, the mad and crazy mothers who campaign for tax increases on other people’s property.  And even worse than those neurotic types come their queer eye for a straight guy husbands, who are more interested in doing the dishes, hoping to get laid by their wives’ best friends husbands because they are so progressive themselves, that all traces of manhood have vanished from their cell structure like clowns at an anti-mime rally.  (that’s how you know that I don’t use AI to write my articles, I do everything the old fashioned way)  And watching their campaign this time around, after watching lots of campaigns from the past, it looks like their entire approach to this tax increase is based on that inner firing squad of transgender losers, wife-swapping scandals, and corporate bootlickers too busy to know that their children had their 8th birthday.  They don’t understand the forces against them because they haven’t worked very hard to get to know them, and you can tell by the way they have put out their signs and raised money for the effort.  They are doing what I call the Kamala Harris approach, where they know they have a weak position and their strategy is to surprise everyone at the last minute, before anybody knows what’s really going on.  And where they are present, they are trying to affiliate themselves with well-known politicians, like Mark Welch, who is an obvious frontrunner for the upcoming West Chester trustee race. 

A very weak campaign by the pro tax people

Another thing that I noticed while driving around the district is that there are a lot fewer businesses supporting this levy than there used to be.  The school has always acted like a bunch of mobsters when it came to pushing for business support.  If businesses did not support massive tax increases, those businesses were attacked by that mob of angry moms, and they’d try to inspire a boycott against those businesses.  Lakota schools traditionally has quite a collection agency force that is very aggressive on tax shakedowns, and they have been pretty ruthless.  But things have changed over the years; it’s been a long time since Lakota went for a tax increase because the community has been so hostile toward them.  And the shoe is on the other foot now, for sure.  When the mad moms think they are getting a hook in the water by putting their signs next to Mark Welch, to attempt to trick voters into supporting massive tax increases, hoping to get bleed off votes from low information people, there is an air of desperation looming over the whole effort.  I could tell a lot of stories about the past where the outcome was never obvious.  I have done interviews with some of the big media, a Channel 5 broadcast on prime time television comes to mind, where the pro-Levy people had the streets all lined up with supporters, and they looked like everyone was going to vote for them.  Then they’d put me in a lonely parking lot, trying to make it look like I was on my own and had little support from anybody.  And once the election happened, the silent majority showed up and crushed the visuals in embarrassing ways.  Those were the old days, and these Lakota people are certainly not functioning from that kind of strength. 

I think this says everything about the election of 2025

It costs about $5 per yard sign.  And based on the yard signs, you can tell the strength of the political party because the early investment usually indicates how much community support there is ahead of the election.  On the No More Taxes at Lakota side, the push was to raise about $20K to fight this levy attempt and to be prepared for follow-up attempts after this first one fails.  For Lakota’s side, once the filings get reported, it would not be surprising that their donations are in the six figures, as many schools are these days.  But in Lakota’s case, that money isn’t seen yet, and obviously, they are worried about giving people too much time to learn the facts, so they are doing a last-minute push just like Kamala Harris did, hoping to catch people a little off guard, which doesn’t spell confidence in their position.  They don’t have many signs out really late in the campaign.  The No More Taxes campaign has had its signs out since the last week of September.  So, impressions by the public who didn’t already have a strong opinion on the matter were being made during October.  But early voting has already been going on, so the Lakota effort has been noticeably flat-footed.  And where they hoped to win over people, they are trying to give the illusion that a popular local trustee, Mark Welch, is on their side, which he most certainly isn’t.  But those are the strategies of the desperate, and not very smart.  And a group of people who think that everyone is with them when they are only talking among themselves, with a couple of cats and dogs to greet them at the door.  When it comes to the community as a whole, I think they are in for quite a shock when the reality of the vote totals comes in.  They don’t seem to know just how bad people have come to hate them.  But they will, the election is near.  And for all the normal people out there, those who are not dysfunctional misfits hoping to hide in society through an overly liberal education built on a foundation of DEI hires, make sure to vote NO on the Lakota Levy, and do it in a big way.  These losers need to learn a lesson. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Destroy Your Enemies: Let God sort out the mess

I have a lot to say about Peter Navarro’s new book, I went to Prison so You Won’t Have To.  But before going down that rabbit hole, let me say that it’s good to have enemies.  I was talking about that this past week, and my love of destroying enemies and the many Christian people who are always around me reminded me that my attitude was not the way of Christ, and that if Erika Kirk could forgive her enemies, why couldn’t I?  I said to them that I had no plans to hang around on a cross crucified by those same enemies for the concept of sacrifice to an evil power of timeless tyranny.  And their faces melted.  I continued to tell them that the Christ story in the Bible was told four different ways, from the perspective of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  And that it is my thought that the Romans were looking for compliant citizens for their empire, so they told the Christ story as a way to shape a nice and compliant society.   And to emphasize the point, the Romans stopped talking about God being mad at the Israelites for making peace with the enemy and started talking about forgiveness to the death.  I like Jesus Christ.  But I have no desire to hang on a cross and to forgive sins.  If God wants to do that, have at it.  That won’t be me.  I’m with Trump on the forgiveness of enemies. I don’t think it’s a good idea, and it usually ends in your own personal crucifixion.  If God has a problem with it, he can let me know.  But so far in my life, God seems to enjoy it when I punish my enemies.  I would say I was built for it.  To go even further, I think God made me to defeat evil in a very Old Testament way.  So I’m not real keen on the hippie Jesus talk. 

And to that point, I think the value of a person is in the enemies they have.  It’s good to have enemies and to seek to destroy them.  Not to make peace with them.  But to kill them.  And I think that the destruction of God’s enemies is God’s work on earth.  So if you have a lot of enemies, you are doing a good job in the world.  If you don’t have enemies, then you aren’t doing enough to make the world a better place.  And I say all that because I knew I would be enraged by Peter’s book when he wrote it.  I wasn’t sure how much it would make me angry, but I knew it would.  So I wasn’t exactly looking forward to reading it.  I really like Peter Navarro and several of the old White House senior advisors of the first Trump administration, and I never liked what the bad guys did to him and Steve Bannon of the WarRoom.  We walked an excellent line in the days of Trump’s exile, playing by the rules just enough to last, so that the enemies could have those same rules turned around on them and be punished for what they did.  Things could have turned violent, and I’ll have to admit, I was very close to going full mercenary during the years of 2020 to 2024, many times when people would say to me, as they still do, what would Jesus do.  I would reply that he would be crucified at a terribly young age as a political prisoner and hung on a cross as a warning of non-compliance.  And that evil needed to be punished for that, not forgiven.

I would not have been able to do what Peter did that day; he and his girlfriend were arrested while getting on a plane at Reagan International Airport as they were traveling to Nashville to be on Mike Huckabee’s Fox News show.  The humiliation of it would have been enough to make me fight back.  They waited for him to be separated from the terminal and the crowd there so they could take him out the door just before entering the plane.  They were toying with him to embarrass him in front of a public scared of what could happen to them.  If a senior White House staff member could be put in leg irons and strip-searched the way Peter Navarro was, after they had let him through security, it could happen to anyone.  And that kind of evil in the world, which is the same personality of evil that hung Christ on the cross, I’m not going to play nice with.  So I consider it very valuable to have enemies in the world.  I love them.  And I love to destroy them.  If God doesn’t like it, he can let me know.  If he wants me to go to Hell, then that would be great.  Because there would be a lot of enemies there to destroy, and it would be Heaven for me.  It’s great to have enemies because it’s fun to destroy them.  And I say that for context, for all the enemies who must now be punished for what they have done.  That’s the Nancy Pelosis, the Jim Comey types.  John Bolton.  I want to see Clapper, Brennan, Pencil Neck, Big Tish, Fanny, and George Soros all punished. I want to rake them all over the coals and punish them to the point of them crying for mercy.  And I want to shower in their tears.  I hate them and want to see them utterly destroyed. 

And I think that is the right way to think about it.  I don’t know that I even want to pray for our enemies, as they like to say on the WarRoom.  As I said, I think history reads the Jesus story wrong.  Evil wants to be forgiven so they can sacrifice the innocent to their schemes of doom, which is why I am not a big supporter of organized religion.  Religion isn’t strict enough for me in fighting the nature of evil.  I like a God who says to destroy every one of your enemies completely, and utterly.  But before you can do that, you have to have enemies; the more the better.  And to destroy them as much as you can.  And I won’t be praying for their pathetic souls, or for hopes of redemption in the afterworld.  Once they are enemies, I would offer that you go into eternity, continuing to destroy them and punish them for their misdeeds.  And never to seek to make peace with them.  Peace is a really dumb idea when it means compromising with evil.  And Jesus even questioned it in the end, “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”  I think Jesus should have cut the throats of all his captors in the middle of the night and led a revolt against the tyrannical establishment’s at the time, and not played into the game of sacrifice that has always been the assumption of the political left, to sacrifice to the forces of evil in the world, and feed their hungry spirits with the blood of the innocent.  No, I think evil needs to be punished, and with Trump’s second term, everyone who did him wrong, and all the rest of us, wrong, need to be punished viciously.  Even people who do the day-to-day things that are knowingly wrong and make themselves our enemies should all be punished and never forgiven.  And in the aftermath, we’ll let God sort it all out.  But it’s good to have enemies and to destroy them when they make themselves known. It’s not good to be hung on a cross to feed their unworthy souls with your life, expelled to their great joy.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Why People Play on the Smartphones: Proper methods of modern communication

I’m only sharing this because it was pretty helpful for others to hear what I had to say to an astute young professional who has a problem playing on his phone during important meetings and discussions with high-level people.  I understand the mystery of why people play on their cell phones all the time, and, in all honesty, I don’t blame them.  I also have grandchildren who are entering that teenage phase, and, of course, kids would rather lose themselves in their phones than talk to someone at a kitchen table.  It’s a relatively new phenomenon, and it has social psychologists pretty upset because of what it says about human behavior.  But I get it.  I understand.  However, just as with many of the things I have been talking about lately —back-of-the-train people and the essential leadership needs that only a human being can provide —we have to use all the tools available to us.  And in my example to the young professional, I explained that I love to wear sunglasses in public, but I consciously don’t when I know I’ll have to talk to a lot of people.  By choice, I avoid wearing sunglasses because I want to engage with others and use my eyes to express myself.  Even with all that’s going on, I chose to do videos with all my articles to show people that it’s not AI producing the material, but a living person walking with them and talking.  People can see my eye contact even though I look all over the place.  People can at least see my eyes, and AI programs can’t communicate like I can in a public presentation.  I purposely, even though I’d rather not, speak to people without sunglasses so that people can see and trust what I’m telling them.

And that’s why it’s a good idea not to retreat to your cell phones when you are in a group, talking to a lot of people.  But why do people do it? Why would they rather communicate with the smartphone than speak to a perfectly good person right in front of them?  If you go to a business meeting, half of the people, if the meeting is long, spend a lot of time checking their phones rather than talking to the real people who are present.  But why?  Well, it goes back to my sunglasses example, and a lot of the things I have been saying lately about social engagement and value, which have been on purpose for my audience.  I like to keep noisy people out of my life, who I call time eaters.  And when I go out in public, I almost always bump into people I know, or who want to talk to me for one reason or another.  So I wear sunglasses in public so that people can’t lock eyes with me and drag me into a conversation I don’t want to be in, because I’m always busy thinking about something important.  I don’t ever have leisure time to talk to other people about nothing.  So to avoid getting sucked into meaningless conversation, I wear sunglasses to protect myself from making eye contact with anyone who might use their eyes to get my attention and lock me into a conversation.  It’s the same reason that you can go to a crowded movie theater and nobody wants to sit next to each other if they can avoid it.  People, if they have a choice, no matter where in the world they are, especially in America, where there is an assumption of personal freedom, will choose to have their own thoughts rather than be captured by others’ concerns. 

This translates into the new technology of smartphones, which can give you all kinds of interesting information that you can choose to consume or not.  When people scroll through their text messages rather than listening to the person in front of them, they select information they control rather than deal with the randomness of another person outside their control.  It’s all about personal autonomy with cell phones.  People want to maintain their personal space rather than surrender it to other people.  This is why teenagers, not yet fully responsible for their own lives, want to lose themselves in smartphone interaction.  They can’t yet make all their own decisions in life, so the smartphone gives them that illusion, just as the video game experience does.  People prefer to think about what they want to think about, when they want to, even if the text message they are reading is just simple information that doesn’t lead to anything significant.  And the live person in front of them might be much more critical and say things infinitely more lofty than anything happening on someone’s smartphone.  But the freedom of choice is what people like and why they would rather interact with a smartphone than a real person. People, more than anything, want the freedom of choice.  And if given the option, from teenagers to high-powered business executives, will choose choice over a forced engagement with another human being they may not care much for, or want to interact with, such as in my sunglasses story.  To protect their own thoughts and keep the world at bay, they look for control over what they think through their smartphones, which are always there to provide a nice distraction. 

But as I told the young hotshot executive, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.  If you want to be an effective communicator, put the cell phone down when you want to express yourself to other people.  Don’t let them know that there are other things more important to you than what they are saying.  If you want to be an effective communicator, you have to use everything, even your nonverbal expressions, to sell your ideas.  Otherwise, they will tune you out because if you are busy on your phone, you break that one-on-one interaction.  Put your phone down and don’t play with it so you can make other people listen to you when you have something important to say.  But don’t be surprised if people tune you out for their own protection if you give them an excuse to break social engagement.  For the same reason I provide videos for all my written articles, modern technology, especially AI, has made it so people never know if a real person is actually saying things.  And in my case, I let people see my eyes while I’m talking, and I even walk rather than sit in a chair for a podcast, because people can see my hands and my pace of walking with a moving background going by, which is very hard for AI to replicate. And once people know that all that information is something they can trust, they can listen to what I am saying in a way they can believe in.  And if you are hiding behind technology yourself, you can’t win over that trust to communicate what you need to.  So that is why playing on your smartphone while in conversation with others is not a good idea.  And it’s also why people do it.  I don’t take it personally.  I get it.  I actually like that about the human race: they seek their own space over shared space with others when given a choice.  But if you want to be a good communicator, you can’t hide behind sunglasses or your smartphone.  You have to actually look people in the eye and make them interact with you. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Real Way to Get Peace in the Middle East: Going door to door where evil lives and thrives

I think it’s nice that Trump did a deal to get the hostages back in Israel.  But the cause of the trouble between the Palestinian’s and Israel was not present at that peace negotiation.  The politicians are not the cause of the conflict, and if we really want to solve the problem and bring peace to the Middle East, then the source of that trouble will have to be eliminated.  I recommend performing that task without any state involvement.  The United States doesn’t need to commit ground troops toward lasting peace.  All it needs to do is step aside and give contractors a “get out of jail free card.”  To allow contractors to go into the Gaza Strip and go door to door, eliminating the perpetrators of violence.  When you travel through the area, you can learn a lot about a culture, and one of the most dominant influences in their bookstores is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  The people who order those books to be sold, and the publishers who knowingly try to keep that kind of anger alive by blowing on the embers of evil, are the cause of the trouble, and they’ll have to be eliminated.  And until we are willing to play that game, there will be no peace, anywhere, not in the Middle East, nor on American college campuses.  The enemy lives in the minds of the vacant, empty souls of evil who want people to fight in a bloody conflict for all kinds of terrible reasons.  Everyone may clap that some tortured souls who managed to live through that captivity were returned to their families.  But the problem is far from solved.  Nobody could blame Trump for trying.  Yet the solution is still lingering in the tunnels and back rooms of the Gaza Strip, and many other places around Israel, and they are planting the demise of the Jewish country as we speak. 

Hamas had its money dry up after the bombing of Iran, and Trump has put everyone on their heels, including Qatar, who are the primary sponsors of terror in the region, and they want Israel wiped from the face of the earth.  I have a unique understanding of this problem from the science side, and the battle over the Temple Mount is the key to it.  The Arabs are never going to get over what the British did to them over Sykes-Picot after World War I, and how they felt double-crossed at the end of World War II, when the United Nations decided to give the Jewish people their own country, and Israel was created in what the Palestinians considered their land.  But this fight, as Trump said, goes back many thousands of years to when Yahweh encouraged the Hebrew people, the Jews, to raid the land of Canaan and resettle the land righteously for them.  And all that went well beyond 4000 years ago, even further to the land dispute that God was clearly very aggressive about.  And since that time —the First Temple period, especially with Solomon and King David’s threshing floor —the dispute has continued, with no end in sight.  The Jewish people were constantly attacked and removed from the land and dispersed as exiles all over the world.  Until the United Nations came along and imposed a Jewish state, and everyone had to get along with the idea, which has caused all the wars there for all these years.  Looming always in the background is the hostile views of the Muslim community toward all outsiders, which feeds the anger of pitting the Quran against the Holy Bible as a source document for understanding eternity. 

Knowing Trump had everyone pegged down for destruction, the Palestinian movement is going back underground while the politicians save themselves from financial destruction and give Trump what he wants.  Visible peace in the Middle East so that they aren’t crushed by the aggression of a much stronger enemy, the United States.  They only made a deal because Iran has fallen apart, the Marxism of the area behind the teachings of the Quran is being challenged by populism, so they are, for their own preservation, making a show of peace for the cameras.  The real solution will be to eliminate the leaders of discontent, as in the United States.  There are a lot of voices hiding behind what they think are Constitutional protections of free speech, who are outright anti-American terrorists, and they will stop at nothing to destroy those they don’t like.  Look at the youth movement behind the killing of Charlie Kirk.  Those kids didn’t come up with those thoughts on their own. Instead, they received their thinking from influences who are still very much at work and just holding their nose through Trump’s terms in office.  That same radicalism showed itself on ABC News when George Stephonopolis cut off Vice President J.D. Vance during a Sunday show recently.  They are all united behind a curtain of discontent and just waiting for Trump to be removed from the world stage.  And a future president was treated like a rag doll by those same elements, disrespectfully cutting him off to show him disrespect purposely.  That’s the kind of evil that puts those books in the book stores of the Middle East, from Egypt to Turkey, and everything to the East, all the way over to India. 

The best way to deal with these terrorists who hide behind polite society is to hire contractors to eliminate them, $100K per head.  Cut off the enemy’s head and put it in a bag for payment by an independent contributor.  Keep the states out of it and fight this battle away from the borders of nations, but door to door, where the bad guys really live, and create so much purposeful, strategic hate, to destabilize society to the liking of evil.  I would volunteer for that kind of thing, and many people could get very rich as privateers, much as it was in the golden age of piracy.  There are plenty of ways to do it, and all that would be needed from a country like America is to leave the process alone.  Let contractors go into Gaza and collect the heads of the terrorists.  Everyone knows where they live; go in and get them.  Take the terror to their doorsteps and save the ink on the peace deals.  Because as long as they are allowed to live, they will seek to bring evil into the world.  And that goes for areas outside of the Middle East as well.  Even in New York City or Chicago.  The Antifa terrorists of Portland.  They are being crushed now by a Trump administration willing to perform the task.  But the evil is still lingering, going underground.  And it’s there where evil must be hunted, door to door, and with soldiers of fortune carrying around pillow bags to carry the heads of their trophies.  Turn those kinds of people loose, pay them well under the table, and attack the rats where they live.  Don’t let them continue to publish books like Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Or even to burn down churches in Paris in the name of the Quran.  That hatred even found expression in the creation of the Quran in 610 AD by Muhammad, which sought to displace the emerging Christian movement that had united the Roman Empire in 313 AD.  These were not religious pursuits intended to gain entry into the gates of heaven, but rather to destabilize the governments of the world through military raids.  And that same youth is being corrupted everywhere in the world at the point of learning.  And it’s a real threat to any potential peace efforts.  That is, unless you physically remove the perpetrators with door-to-door contractors.  And speak the only language those kinds of enemies understand, ruthless violence, mercifully applied to the root cause of evil itself.  And nothing less.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Under New Management: Why companies fail and how leadership works

All over my town of West Chester, Ohio, there are signs everywhere indicating that new management is running a business.  Most of them are restaurants and bars, but they have been unusually placed in front of all kinds of companies, even manufacturing facilities.  Which was another thing I said would happen as a result of the catastrophic stupidity of COVID, where a global Marxist strategy of micromanaging how people were going to do work was imposed on all of us through the ridiculous means of a doctor’s office.  White coat losers in the form of health professionals were trying to scare us into open socialism, and it was always going to be a disaster.  And now, five years later, the world has turned to populism, specifically to capitalism.  If you really want to get philosophical about the Trump administration at this particular time, it’s because the human race knows what’s good for it, and all forms of Marxism have not been it.  There was never a plan for Trump to be in any authority position.  The plan was to take over mass society and make people afraid of a virus that was made in a Chinese lab, by people who wanted to make a bioweapon to use against the world, to steal elections, and take over economies.  People saw this happening, and they put Trump in office as the rest of the world has been supporting their own version of pro-capitalist populism.  Its not because they were that great of a candidate, but because people didn’t like the direction the world was turning, which brought about out of desperation, the Covid year of 2020 and the complete collapse of the global economy that was so tragic that most people didn’t even want to discuss what happened because they wanted so badly to put it out of their minds. 

So the mindset of the economic shutdowns has taken a few years to recover from, and it has taken a while for people to get their feet under them again.  And what we’re talking about are all the DEI hires and the work-from-home mentality that has been socially disastrous—social policy cooked up in a lab, with everyone’s books open to Karl Marx’s literature.  Even Microsoft was in on the gag, trying to push everyone into Teams meetings from home in their pajamas.  Nobody was betting on a complete economic recovery in those dark months of 2021, as Biden took office, Trump was forced into exile, and Covid protocols were imposing themselves on every one of us.  People should have been more intelligent to see the obvious.  We were under attack by an extensively laid plan of a complete Marxist takeover of the world.  And I said it at the time, and said all this was going to happen.  Nobody listened until it was too late.  And I would go around town and talk about all the businesses that were working from home, and how they were going to fail, and all the fast food places that closed their dining rooms because they didn’t have enough staff to stay open.  I told everyone what was going to happen, and now it is.  And I saw it clearly because of the way I live my life, in front of the train. At the same time, most of the world lives in the back, where it’s safe.  We’re talking about Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality as he talked about it in the great book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  It’s a very popular book, though largely misunderstood.  Its sequel, Lila, has not been read by millions, but by a very select few in the world who are audacious rarities. 

The metaphysics of quality, as I explained in my video with a train roaring by, is essentially a perspective on leadership and decision-making. Outstanding leadership is done at the front of a metaphorical train, where you can see what’s coming as it approaches.  You can turn the train, slow it down, tell people what you see coming.  But most people don’t dare to lead from the front.  So they have built an administrative bureaucracy in the back of the train to provide analysis, which is useful.  But it’s not leadership because by the time the moving train reaches the point of decision, the caboose has passed it entirely too late.  Decisions have to be made at the front to ensure the quality people expect.  That is why great generals who lead from the front are great.   Great business leaders are so rare.  And why political efforts succeed or fail.  If leadership is at the back of the train, a management effort will likely fail every time.  If, under scarce circumstances, an organizational leader is at the front of the train —where few people dare to be —then great success is possible.  Success that is often beyond people’s wildest dreams.  So when a business is failing and wants the public to know they are making changes, they put up signs saying they are under new management, hoping people will give them a second chance in the economy, implying that their leadership change will be different.  After COVID, a lot of companies got suckered and put their leaders all in the back of the train, where it was safe, and it was a disaster for the world’s economy under a hostile takeover. 

Karl Marx was always an idiot and a coward.  He died broke because he was a back-of-the-train theorist.  The world is full of them.  But because there were a lot of cowards in the world who ended up in government, health care, and were second-generation titans of industry who didn’t have the same guts their previous generation had, they adopted Marxism to hide what losers they were.  But in a marketplace where free will is expected, that kind of back-of-the-train micromanagement was never going to work.  And I said so all along.  And now that the money is flowing again and Trump is back in the White House, leading from the front, it has exposed this plan for the fraud it was.  And now everyone is scrambling to find people at the front of the train, and their “under new management” signs are hopes that people will assume that there is leadership at the front of the train instead of everyone functioning from the back, where all the wimps hang out.  And that’s why there are suddenly so many signs.  At least the owners of these businesses are trying.  But it shows clearly the danger that arises when we micromanage society, with back-of-the-train personalities who are not equipped to lead.  Even in a bar or nightclub, where leadership isn’t even considered.  People expect the lights to work and the beer to be cold.  And when everyone is hiding in the back of the train, they often order those things too late to arrive for a Friday night gathering that nobody thought would happen because of COVID social distancing rules.  Only people in the front of the train were ready, because they saw well in advance what a dumb idea everything was.  And most businesses that lacked those unique personalities failed, are now trying to recover, and want the world to know they are looking for front-of-the-train management.  And even if they haven’t yet found them, they are at least looking.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Meet the Candidates for Butler County Commissioner: Why Michael Ryan is the best

So, why Michael Ryan over the other two people running for the same Butler County Commissioner seat?  Well, a nice walk down High Street in Hamilton, Ohio, makes it all very clear.  Cindy Carpenter is the incumbent in this race, and she has held that seat for about 15 years.  The other is Roger Reynolds, who used to be the auditor of Butler County.  Before getting into any of the negative stuff, let’s just say that Michael Ryan is a good fresh start for the Butler County Republican Party, and he is coming into the race highly endorsed by a lot of very important people.  And he has great donors who are supporting him early in this process, which was quite evident at his October fundraiser.  Michael Ryan doesn’t have any baggage; he and his wife are a really good couple, and what he has done as vice-mayor of Hamilton has been very enterprising.  The good job that he and the city council have done for Hamilton is obvious just by walking down the streets of the West Side.  I was born in Hamilton.  I’ve lived in and around it most of my life.  And I have traveled all over the world and have an excellent idea of what good is, and the Hamilton of today is fantastic.  And Michael Ryan has a lot to do with its recovery from a not-so-good place.  Ryan has been optimistic and shown a remarkable ability to work with others to make things that seem impossible happen.  And there really aren’t many people anywhere better for the Butler County Commissioner job than Michael Ryan.  Butler County is lucky to have him, and I think he could do great things for the County over the next decade. I’m very excited to vote for him. 

But why not Cindy Carpenter?  Well, Cindy has always been thought of as a RINO.  Most of the time, she has run unopposed.  She has been a yes vote on police budgets.  But she has essentially been a Democrat socially, and recently proved it by campaigning for the Democrat mayor of Middletown, Ohio, Elizabeth Slamka.  Cindy was caught at a voting location openly pushing for the Democrat, and it was all caught on camera, which was very embarrassing for her.  Of course, when Cindy was caught, there wasn’t much she could say; she was the Republican endorsed candidate openly pushing for a Democrat mayor in a town that needs a lot of help, Middletown.  Simply put, after all these years, that’s the best Cindy can do, and she will never be a spectacular success.  She has had her chance; we know what she is, and we know she supports Democrats and doesn’t respect the endorsement process.  It’s not like the Elizabeth Slamka issue was in the past; it was very recent, and I think it ruined her forever.  She’ll never be able to live it down.  We’re in a period of party politics that wants more MAGA representatives, and Cindy isn’t one of them.  She’s too much of the kind of politics that people want to run away from.  Not to sign up for another term, especially when they openly support Democrats who have proven to be really detrimental to cities and counties where they gain a majority.  Hamilton didn’t improve because of people like Cindy Carpenter.  It improved despite her.  Michael Ryan gets much of the credit, and we want a lot more of his kind of presence.  I’m sure Ryan will support police budgets, even as tax cuts become a higher priority for him.  In a one-for-one comparison, all the positives go to Michael Ryan, and there are none for Cindy Carpenter.  She did her thing, it wasn’t perfect, and she is a closet Democrat.  So let’s dump her and move on to someone better.

The other candidate is someone I’ve supported in the past.  I would have preferred that he not run until he got his life back together after a rough trial he just went through, which cost him well over a million dollars.  I was very supportive of him during all that, so people are wondering why I’m not supporting him for commissioner.  Well, through the trial, I got to know him better.  I’ve known him for a long time, and I like him.  But he tends to get combative with people, and you learn a lot about them by how they handle pressure.  And under pressure, Roger Reynolds showed he’s someone people want to fight.  And that’s how he ended up in court to begin with.  As a commissioner, you need to be able to work with people and build relationships.  And Roger has a hard time with relationships.  So I might like the guy.  But he’s not ready for a public office.  He has had relationship problems with his wives, and in my book, if you can’t handle a marriage, you are going to struggle with a lot of other things in your life.  And after listening to the testimony of the former Lakota treasurer, Jenni Logan, there was a lot of poor judgment that gave early indications of spousal commitments.  Most of those are private problems, but he’s the one who decided to run for office, even though there are a lot of red flags about him personally that have only muddied this race for what I think are really selfish reasons. 

I would have said the same thing about President Trump’s marriages, and it took me a while to start taking him seriously.  I’ve met Trump several times, especially during the early Tea Party and Reform Party years.  And I’ve met Melania Trump, too, and I’ll say she’s been good for Trump and has made him better for the public office he’s now doing so well in.  Maybe Roger will find someone who will help him improve as a person, like Trump did.  But right now, he has a lot of digging to do to get out of a hole he put himself in.  And, unfortunately, he is seeking redemption through public office, even though a much better person is running for the job.  Roger is damaged goods, and he needs to present himself undamaged.  And it’s not just marriages that Roger has destroyed.  He has relationship problems, which raise major red flags for a job like this commissioner position.  Again, Roger has been around for a long time, and everyone knows what they are getting.  He’s not going to do anything significant.  But Michael Ryan has a chance to, so it’s really not a hard decision for voters.  Because of the way the world is changing toward better MAGA options at these positions, Michael Ryan is the only reasonable choice.  That’s why I am happy to support him over these other candidates.  If Roger wants to return to public office, he needs to fix some things about himself first.  Seeking redemption by voter validation isn’t healthy.  And Butler County needs to do good things for itself, not provide a platform for personal growth at the expense of progress.  And that is what anybody but Michael Ryan would be for the Republican Party, Hamilton, Ohio, in general, and Butler County as a whole.  People deserve the best person for the office, and for me, nobody would be better than Michael Ryan.     

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Wells Fargo Analyst Matthew Akers Was Purposely Wrong: When bankers are more dangerous in the world than Hamas

There’s a very public case going on right now that I’m in the middle of, and all this is on public record so that people can judge for themselves the contents.  But when I have to explain it to people —many thousands of people —the only thing that comes to mind is pirates.  People who rob other ships at sea and kill the crew and steal all the wealth on the ship.  The case I’m referring to involves a huge bank, Wells Fargo.  But as I have learned, what they are doing in the finance world is very common, not unique to just them.  We have a lot of plundering pirates in the finance and legal world, who, to put it mildly, steal wealth for all kinds of radical reasons.   And they have grown so large over the years that they have turned to piracy as their mode of operation.  The system we have allowed to exsist has created pirates in the finance industry that are completely stealing the kind of wealth that Trump is trying to unleash and based on my experience, because none of these people will ever admit any of this in court, it all comes back to politics and radicalism of human beings who have been allowed by law to get too much power over industry standards.  In the case I am talking about, Wells Fargo published an analytical opinion in April of 2025 that indicated the aerospace industry was going to suffer through a tough year.  This opinion appeared in multiple trade publications aimed at investors, and, to make a long story short, the intent of the opinion and its publication across multiple fronts was to depress the aerospace industry as a whole.  The comment by Wells Fargo analyst Matthew Akers regarding the poor performance of the aerospace industry was way off the mark, and I knew it then.  But the reason for the comment is that the piracy begins there, and is no different than the robbery we know occurred on the high seas in 1690, or in the finance industry in 2025. 

Banks like Wells Fargo did not get to be so big by their own power, there is a whole corrupt story that involves BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, and the Federal Reserve pumping a lot of printed money in the system that essentially gives public companies like Wells Fargo a pirate ship to attack the finance industry, while appearing to a media they largely control through advertising, to dress them up as good vessels.  Pirate ships used to perform this trick all the time: they would pretend to be a normal merchant vessel, then, just before they pulled up alongside another boat, they would hoist the Jolly Roger flag to scare the inhabitants of the ship they were trying to attack into surrendering.  And from there, the boat would be plundered for all its worth.  I see that happening to a lot of companies these days, especially after Trump was put back into office, which, based on the case I’m involved in, appears to be the motivating factor behind Matthew Akers’s statement.  I could have easily told him all about the aerospace industry and that he was incredibly wrong about his forecast in April of 2025.  But he wasn’t looking for the truth.  He was putting up a friendly flag to look helpful to the industry, to pull up alongside unsuspecting vessels to rob them.  That was the apparent purpose of his statement to the investment media.  And they thought they’d get away with it cleanly because they have for years, and have acquired more power, they believe, than our court systems can process.

There are a couple of strategies for why Matthew Akers and the people at Wells Fargo would make this prediction, knowing it was not the case.  2025 was projected to be a big year for the aerospace industry.  Trump was back in office.  The economy was poised to be red-hot.  And when people are happy and spending money, they fly to places.  Knowing a lot of people in this finance industry who are Democrat rats in disguise of pirates wearing suits, I would bet a lot of money that the purpose of the Wells Fargo statement to the industry was to attack the aerospace industry as a whole because they wanted to depress the incoming Trump economy.  If the Autopen president were still in office, I think the Wells Fargo forecast would have been the opposite.  And this is one of the primary reasons so many businesspeople are wishy-washy about politics.  They don’t want to be targeted by pirates who try to take over their business and industry.  So by depressing the industry, a large bank like Wells Fargo thinks it can actually shape politics.  And we see the same behavior wherever significant money is controlled by political radicals, such as in the pharmaceutical industry.  Only in aerospace, if you want to attack the military that Trump was to have access to, and the free flow of money into commercial aerospace because you want to protect the earth from the carbon footprint of a lot of new airplanes being built, you would if you could seek to tank the stock and harm the supply chain so that the industry would meet the expectations of a forecast that was not measured in real market value, but the strategic intent of the pirates involved at the front of the lending practices. 

Even worse than the political motivations is the ability to actually steal value.  In the case of the Wells Fargo April analysis, the mention was on the impact on Boeing stock, which a large bank’s opinion could greatly influence.  Such negative news could easily spark a mass sell-off and lower the price.  Only to have BlackRock, which owns a lot of Wells Fargo, sweep in and buy up all that stock for a very low cost.  And that money came straight from the Federal Reserve.  So we have a terrible game going on here that is really restricting a positive American economy and a global aerospace industry critical to Trump’s goals in the world.  In the case I’m involved in, the pirate ship is being fought; it was recognized well before they raised their pirate flag.  And the intention is to sink that pirate ship and bring disaster to all who are on it.  Ruthlessness has to be the means of proper conduct when its necessity is discovered.  But this practice isn’t unique; it’s common, and it is shocking how many court cases are spawned from this very behavioral practice.  These big banks have way too much confiscated power.  And Matthew Akers at Wells Fargo obviously is abusing that power for all kinds of political and financial reasons.  And the biggest threat to the American economy isn’t coming from foreign attackers, but from the banking industry that is entirely way too politically radicalized.  They keep their pirate flags lowered until it’s too late.  They pretend to be friends and helpful merchants.  But they are ruthless pirates by their conduct, and they intend to do anything to destroy positive financial growth in opposition to the politics they disagree with.  And in the case I mentioned, they went too far.  I know a lot more about the business of aerospace than Matthew Akers does.  So being wrong revealed a deeper problem, and it was easy to see in this case.  But often, nobody figures it out until it’s too late.  And if we want to have a good economy, we can’t let our bankers be more dangerous than Hamas. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

There Will Never Be Peace with Hamas: Releasing hostages that should have never been captured in the first place

After Trump posted support for Douglas Murray’s book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, I bought it quickly and read it because I wanted to know what Trump’s position on these hostage negotiations was with Hamas.  There are 48 total, with only 20 still alive, but none of them are in good shape.  Trump was wise to point to that particular book as an example of his policy on the issue, because it can be confusing.  But here’s the thing: it’s nice to do everything you can to save those poor people who have been hostages to Hamas.  And to return those bodies to their families.  But the solution is a deep one that I think will require much worse than Israel wants to do to all these Palestinian neighbors.  There is no way to achieve peace, and a two-state solution will never be realized.  One side will have to eliminate the other, and that will be the end of it.  That is the only way at this point.  The foundations of the religions at play are meant to provoke each other into conflict, and this is serving a greater evil that is far at work beyond normal sentiment.  There is a real lust for the death of the people involved that looms in the background.  And just for the record, when people ask me about AI and if I use it.  The answer is no, there is no AI program in the world, and I don’t think there ever will be, that can write the way I do.  It can attempt to copy my style, but it can’t think in the way I approach writing my articles.  AI could not write this article from scratch because it would require it to exceed human capacity to do so. To answer the question, no, I don’t use AI.  I do it the old-fashioned way because that’s the only way it works. 

I say all that because I think there is only one solution, especially after you read Murray’s book.  I’m not particularly impressed with Murray as a person; he is way too progressive for me and way too accepting of drug use.  There was a lot of drug use going on at that Nova dance party in southern Israel when Hamas ruthlessly attacked them over their Gaza Strip war.  Gaza is one of those positions where Israel tried to play nice and let the Palestinians live in some co-existence.  However, the terrorist mindset in the region simply cannot and won’t do it.  And they never will.  The minds at play are poisoned with hate, and we have to deal with that before we do anything, which is a radical leftist issue that is global.  It plays out beyond the façade of religion in the Middle East, as a validation between indigenous people and their territorial captors, as is the issue over the creation of Israel to begin with.  The primary assumption is that the Jewish people should not exist.  And the creation of Western Civilization behind biblical history should never have happened.  I know a lot more about this issue because I am very interested in the archaeology of the region and the politics on dig sites. At the most fundamental level, the situation is irreparable.  Islam is determined never to admit that there was ever a First Temple period, and they work really hard to make sure that science can never find anything from that period, which predates Islam by almost 2000 years.  There is a significant amount of historical revisionism occurring to validate their current political stance, which is unacceptable. 

Israel itself is way too progressive; the drug use at that festival was not appropriate for the young people who were slaughtered for no reason.  And the way Bibi Netanyahu has been untrustworthy as a leader of Israeli politics, claiming power, reveals how fractured the government really is at the highest levels.  The solution to it all is a much more conservative government and people far less inclined to liberal ideas.  The raids into border towns like Nir Oz, which had Hamas raiders going door to door and ripping out people from their homes and killing them ruthlessly, would not have happened if Israel had more guns in the hands of private citizens.  To answer the question about why such a thing as this doesn’t happen in the United States, it is because of the mass gun ownership that we have.  The same terrorists, using different masks, attack, and they kill ruthlessly and often.  Consider the recent situation involving Charlie Kirk.  It’s the same kind of leftist evil that is corrupting so many young people; there isn’t much difference between Charlie Kirk’s killer and the young people of Hamas who ruthlessly killed so many at the music festival and raided the homes of innocent people at Nir Oz.  But the incident cannot be widespread in America because every home is so well armed with personal firearms.  Terrorist elements would love to go door to door, raping and killing people in the suburbs of America.  However, they can’t because people can retaliate if the government fails them.  And in Israel, the government failed the people.  They should have known an attack was coming.  It took them too long to respond.  And it all could have been solved with wider gun ownership.  So Israel and its way-too-democratic government are too liberal to start with, which has caused them many of the problems they do have.  Without the United States, Israel would not exist, and everyone knows it.

The solution to the problem is not at the level of government.  The United States can’t get drawn into fighting Israel’s battles for it.  If we are going to say Israel should exist because God wants it to and we want to serve God, then let’s get serious.  Send in private contractors to wipe out Hamas wherever they are, pay them $100k per head, and hunt them down like dogs.  The solution to the violence is a lot more violence by private citizens.  I would volunteer for that.  I’d be happy to go and be a private contractor by going door to door where Hamas lives in Gaza, and other places, and just getting rid of them.  Forget about the armies, those are too structured.  Just take the violence to the enemy with profit-minded contractors, and beat the political left with their own game of terror, and stop playing nice.  I think it’s commendable that Trump is trying to secure the release of those hostages.  It’s a reasonable effort to try to make peace.  But, to really solve the problem, Hamas has to be hunted down and destroyed where they sleep.  That is the only way.  All the Hezbollah activity in the region, and the funding support that comes from Qatar and Iran, are just too deep.  When books like Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are as popularly sold in book stores in that region as they are, there is a much deeper evil at work for any logical negotiations.  And that evil wants the blood of humans for its personal consumption.  The only way to deal with it is to flood it with the blood of its own supporters.  Not the innocent.  And that is the only way.  I’m happy Trump is willing to try.  But the only solution is a lot of blood from the bad guys.  And the best definition of good in all human history has been defined by the Holy Bible.  And that’s the foundation of the entire fight.  You can’t make peace with that evil.  It has to be destroyed, and nothing else.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Defending Erika Kirk: Democrats make themselves victims over everything, conservatives don’t

There is a lot to talk about regarding Erika Kirk and the reaction that many left-leaning people have had about her during the memorial for her husband, Charlie, who was recently murdered.  This is part of a larger study that we need to conduct to determine whether we can all coexist in the same world.  What people think and why is often very dangerous, and we have to start thinking about those types of things realistically.  Having personal freedom does not mean the same thing to all people, so it’s nearly impossible to have a meaningful and structured society when everyone doesn’t agree on what “good” is.  And that was never more apparent than in how people from the political left viewed the way that Erika Kirk dealt with her husband’s death, which was a very public enterprise.  Turning Point USA is a group of young people who have fully committed to the pursuit of conservative freedom and spiritual alignment. As such, nothing was shocking about their memorial service, especially for those who attend church on Sunday, a common occurrence, especially at large mega churches.  The Turning Point memorial for Charlie Kirk was held in a stadium in Arizona, which filled to an overflow crowd outside.  So it was an experience that godless heathens from the Marxist left could not understand.  And they certainly didn’t understand Erika Kirk’s approach to life in the wake of her husband’s death.  Because Erika was able to speak to people and contain her emotions, wear makeup, and dress well, people are suspicious of her and are talking about it extensively.  Those types of people would understand Erika better if she fell off the fence and went on a drunken binge, as other left-leaning people do.  But because she was able to hold it all together, people are very suspicious, even conspiratorial. 

This raises an essential point about society in general: conservatives tend to be above-the-line thinkers, meaning they take responsibility for their actions and are always looking for ways to improve things.  Where Democrats are often perceived as perpetual victims who look to society to fill in the gaps, they are below-the-line thinkers, as we call them in business – people who prioritize their own needs over others’ positive efforts, seeking to live off the positive efforts of others for their basic sustenance.  So when faced with a crisis, and a deeply emotional circumstance, Erika Kirk did as conservative women tend to, she looked for proactive measures to accommodate her very negative feelings on the murder of her husband, and the loss of the father of her very young children, with proactive positions.  And that came out in her various speeches.  Now Charlie would be very proud of Erika, including her walking out onto the stage to give a speech on behalf of her husband, accompanied by rock concert-like pyrotechnic effects that juiced things up for the audience.  Democrats in that same situation would be looking for excuses to fall apart, because that is their natural state of existence.  They would want to become intoxicated, to dress all in black, and to cry instantly, drawing attention to themselves so that people would feel sorry for them.  That is what all Democrats do; it’s what separates them from the rest of the world.  It is what makes them broken people and social menaces to themselves and others.  They could not understand a person like Erika Kirk, who had the personal strength to speak to the public so soon after Charlie’s murder and would even go to the trouble to put on some makeup to make herself presentable.  

Again, Turning Point USA excels at the entertainment aspect of their political efforts, and it should come as no surprise that they leveraged the memorial service to amplify their efforts.  Charlie Kirk would certainly approve, as he poured his life into the conservative movement and would undoubtedly appreciate how his memorial service was handled, including the way President Trump spoke during it.  It might be hard for Democrats to understand, but that doesn’t make it a vast conspiracy.  I’m sure Erika Kirk had to do a lot of acting to get through those few weeks, where she felt like shutting the world out while she grieved.  But she married a very public husband who had been very publicly assassinated. So to do him justice, she had to address that public in a very public way.  So she had to dig deep to get there, and what she did was conducive to the way that above-the-line people approach life in general.  People derive the strength they need from compelling leadership personalities.  Don’t cry about things that you can solve for yourself.  And don’t go out of your way for pity from a public that should never be in a position to give it to you.  That is, in general, the way that conservatives approach their business, and it’s very different than those who are attracted to social management in the form of Marxism, where the down and out want to stay that way so they have an excuse for all their bad decisions in life.  They don’t want people like Erika Kirk to put pressure on them to be better than they otherwise dare to be.  They want to be victims in life and cannot imagine taking charge as a reaction to tragedy. 

Without question, there is a lot wrong with the Charlie Kirk murder that should be a lot more forthcoming.  With Kash Patel, a friend of Charlie Kirk, in charge of the FBI, many people expect better, proactive answers.  However, we are dealing with a deep and elusive evil that operates in the background in a manner that is very difficult for people to confront.  So I don’t know that Turning Point USA and Erika Kirk are willing to just move on from the motivations of Charlie’s killer and to take the surface investigations all too quickly.  But part of the way that evil hides in the background, and into the lives of below-the-line Democrats, is in the notion that putting trust in Christ will rid them of the burden of carrying the cross, so to speak.  And when Erika said she forgave the murderer of her husband, she was also putting the burden of that anger aside, which is a consistent Christian means of dealing with stress.  And I attribute that to the Turning Point USA position in general, with Charlie Kirk, who wants to get back to the business of what Charlie stood for, rather than spending a lot of time crying over his loss.  For conservatives, the goal is to get out the message uninterrupted.  Not being encumbered with grief and misery.  Democrats don’t and will never understand a proactive approach to misery, so to fill their void, they will resort to conspiracy theories.   When in truth, they don’t have it in them to think in any other way than to be broken people.  Democrats are broken people who seek attention in times of crises because they feed off pity and emotional distress, which is why they are dangerous to society in general.  We can’t have all these different people working toward the exact same social necessities when they are so far apart.  And that has been grotesquely obvious in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder.  We’ve learned many hard truths in the wake of it that will require real action in the future.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Under New Management: The difference between the back of the train and the front

It was a good accident while I was shooting the video for this article, when a train came by.  I tried to wait for a previous, huge train to go by, but about 10 minutes later, another came, almost as if the trains wanted to help me make my point.  Because I was discussing the Metaphysics of Quality, a favorite topic of mine from Robert Persig’s famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I think it’s one of the most important books that the human race has ever produced because it puts its finger on a very allusive idea, which is why some people are better than others, especially in the field of business management.  And these days, now several years out of Covid, and a world obviously not prepared for Trump to be in the White House, a lot of companies are flat-footed on this current economy.  There was an assumption during the COVID pandemic, and all the way up to last week, that different rules would govern the world, a kind of socialist administrative state where work was bent to the preferences of the workers instead of the needs of the business.  And people are shocked by these very capitalist rules.  All over my town, signs are going up to let the public know that their companies are under new management.  Most of them are restaurants that have been too slow and understaffed for too long. Many people thought they would be able to work from home to stop the spread of COVID, which, in retrospect, was a laughable endeavor.   Yet the entire world tried to think it and actually put it into practice, which was one of the dumbest things ever.  To my point, which is why I can say that our COVID response, even as it was artificial, was really dumb. That train helped me make the point right on time, leaving a perfect demonstration of what the heart of the problem is with all these restructurings. 

What the world needs, especially from every company and every family, is a leader who leads from the front, where all the action happens.  Using a train metaphor, the front of the train, at the cutting edge, is where all the critical decisions are made. For instance, how fast should the train be going? Does it need to turn onto a different track in case something falls across it, posing a danger to the entire train?  Operating the train needs to happen from the front, where all the controls are, and the leader can see what’s coming before anybody else.  However, most leadership cultures, and I can say this after dealing with many tens of thousands of people, most of whom have advanced degrees and extensive experience in high-tech sectors, are behind-the-scenes people.  People who sit in the caboose collect data and report the contents of the train as it moves along.  The information they process can be helpful, but by the time they see it, the front of the train, especially on a very long one, has already passed the point where something was observed.  For exemplary leadership, by the time the people in the back of the train see it, it’s too late to do anything different.  Most management in the world, whether it’s a small company like a private restaurant, or a large company, or a government, functions from the back of the train because that’s where it’s safest, and people generally don’t like danger.  That is why good leadership, let alone outstanding leadership, is so rare in any industry.  It takes a lot of guts to run things from the front of the train. 

When people say they are under new management, they are trying to tell their customers that things are different and that they’ll get more responsive service from the organization, and they allude to this leadership quality.  As if to say that their management is new, and therefore the opportunity to be better is in the future.  But to be honest, the ownership is usually just throwing darts in the dark, and they don’t know the difference between good leadership and bad, because they are too afraid of the cutting edge at the front of the train to make decisions there.  It’s scary at the front, and most people in the world, more than 99% of them, would rather be in the back of the train.  I have literally dealt with consultants at every level who proclaim to know a lot about these things, who are in that consulting business because they are afraid of life at the front of the train, where all the scary stuff happens.  They don’t want scary things in their lives, so they do what many people do who aren’t very good at life: they teach.  Nothing is safer than putting the train on pause and studying its contents while it’s not moving, in a classroom environment where there are no dangers of driving through day-to-day life.  And this isn’t some fluke opinion; it’s actually a flaw in the way we teach generations of people in a classroom environment, and why those who survive the schools of hard knocks are actually better prepared for authentic leadership.  Leadership isn’t taught as much as it is learned in the challenging places that the world presents. 

The problem with all the COVID protocols and the obsession with moving the world into an administrative state management condition, where people could sit in their living rooms in their pajamas and tell others things from a Teams call, was absurdly stupid.  Yet, that is why so many companies are now struggling to meet customer demands.  The marketplace did not go the way it was expected to, and virtually everyone is struggling to catch up.  Many organizations are seeking new management to replace the old one, and they are posting signs to let their customers know that they are trying to find effective leadership, even if the kind of leadership they are looking for is actually one of the rarest commodities in the world.  Good leadership thrives at the front of the train while most of the world desires to hide in the back.  They might make a lot of noise back there and bark out commands, but on a fast-moving train, by the time they see them, the train has already moved well beyond the point of decision-making.  And that is the core of the problem; it takes courage to run things from the front of the train.  And our schools don’t and can’t teach courage.  They teach people to be in the back of the train, where the bootlickers and con artists reside. They are that way because they lack courage and have to fake it to make it.  They learn to appease the teacher in a static classroom, and once in the world, they do the same from the back of the train.  And that is why most management in the world is ineffective.  But then we marvel when we see individuals who have great success at almost everything they do.  This is why it’s called “Metaphysics of Quality” by Robert Pirsig, and it’s one of the most outstanding books on the subject of business that has ever been written or thought about.  I’ve read numerous books on business, including some of the most popular titles on Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.  All that means nothing if your organization doesn’t have a leader at the front of the train.  And you can put all the signs out about new leadership, but it doesn’t matter if all that leadership is where most leadership is in the world today – at the back of the train, hiding, where it’s safe.  Leaders need to love danger and to make decisions unafraid as they face it moment by moment.  That is the difference between success and failure.

Rich Hoffman

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