Category: Creative Writing

Populism is the Weakness of Davos: The Fed has sold us all out, and now we have to rethink how much power they should have

As scary as it is, we’ve been here before in America. We can survive this, even as we learn of the sinister forces that have embedded themselves into our government and are presently threatening the world and everyone in it. I will admit reading Christopher Leonard’s Lords of Easy Money opened my eyes to a terrible menace at the Federal Reserve. I am thankful that there are people like Thomas Hoenig out there who was the star of that book and were soft “Rs” on the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) as the bank president of Kansas, who was during a reckless period of quantitative easing was the only dissenting vote on the 12 person committee. If all twelve members of the FOMC were like him, I would say that the Federal Reserve would do what it was supposed to do, which is manage the value of the American dollar in a proper way with the world. But, when members of that FOMC are extreme liberals or overly educated in Keynesian economics like Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, then the propensity for trouble and eventual scandal is all too tempting and justifies everything that President Andrew Jackson feared about central banking in America. And for that matter, this argument goes back to a significant dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton wanted a strong central government, whereas Jefferson was the king of the Anti-Federalist position against them. Time has only proven Jefferson and Jackson correct about them. And today, we find ourselves in precisely the reason why they were so dangerous. Our current Fed has created an exacerbated “monied aristocracy” that has sold out our country to globalism and is a significant problem. If not for Hoenig’s dissenting votes, we might not know how bad it is. If not for those decisions, for finance reporters like Christopher Leonard, a liberal, he may not have been drawn to this story, which probably nobody thought would ever see the light of day. But because he did, we know that the Fed has created a massive asset bubble that has opened the door to major foreign influence and set us up in a vulnerable way to the Party of Davos, where Larry Fink directly has been the bridge that has connected them all, the Party of Davos, the Fed, China, and progressive woke politics pressed directly into all our lives in a very destructive way. 

Knowing all that, of course, people are worried. They think it’s all too late, that we’ve all been sold out, and that it’s over for America. But fortunately, this is an old argument in America, and we know how it can end because President Jackson showed us how to go about this. The amount of dollars involved is much more significant today than it was in 1828, but the concept is the same. Should there be a central bank running the money of America? Can it run correctly? And what are the dangers of a Federal Reserve getting out of control to where they no longer represent ordinary people but fall under the supervision of a foreign entity like the Party of Davos, where Larry Fink sits on the Board of Trustees at the World Economic Forum. When people talk about the “elite,” they are talking about these types of people, people who control the money supply and its value. Most people glaze over when talking about money. They just want to know that the money they earn can buy them a tank of gas or lunch. They don’t like the meetings in Jackson Hole, where the FOMC meets yearly and geeks out over finance talk. I personally find it all fascinating. I follow the meetings in Jackson Hole, which is where I bought my new Stetson cowboy hat, the white one I have been wearing everywhere these days. I like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, because many important things happen there, and it’s a very nice town. I don’t have a problem with the Fed as long as all the members of the FOMC are like Thomas Hoenig. Actually, I’d want them to be more conservative than him. I think we need a way to manage our money. But we must always watch the kind of people who are in charge of our money. I don’t expect it to be a perfect system. But I don’t expect the Fed to sell us all out as this modern Fed has. And for the monied class to use those mistakes to destroy our country was always the worry. Jackson and Jefferson were right from the beginning.

Ultimately, I think the fix at the minimum due to our current problem will be much more painful than what the country went through when Jackson was president. There will be lots of pain resulting from the Fed’s coming out and the eventual collapse of the asset bubble they have created. The Party of Davos has bet everything on this monied class sell-out by our current Washington D.C. culture. It doesn’t take much imagination to trace everything regarding election fraud, Covid, and the constant press attacks on Trump, the two impeachments, and investigations on the criminals who have been built off these artificially created asset bubbles. Suppose you peel back the curtain on Hillary Clinton’s Durham revelations, or the Biden laptop, or the FBI falling under control of the disptribution of budget money, or the Department of Defense activism into global affairs. In all those cases, you will find at the root of that Hydra of Evil the trillions and trillions of dollars the Fed printed out of thin air that allowed Wall Street to sell as assets to investors in a scam that will prove to be the most significant corruption case in world history. I would advise everyone to cash out their 401k plans now before the bubble bursts because it will. It has to. And the Party of Davos people are hoping that there is some major war in the world that can divert people’s eyes from the matter before they figure it out. Put this statement on your calendars, the Wall Street investment managers could not afford a second Trump term, and now that they know one is coming anyway, they are scrambling in panic. Their sell-out of our country is going to be noticed. 

But for everyone else, they can rest assured that the weakness of the Party of Davos people, people like Larry Fink, who we all have to deal with in some way or another, whether through our investment portfolios or our companies where BlackRock representatives have taken control of management, the biggest fear they have is in the rise of populism, just as it was in Jackson’s day. Trump is a populist, and populism is rising worldwide in reaction to what people see. They may not understand how dangerous this current Federal Reserve asset bubble is to the American economy, and thus, to the rest of the world. But they know that the mysterious “elites” are up to no good, and they instinctively know to be skeptical of them. I don’t think of those people as “elite.” I don’t even think of them as being smart. I know that the Fed doesn’t control the American economy. But the Fed and the government itself are terrified of losing control of their “monied class” in the Beltway. Ultimately, when we talk about draining the swamp, we are talking about taking control of our money from the centralized planners. We will survive that exchange. But they likely won’t, and as they go down in flames, they are going to scream and protest. It will be ugly, but the pain will be felt by those who have made their livings stealing our wealth and using it for their own means.

In populism, the people who actually do all the work will be empowered. And as we deal with the current crises and look forward to Trump being the president again in 2024, while on Biden’s watch, the Fed needs to have its collapse. Larry Fink needs to be shown for the fraud he is, and the Party of Davos needs to have their hands cut off from our money supply which they are using to invoke the world into their domination. It’s time to take our country back, starting with reform at the Fed, with an audit at the very least. And possibly, a complete reconstruction of how we manage the value of our dollar. The members of the FOMC are obviously not able to fight off corruption, and it’s time we start there in properly reforming our country with an American First policy that is defined by our money. And to Hell with the bandits who have been caught trying to rob it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Foreign Power Attacks Ohio’s Energy Grid: The Real story of corruption behind FirstEnergy, The Fed and Mike DeWine

ESG scores (Environmental Social Governance) are for business what CRT (Critical Race Theory) has been for public schools. Once parents found out what the game was in sliding CRT under the door and trying to program their children into outright Marxism using race as the mask, they became enraged and have started the process of retaking control of their public schools. Businesspeople, too are on the cusp of a similar necessity. That is why I have never accepted the FirstEnergy scandal as being what the FBI tried to paint it as. Over the summer of 2021, I watched pretty enraged at a press conference the Ohio FBI had boasting that they had received a settlement from FirstEnergy over a bribery scandal they had been investigating, which involved the Speaker of the GOP House, Larry Householder, and many others. It was a story that put Ohio in the number 1 state for corruption in the entire United States, and Governor Mike DeWine was right in the center of it. The FBI proudly bloviated that FirstEnergy settled the case with $230 million, which they indicated was an admission of guilt. The story for me was always about a much more sinister kind of corruption, one that actually points to ESG scores and environmental wacko policies that are an attack on our infrastructure in America from foreign interests. In this case, it all points back to the Party of Davos, the billionaire types who attack countries without a country of their own and seek to impose politics on those countries that bypass their elections domestically. What these finance companies like BlackRock, Blackstone, and Icahn Capital were doing to the nuclear power capability in Ohio was no different than if a country like China had attacked them with missiles and planes to take them out and destroy our power grid. And here was the FBI helping them do it. And the money for all the power leverage came straight out of the American Federal Reserve, created by Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell over a ten-year period to put money behind ESG rankings to impose climate change politics on us all.

After that FBI press conference, around December of 2021, Blackstone bought up 1 billion dollars in stock, which will put yet another activist investment board member on the Board of Directors at FirstEnergy, which will continue to direct the company toward a zero-emission world, to get their ESG scores at the targeted range. Back in 2019, when this ESG imposition was just becoming a practice, the management of FirstEnergy thought the regulatory burdens were ridiculous as these money management firms were pushing them to implement zero-emission standards. Of course, these requirements come from the United Nations, which are driven by the World Economic Forum, which sets them with Al Gore, Klaus Schwab, and the BlackRock CEO himself, Larry Fink. These are extreme left-wing wackos who wouldn’t get the time of day in a political theater, but when they tie themselves to our money, now suddenly they have all the power in the world. And it is through those methods, FirstEnergy was imposed upon through ESG scores to move their coal and nuclear plants to zero emissions by a ridiculously impossible deadline, which would essentially shut them down. FirstEnergy tried to fight back; they funneled $61 million in donations to the GOP through Larry Householder to protect them from these United Nations standards reflected in the ESG means of measurement. The GOP created House Bill 6 to roll back some of the environmental burdens that were killing companies like FirstEnergy. Suddenly the FBI was busting members of the GOP, but not these radical investment firms connected to the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. They were clearly attacking the American power grid to destroy coal and nuclear and replace them with wind and solar. 

Many of my friends in the House and Senate in Columbus wanted to distance themselves from Larry Householder as he was strung up and ran from his seat. It looked like dirty politics to me, and internal power struggles between Householder and Governor DeWine. But some of the other people who took money from FirstEnergy were never-Trumper types leftover from John Kasich, so there wasn’t much of a desire to fight to defend them in public. But the issue continued to bother me. That year of 2021, my wife and I traveled extensively in the West, everywhere from southern New Mexico and Texas to Montana all the way out to Utah and Idaho. I wanted to get away and think about some of these big things clearly. And during that trip, I saw what many truckers have been talking about, the changes to our country that were happening, with these giant wind farms, everywhere, from Iowa to Texas and everywhere in between. This wind power thing was much more advanced than I had been led to believe. In fact, at the Iowa 80 Truckstop, the largest of its kind in the world, I had a chance to see up close the trucks bringing these massive wind turbine blades to their construction sites. This was an enormous project that was going on everywhere, yet not much discussion was happening about it on the news. How was all this happening? Indeed, Americans weren’t imposing this on themselves. 

Doing a lot of research from then until now, it’s quite clear what has been happening. These wind power farms were not coming from the people of America but from energy companies and states seeking better ESG scores to stay compliant with their shareholders, like Blackstone, Icahn Capital, and of course, BlackRock. And the rate of manufacturing has been consistent with all the money the Fed has been printing through quantitative easing over the last decade, creating a dangerous asset bubble that directly contributed to the rise in power of these money management firms. The leverage and power these gained in managed resources, which allowed them to buy all these stock options, to start controlling these companies at the level of the Board of Directors, came directly from the inflated wealth the Federal Reserve created through their ZIRP policies and quantitative easing. Otherwise, BlackRock would have never had the financial leverage to impose these ESG scores on all these companies. And how convenient was it for Blackstone to buy up $1 billion in stock after the settlement story broke about FirstEnergy driving the price down. And guess who pushed FirstEnergy to settle the case, Icahn Capital. 

So as everyone can see, the story is much more sinister than an Ohio energy company trying to prevent itself from being put out of business by ESG politics that come not from the American government but from the United Nations and the Party of Davos. They sought help from the GOP-controlled House because it was their only option. But obviously, the game was rigged against them from the start. And now we see too late that the United Nations fully intends to close down all coal and nuclear power plants in the country and switch us all over to these solar and wind options. We know from California wind and solar alone is not sufficient for the power needs of our economy. But for the enemies of America, that is kind of the point. These finance companies taking control of these Boards in companies all across America over ESG scores are not on an America First agenda. They seek a zero-emission world and massive wealth redistribution from rich countries to poor ones, where they have already leveraged their financial bets. And we have been the pawns in the game because we have let this attack happen, unchecked completely. 

The actions we can take immediately is to understand how ESG policies became part of our SEC rules, at the Federal and State levels.   Because those rules are directly attacking our business infrastructure from elements outside our county.  We need to remove those ESG policies, legislatively.  From there, we need to stop our Fed from funding Wall Street so that an open door to foreign investment can flow money into the backdoor of our country and buy our political system behind our backs destroying our vote through finance and attacking the very heart of our republic without a single shot fired by military aggression.  Make no mistake about it, it’s a war just the same. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why You Must Always Be Ready: The biggest secret in the world

In the video above, I answer a question that I get asked a lot, “what’s in the backpack?” Well, I carry that backpack with me everywhere. When I’m not at my house, it’s always nearby. And of course, watching the video, you will quickly see what’s in it, my .500 magnum, which is one of my conceal carry guns. And additionally, that backpack is heavily armored. If someone shoots at me from behind, or even from another direction, I can have a way to absorb the bullet harmlessly and take away the danger. It’s a big pack for that reason; it covers a lot more body area. Then hearing that the next question is, “why do you feel you have to be so well-armed and to defend yourself so heavily?”

Most people would be happy with some little Glock tucked in their pants. But not me. I want to be ready for a small war, and there is a good reason for it. I put those thoughts into my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which has become highly relevant in the early years of 2020. When I was writing that book, I knew that it would stir up trouble, and it has. To my mind, it’s the good kind. But one thing is for sure; you don’t have to go out into the world looking for trouble. Trouble will come to find you, and for all kinds of reasons. The main reason is that the world’s bureaucracies were all built to conceal a dark truth about human nature. They were built to conceal laziness and the unambitious, which is in the majority. Everyone wants a trophy for success, but not everyone wants to do the work to become the best at something. And when people discover they can’t loot off you for their own efforts to make them their own, then they seek to get rid of you in any way possible to erase your memory from their minds. And that is why it’s important to be well-armed and always ready for trouble when it comes looking for you.

While I was writing The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business a few years ago, I had a confrontation with a consultant from a very expensive and powerful firm that teaches Lean Techniques worldwide to the biggest corporations that there are. When he found out that I had my own theories on process improvement and that I took exception to his constant beratement of “shooting from the hip,” as if it was a reckless assertion toward productivity, he became irate when he discovered I was writing that book. “what are you going to say that hasn’t been already said, the field is crowded with opinions on process improvement. Pick your poison and get with the program.” My response was, “well, I want to create a system that doesn’t involve poison, something that is more reflective of what is really going on in the world.” That’s when he lost it and pretty much swore himself to be my enemy, which didn’t work out very well for him. There was no provocation to try to make the guy mad. He went there on his own. It was the realization that a kind of scam was being exposed that he secretly feared was the real issue. And ultimately, this secret is a big problem out there in the world. I knew it was, but watching some of the violent reactions that played out, knowing that the secret would be put into a book I was writing, was just too much for him, and many, many others. 

The truth of the matter is what I said in the video when people find out they can’t steal from your efforts to hide their own lazy and unproductive natures; they actively seek to eliminate you from the discussion, whether it’s cancel culture, outright violence, social ostracization—whatever means they can come up with. And we are seeing that play out on a mass scale these days in business, politics, media, and even neighborhood soccer games. It’s everywhere. But what’s worse for them is when you don’t care, and you don’t need what they offer, which is kinship in a team environment. At that point, everything they have ever been taught turns out to be a lie, and they can’t handle that knowledge. There is a great yearning in the world for nobility and individualized respect. While traveling all over the world, I have found that when people see those elements in you, they often pay reverence instantly. People crave the kind of individualization that evolved in American culture and, ultimately, American business. But there have been many who have shaped this European collectivist mindset into global affairs and have evolved a kind of socialism during international trade that has found its way into every aspect of business. And the big secret was to hide the incompetency of the many from the eyes of the few. So when people often criticized me for “shooting from the hip,” they meant that I should always sit down and consult with others to figure out the best next step. Even if my idea ended up being the way to go, the bureaucrats wanted to believe that they had some hand in the process and wanted to share credit for the endeavor. But to a person like me, that all takes too long, so I cut them out and take my shots without them, which denies them of the theft, which makes people angry, very angry, for being exposed. That’s why I carry the backpack, and it has come in handy often. 

After dealing with that guy, and many others like him over the years, I felt it would be good to address the process improvement problems that all businesses have, especially these days with all the woke problems that are entering our places of employment. There are many great techniques for process improvement out there, but most of them never address the real elephant in the room. What makes people corrupt, and why do they intentionally sabotage process flow in a business? I often point to the time clock, even the salary people, and say, “look how quickly they leave for the day.” Their minds were never on their work; they just collect their paychecks and associated with other people waiting for someone else to do something. They are too lazy to do things independently and often leave all the heavy work for the few with a mind to do it. And there is no fancy consultant class that can address that issue. To deal with that, we must deal with the real problem that sits at the heart of all process improvement needs, the lack of human capital and raw individualized leadership. That is why I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, to empower the types of people who really do all the work and to prevent those who get in the way from doing so. And also to explain that consensus building and teamwork are only distractions away from productivity. In the world we have today, it is the few who make everything happen and the many who try to hide behind those exploits and take credit for them as their own. If you let them take that credit, they will love you. But if you don’t, they will do everything in their power to get rid of you, even if it means killing you any way they can. Sometimes they become so jealous that their minds lose all reason, and their thoughts become a Shakespeare play. And the only way to have real peace is to carry a backpack like the one I do and make sure that their intentions do not become your reality.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Iniquitous Intent at Disney: When it comes to ‘The Book of Boba Fett,’ it’s all about a “Return to the Primitive”

It may seem iniquitous, but when you know a subject very well, it’s easy to see the changes over time and trace those changes to particular injunctions that contributed to a demise. And that is precisely what I saw as I looked at an earnings report for Disney stock and noticed how many shares BlackRock owned recently, then saw episode 7 of the new Book of Boba Fett on the Disney+ streaming service. The imprint of Larry Fink and his fellow board members of the World Economic Forum was unmistakable. Additionally, I used to write screenplays, and I have a good understanding of the politics of movie-making. When I was a young guy, I had several projects that won screenwriting awards at film festivals and made the circulation around Wilshire Blvd selling them, so I’ve been told more than once by the people of finance, “he who owns the gold rules.” So, I sympathize with what Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau, and even the original creator, George Lucas, went through to make this new show. They tried to do with The Book of Boba Fett, an original character from the old movies, bold and ambitious things. But at the end of the series, Star Wars fans were left feeling shortchanged. That’s the standard review of the show now that it’s completed, and a year of waiting left fans flat and looking for much more. It had some good stuff in it, but the overall message was filled with wokeness, and to my eyes, it points back to the owner of BlackRock owning too much stock in Disney and dictating creatively what ends up on the screen. I’ve seen it before in much smaller ways, and that is certainly the case with what is going on at Disney these days.

My review of The Book of Boba Fett is that its space meets Dances with Wolves. Clearly, the current makers of Star Wars projects, specifically Filoni and Favreau, used to enjoy playing with Star Wars figures, as I did. We are all kind of the same age, and when it comes to Star Wars, we just want to put what we wanted to see as kids on screen. Most people who watch these Disney+ shows and go to the modern movies feel that way; it’s more about childhood nostalgia than what is actually good about it. So it was strange to see the gunslinging bounty hunter from the classic film The Empire Strikes Back, running around in half the show dancing with Tusken Raiders around a campfire, acting like some hunter and gatherer. The purpose of the entire show became quite clear by episode 7, where Boba Fett and another bounty hunter called Cad Bane had a gunfight duel to the death, which was the ultimate climax and apparent purpose for putting the whole thing together. But this is where things get iniquitous, and the influence of BlackRock and other forces come into play. The show’s creators wanted to put on film what they thought about as kids, a gunfight with Boba Fett and some ultimate gunslinger. Woke Disney, essentially not run by Bob Chapek but by the owners of the most stock options, such as Vanguard and BlackRock, changed the story’s nature to reflect real-world tactical goals for global domination. That is clear by what Larry Fink puts in his ultra-liberal letters to CEOs showing the woke parameters for which the show must be done. 

When people ask, “what’s wrong with Star Wars,” well, I would point to the loss of ownership of George Lucas, who over time have listened to people like Larry Fink more in his old age than he would have like a 20 to 30-year-old. Star Wars was about standing up to people like Larry Fink, not being told what to do by them. So now that extreme characters of progressive causes are calling the shots on the finance end and sticking their nose into the creative process of the much more woke Disney than it ever has been before, Star Wars comes out as if Darth Vader made the movies instead of Luke Skywalker. I could recite the production meetings as if I had been there when the pitch for The Book of Boba Fett was made to Disney executives who had an eye toward stock prices and the massive control BlackRock has on it. “You want to make a Disney+ show about a villain from the original movies to win over the fans from all the mistakes that Kathy Kennedy has so far made? Well, you’ll have to make the bad guy into a good guy and to do that, we must make him identifiable with indigenous people, which parallels the gunfighter against the Indian in American history.” So from there, the show’s writers had to figure out a way to get their big gunfight with Boba Fett and Cad Bane done in a way that made the show sympathetic to Disney’s woke needs to stabilize their stock price. Ultimately, they had to make Larry Fink happy, and to do that; Boba Fett had to Return to the Primitive.

Fans feel shortchanged because the whole thing was out of character for Boba Fett. When he finally had his gunfight with Cad Bane, the bad guy beat Boba Fett to the draw not just once but twice. That meant that Boba Fett had to rely on the new skills he learned from the Tusken Raiders to defeat Bane with a Gaffi Stick in the end. It was like a gun duel with an Indian (native American), and the Indian winning with a bow and arrow. Undoubtedly, a hidden message implied that primitive traditions are superior to technology and that, ultimately, the West will fall to tribal unity. Again, I know this subject very well; I just wrote a book called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because I run into people like Larry Fink all over the world. They have been trying to promote China, indigenous people of all kinds constantly over the technology of the West for years. Such an assumption is at the center of Lean Manufacturing. And of course, Disney couldn’t have given me a better example of why I felt the differences between the West and the East needed to be pointed out in business transactions. The message behind The Book of Boba Fett was that in the end, to be the good guy and to beat the bad guy, the classic Star Wars villain had to learn to embrace the primitive tribes of Tatooine, the scary Tuskin Raiders. But in the original movies from 1977, the Tuskin Raiders were thought of as villains. That basic flip of the script is why people are so upset with the Disney-owned Star Wars productions instead of what George Lucas produced on his own originally. Once you start worrying about stock prices, woke politics, and the letters to the CEOs from Larry Fink, what you end up with is a bunch of garbage nobody wants. But suppose Disney wants to keep their stock price up. In that case, they have to do what The World Economic Forum tells them to do, and that is to bring down the West and to sell those asset bubbles to China, where their new world order will emerge under a communist flag and a foot on western civilization that is meant to choke it off, forever. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Disney’s ‘Eternals’ is All About Guys Kissing and Abortion: How people like Larry Fink are ruining the world

More news sites don’t talk about things like this one does due to freedom; I am freer than most anybody who would write an article like this, so the information never gets out. In most cases, everyone has a master, which is undoubtedly the case with Disney. After a horribly progressive movie like the Eternals, Disney is the obvious target for criticism. The same with how they have handled Star Wars. It’s easy to get mad at the traditional family company without realizing all the Woke politics that are going on behind the scenes, which are literally ruining the world, starting in America with our art and entertainment. To understand why Eternals is such a terrible movie, you have to understand the latest stock report of Disney, where they had a record-breaking quarter to close out the year. Yes, more people than ever are flocking to the amusement parks in Florida. People have been locked down with Covid, and they want to get out there and spend money on something, anything. So attendance is up. The new Spiderman movie was great, a Marvel production that ultimately boosted interest in the Disney + streaming service. Some things make the stock price look attractive, so the shareholders are happy and empowered to continue to do something as they have, which produced the disaster Eternals with all the arrogance that Woke culture could muster. However, I’m in a position where I am free to have an objective opinion about Disney, one that most in the industry just can’t because the money flow they need to live is controlled by the elements that are killing Disney, despite the smoke and mirrors that come through on the stock report. Disney is an asset bubble that is poised to burst, and the evidence is in the movie Eternals, which is now streaming on Disney + for all to see.

The top stock owners of the Disney Company are the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street Corporation, and Morgan Stanley. Vanguard, for instance, owns 137,572,834 shares of Disney stock. BlackRock, with all the Woke advocacy strategies of Larry Fink, owns 119,795,456. The shares go down to the local buyer who just wants to pad their investment portfolio with some entertainment options. But when you understand that these large investment firms believe they are too big to fail and control the world’s governments through finance, they become the next generation of tyrants on earth clawing for power. And in the case of Larry Fink, who comes up a lot these days when talking about all things Woke, we have to address the issue as a menace that has not been on anybody’s radar up to this point. Nobody talks about it because they most always have some financial stake in the company, like Disney. Even though the actual controls come from shareholder pressure, Disney doesn’t care about the ordinary people who might buy a few hundred shares of stock and post negative reviews about Eternals on some social media platform. The Board of Directors and ultimately the CEO Bob Chapek care about what BlackRock thinks about what they make, and when it comes to Eternals or Star Wars, the garbage that ends up on screen is precisely what Larry Fink wants. A Woke message that will poison the West and destroy it for consumption, China intends to take over the world and restore itself as the dominant power. Something they think about a lot and have people like Larry Fink to be their flaming arrows of warfare at the helm of all finance which ultimately controls everything. Bob Chapek may make a lot of money as Disney’s CEO, but he is not free to have an opinion on the matter. When BlackRock calls, or Vanguard, he does what they tell him because one thing Bob can’t afford to see happen is a quarter to quarter slide of the Disney stock price. And if Larry is displeased with the level of Wokeness coming out of Disney, then BlackRock could dump its stock and send Disney tumbling with a massive sell-off. And that would be the end of Bob Chapek, so ultimately, that is why the movie Eternals was so terrible. 

I had high hopes for Eternals. I had wanted to see it at the theater. Generally, the Marvel movies are great, so a film about some beings who inhabit the universe like white blood cells in a body and are born from planets seemed like a cool premise. But sadly, the whole point of the movie was to show guys kissing and to drag a nearly three-hour movie into an event of torture as it was a bunch of dysfunctional characters of all nationalities arguing over dumb things to ultimately have an abortion at the end of the movie to save the earth. The whole point of the Eternals was a kind of metaphor on abortion; to save mother earth, we had to kill the baby, the Eternal that was being born from it and was the point of 7000 years of human evolution. For the Eternal to be born, mankind had to create culture, which then fed the baby as it grew in the egg of the earth. So in that way, the Eternals became a vehicle for all the modern progressive causes that people don’t like, yet it was crammed down their throats with this monstrously bad film. The movie wasn’t about entertaining the audience; it was about forcing progressive politics down the viewers’ throats who thought they were showing up to watch the latest Marvel offering. And what they got was essentially the strategy of Larry Fink, large doses of progressive ideology that they thought would open the door to a modern political platform that embraced gay rights and forever abortions. The decision at the end of the movie to kill the Eternal so to save “Mother Earth” is so evident that it’s almost like sitting in an abortion clinic with a daughter who wants to kill a grandchild so that they can go clubbing later that night and not have the burden of being pregnant. It was bad, bad stuff. 

Yet Disney is the company that gets all the shots of criticism, and it will be Bob Chpeck who gets lacerated at the shareholder meetings if he doesn’t come up with some way to make Blackrock happy. The everyday people willing to spend $10,000 on a Disney vacation package in Orlando get ignored. Disney was built on solid Main Street traditional American values for the people who go to the parks, so they are willing to spend the money. But people like Larry Fink don’t really care about the money they make in their investment firms. They care about the power they have amassed through finance to control the creative process at companies like Disney, and it’s in that way that Eternals even found a way to make it onto a screen, and ultimately the Disney + streaming platform. Eternals breaks all movie-making rules and presents everything they don’t want into a movie to audiences. But the arrogance of Disney shows more than just a bad movie; it’s an assumption that the path of least resistance runs through the audience and not through BlackRock and Vanguard. Ultimately, who controls what Disney produces isn’t the fans, it’s the investment firms, and those investment firms feel empowered to impose Woke politics onto our culture at every opportunity. And Eternals was so bad that it’s almost a dare for the public to rebuke it. Otherwise, Larry Fink and the investment hounds beyond the stock prices will crush each and every one of us, or so they think unless we do and say everything they want, without a thought.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

China’s Attack of America Through the Tyranny of Safety: Most of Cincinnati called off work over a little snow

I always hate to see mass call-offs of work when there is a significant storm or some other weather emergency. To me, it’s a distinctly American thing to work hard, work more than eight silly little hours a day, and work weekends. I have worked well over 24 hours per day when it’s called for, and I’ve spent many years working seven days a week. Of course, I have slept when needed, but I have never understood people who don’t get going when the going gets tough. There is something very un-American about calling off work and sitting around in your pajamas when productive things need to be done. When I was a kid, I was the one who had perfect attendance in school. And as an adult, I am always the one who never calls off. I have worked through severe injuries, including three times when I had bones sticking out of my hands. I always finished my shift and got stitched up later. I superglued my skin together to get through the rest of the work period to stop the bleeding. When I’ve had major surgeries that I was told would keep me in bed for months, I returned on the next available workday after and pushed myself to recover within a few weeks completely. When it has snowed too much to drive a car, I have ridden motorcycles and bicycles to work, whatever worked. And if I got to work and felt it better to stay until the weather cleared, I always have done so, as long as it takes, so the work that needed to get done always got done. So, on February 3rd, 2022, a snowstorm hit the Cincinnati area. Most of the city decided to call off work based purely on what the weather people said on television; it made me sick and reminded me of the real meaning of the war we are in with China. 

One of my favorite chapters in my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the chapter titled “The Tyranny of Safety.” When I wrote that book, I felt some things needed to be addressed in American business that was being ignored. Yet, every company everywhere wanted to know the secret sauce to success and how to unlock it within their work cultures. I am a practitioner of all the trade’s modern Lean tools and process improvement tricks. But due to my long experience and work history, even plowing through injuries to get a competitive advantage over a rival, whether they be domestic or some foreign power, nobody wants to deal with the elephant in the room that China set out years ago to destroy the West. They mean to do it by attacking us through every little measure of safety protocol that can be imagined. They don’t follow their own safety initiatives, which have flowed down through WHO, the UN, and into the CDC. Just as they don’t follow climate initiatives, they push us to follow them to commit economic suicide in their favor. The Chinese have intended to get us in the West to play by different rules than they do, and they have done so by getting us to fall for Wokeness, Climate Change, and Workplace Safety. They have spent a lot of money buying up politicians that would sell these attitudes to the public, in media that would strike fear in all who watch and listen to their programming over every little snowstorm.   Their goal has been to get us to work less so that China could catch up to American GDP and eventually overtake it within this decade. That is the emphatic goal of China and the world in general. Whenever I see massive call-offs over snowstorms and other weather-related issues, it makes it very apparent that China is attacking us in a worse way than with the use of any military. 

When I say that all labor unions are communist organizations, I mean it—every single one of them. Labor unions trace back to the start of Karl Marx and all his followers through the early 20th century, and we can’t help but talk about Chinese communism as we see the impact of their strategy of work stoppages. Communists everywhere want to see less work to leverage the money generated. The current supply chain problems in the United States are caused by China restricting its supply and the labor unions at the shipping ports refusing to work harder and longer to unload what’s coming in. Why, well, Covid is the new global snowstorm that communists have used to get people to call off work and stay home. And remember, China made the virus, and they did so for this very reason, to slow the world down to catch up economically. It wasn’t so much to kill people but to kill economic activity. I was at Kroger right before the snowstorm came through Cincinnati, and the shelves were mostly wiped out. Add to that the problem of supply chain issues on imports, and what we have are communist unions and communist countries who are trying to slow down the engine of our country for their own benefit. 

After two years of Covid, people have become used to calling off work over everything, making this 2022 snowstorm different from past snowstorms. This time, the media culture that had been scaring everyone to death over Covid had their ear when they cried about ice and snow hitting the Midwest, and people were calling off work before they even got up and gave it a try to get to their employers. They just gave up without much of a whimper, and that is the work of the powers against productivity that are well at war with America’s can-do spirit and have been for centuries now. The way to beat America is to convince it to stay home and not be productive while the rest of the world works and churns out their widgets at a maddening pace. China is making a show of playing lockdown with Covid, but you can bet they won’t sacrifice a dollar of GDP to it. But America has found itself crippled by the value of safety over productivity as a new measure. Productivity is now viewed as reckless, while staying home, staying safe, and staying unproductive is now promoted by our governments as a virtue. The terrible governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, was quick to announce on the news that people should stay off the roads, let the government workers do their jobs, make it easy for them to keep the roads clear, to hell with the production needs of our society. Whether it’s snow or Covid, the message from the government is, all the same, it’s an act of God, and we don’t control God. So yield to the more powerful powers than us, including the almighty centralized government.

Nobody is saying that we should have an unsafe society. That is the point in my book.   But safety is not about staying home and hiding; it’s about being skilled and competent. And if people don’t have those skills, they need to work hard to get them. That is the American way. But this “safe” way preached in our industrial compliance culture these days does not come from our need for safety. Still, foreign desires to slow down America and ultimately control our output with many communist tentacles that ultimately extend back to China in almost every way imaginable, where money flows in the bloodstream of an unseen monster, is a real threat to all that is good. Yes, China’s war machine is “safety,” and it flows down to us through our bought and paid for governments for the strategy of stopping American productivity. Every time people stay home from work over conditions of concerned safety, that is what is happening. We see the actions of war and our inability to meet the foe where they live and strike back. Because too many people are hiding from the snow, the rain, and every cut finger because they believe the experts without knowing who really controls those experts. It’s war from China for sure, just not the kind of war people expect to see. The way to beat western capitalism from the view of the orient is to convince them to stay home, not to work, and get used to a big government check, while the communist Chinese surpass America in every way imaginable.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trick or Treat in February at Lakota: Darbi Boddy wants to remove masks and give parents freedom of choice, the LEA wants to impeach her over it

The Union Wants to Impeach the School Board over Mask Freedom

I watched the school board videos from January’s Lakota meetings several times, and I still think they are very good. But apparently, the mask police at Lakota is so insulted by Darbi Boddy’s proposal to remove mask mandates from the Lakota school culture and give parents the right to choose has caused the LEA union to begin proposing talk of impeaching the young school board member. During the last meeting, you would think it was trick or treat at Lakota as the mask lovers got up and left while Darbi was talking, obviously meaning to show her disrespect. But none of that is a surprise. This has been a problem for a long time at Lakota, where the inmates run the asylum. Actually, that’s how it is in most public schools, the unions run everything, and the school boards get sucked into believing their goal in life is to show uniformity. I would argue that the point of having five members on a board is to fight it out and debate to convince two other voters to either approve or deny a resolution. The goal of a school board is not to get along but to run the business of a local school the way our “republic” was designed. And to me, that’s what I see happening. This was Darbi’s second meeting, and she’s very passionate. There are a lot of high expectations behind those who went door to door for her to win, and she feels the need to get there and get something done instead of just being another bobblehead on a school board. She ran on getting rid of masks in the schools, as other schools have done around the state of Ohio. So short of getting more comfortable with the rules of school board business and not feeling like a sell-out for doing so, I am more than happy with how the Lakota school board is functioning for the first time in three decades. 

I know people are wondering, especially the sweat bees from the teacher’s union, what my relationship is with all this. Just remember what some of those same people who are all stirred up over Darbi, what they did to me about ten years ago in the parking lot of Kroger by Lakota East. Julie Shaffer played her role in that along with Joan Powell and many other tax increase supporters back then. So now is not the time to play innocent. I’ll stay mad over that forever; I will never forget. But that isn’t the fault of the current crop of kids moving through Lakota or many of the characters who are now involved that want to make the public school work for the benefit of the area’s parents. It took Lynda O’Conner more than a decade to win me over to believing that she was a Republican. I know her to be a very good one now. But I used to be so angry at the Lakota school board that everyone on it was what I thought were scum bag liberals. It took seeing Lynda at many GOP events over the last several years that I learned that Lynda was one of the good people. We have very different ideas about the worth of public education. She really believes in Lakota and is hopeful about public schools’ role in all our lives. I personally want to blow it all up, metaphorically, as a concept given to us by the significant progressive loser, John Dewey. I had been asked to run for school board many times, but that just wouldn’t be fair. We all pay taxes to the school, right or wrong; I’m happy to not get in the way if people like Lynda who want to fix it to the best of their ability. I’m also happy to offer solutions or help people who want to be part of the solution find their way to the school board by helping connect all the right dots. But for me personally, I’m all about getting rid of the Dewey system completely. 

Lynda and I usually agree to disagree on education, and when we see each other, we talk about other things besides school board business. Usually, we have a shared interest in GOP-related topics locally and nationally. If we talk about school board items for too long, I quickly blow it all up intellectually, while she desperately wants to save it. I tell that little story to those who are wondering, which are quite a few people these days. And I can also relate to the problems that new school board members like Darbi and Isaac Adi are feeling now that they are inside. It’s empowering to help be a part of the solution. The rules of the game are there to make it something of a functioning republic, and most of the time, no single person gets it their way all the way.

In Darbi’s case over this mask resolution issue, it’s her job to get two other votes on the board to support her. Many people backing her might think it’s a sell-out to work with people on the board. But they aren’t on the board. It’s tough, at best, to represent so many people and still do what you think is right. I have a policy that I do not pick up the phone, or text anybody ever, like Sheriff Jones might do, to never put my hand on the scales and threaten people to vote a certain way. I would never call up Lynda and tell her that I wouldn’t like her anymore if she didn’t vote the way I wanted her to. I believe firmly in finding people who want to do a job correctly and putting them in power to do that job. I may not always like what they do, but they should know more than me about it in a republic, which is why they are my representative there. You must trust the people you vote for to do the ultimate right thing and always keep the big picture in mind. If they don’t, then you vote them out. That’s the way the game works. 

But for the teacher’s union at Lakota, they already don’t like Darbi because they can’t imagine how they might get her under control and intimidated by their presence. That is something they have been doing for years, threatening school board candidates first with the offerings of friendship but then taking away that civility if they step out of line. That was what was implied by them walking out on Darbi in the second meeting of the year while she was speaking. I can understand not liking what Darbi was saying. It may not be their politics. But if they really wanted to understand what’s going on in the district, they would know that Darbi represents people in Lakota who think worse of public education than I do. I’m a moderate on the issue, believe me, there are lots of people who hate it far worse, and to them, Lynda might as well be Satan incarnate because she doesn’t put everyone on trial and burn them at the stake. Nobody will ever make everyone happy, but what we want is for good people to do good work on behalf of the kids and taxpayers who are stuck paying many thousands of dollars a year for this ridiculous product. And there isn’t a lot of tolerance for these teachers’ union shenanigans. As Issac and Darbi get more acquainted with the conduct of these school board meetings and the agreed rules of the game, they will get better. But so far, these meetings are what I think all school boards should look like. They may be a little bumpy. But I’ve never liked a lot of hand-holding, especially when millions of dollars are at stake and many lives are impacted. And for those who are used to bullying their way into a one-sided argument, well, those days are over.  

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Sheriff Jones Endorses the Governor of the Most Corrupt State in America: A solution to the stupidity of Mike DeWine

Another Reason Corruption is Good to See

This is precisely why I value the measurement of corruption, which I talk about extensively in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. For the last several weeks, people around me have been asking, “what is going on with our great Sheriff Jones” the Butler County figure that is internationally known for his support of President Trump. Suddenly he has thrown his support to Governor Mike DeWine and made a whole lot of other flip flop decisions that seem ultimately at odds with the MAGA movement. So there is a bit of a panic on the matter, which I have explained as a form of corruption that must be accounted for to understand the decision-making process of Sheriff Jones. Corruption isn’t always just about money, but in the case of Jones and DeWine, without a Trump in the White House, many in the Republican Party are drifting back into the cave of power for the sake of it, and that is why we are seeing rifts forming ahead of the Ohio primary coming up in May of 2022. Unless we have a way of understanding the nature of corruption, we would otherwise have no other means of comprehending these strange behaviors. Trump has at least three more years before he’ll have a chance to be back in the White House. Naturally, Jones must align himself to the world between now and then. Yes, he is perfectly willing to adjust his beliefs to the power void that has formed in Trump’s wake, and from his point of view, the smart money points at the current governor of Ohio, the most corrupt state in all of the United States, Mike DeWine. 

As all this is going on, the challenging governor and my pick for the upcoming primary, Jim Renacci, is up 8 points over the incumbent DeWine. I had the opportunity to listen to Mike DeWine on many conference calls during the Covid mishap that his administration unleashed on Ohio. I have seen behind the veil just what an idiot DeWine was. I voted for him in the last election because he called himself a Republican. What I heard during the government-imposed shutdowns was a complete fool out of touch with reality. One moment in particular that impacted me was when I had to listen to Cedar Fair Amusements in May of 2020 try to explain their problem to DeWine about the trouble with not knowing when they could open their amusement parks because they had to hire, prepare their parks, and take all kinds of measures to get ready for a summer season that government had destroyed, and couldn’t give any guidance going forward. As a right-to-life governor, DeWine had put the pro-abortion Obama activist Amy Acton as head of his Health Department. She was running the state the way a stringy-haired pot-smoking hippie would run it, which was costing the business community billions of dollars during a lockdown over Covid that nobody could see the end of, especially Cedar Fair Amusements who ran a seasonal operation in two Ohio locations. It was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and DeWine wouldn’t commit to anything to help them out. That was pretty much what DeWine said to everyone on those many teleconferences concerned over their businesses. His message was, we’re the government, and we’ll tell you when and what you can do and how long you can do it, and you’ll like it. Mike DeWine showed himself to be just as bad as the worst of Democrats during his first three years in office, and what he has done to Ohio will take decades to fix. So for me, it’s easy; Jim Renacci is the answer to the Mike DeWine debacles of the first term in office as governor.  DeWine has been a disaster.

Sheriff Jones has been something of a thorn in DeWine’s side while Trump was in office. DeWine was one of the first in the country to attempt mask mandates leading all other governors to the mandate first, just as he did with lockdowns. Without DeWine, many other governors only fantasized about it. DeWine was the first to do it. He was also the first to unconstitutionally alter election laws which would then pave the way for massive cheating that the Democrats would perform later that year with mail-in voting to remove Trump from office before the courts could even process the assault. Sheriff Jones, who advertised himself as a “pro Trump” member of law enforcement, suddenly endorsed DeWine for governor after all that DeWine had done to Ohio. Why? Well, the first thing is that the DeWine money machine is kicking in. Corruption and DeWine are never far from each other, and Sheriff Jones is always attracted to a kind of power. I’ve known Sheriff Jones for several years and what’s most valuable to him is his brand. For instance, when his brand is aligned with the Trump White House, it’s a wonderful thing. But I’ve seen it negatively align with big government union business, especially in 2013 when he backed the Lakota school tax increase, which he put his name behind to get it to pass by the most narrow of margins. So the Sheriff isn’t always a hard conservative; he just plays one on TV and in public appearances. And with Biden in the White House for the foreseeable future and Jones up in years himself, he needs to protect his brand while the political world sets itself in a new reality. 

What does Sheriff Jones like to do with his brand? Well, we have seen what he did to Thomas Hall, an Ohio Representative from Middletown who didn’t vote the way that the Sheriff wanted him to vote in Columbus, so the Sheriff used his name to berate the young man on WLW radio to thousands of people, personally attacking Thomas. Nobody elected Sheriff Jones to control other members of congress that we have elected to vote on our behalf. The Sheriff is supposed to take care of law enforcement concerns, not to dictate the terms of how other Republicans vote in our community by bullying them to his will. As a reaction to Thomas, the Sheriff went out of his way to put a primary candidate up against the Ohio Rep by dragging Matt King into the race, which naturally was pitting Republicans against Republicans on purpose for the intention of getting his way and making his point as being the “king maker” of the party, which put all kinds of people into a difficult position. Sheriff Jones didn’t care. He just wanted to show who had the power and what they had to do to kiss the ring to appease him, to hell what the voters of Butler County thought about the matter. That is why Jones had to align with Mike DeWine. Even though the governor is known to be attached to corruption, that power overflow gives Sheriff Jones the power to his brand that feeds his need to stay relevant as a man coming to the end of his career. Jones doesn’t have time to wait for Trump to be back in the White House. The need for power is always present, and DeWine is the quickest way to keep it. 

Now, of course, Jones would never admit to any of this. I’ve spoken to dozens and dozens of people affected by this situation, and they don’t know what to think about it. They feel betrayed and don’t have the words to put to the matter. That is why I like corruption so much, because if we didn’t have some way to measure corruption, no matter what form it exists, we wouldn’t have a way to explain this behavior. From his big labor union perspective, everyone thinks they are doing right; Jones thinks he’s doing what’s right for the Republican Party. He’s a moderate at best, and Thomas Hall has turned out to be way too Trump for his taste, so he is taking action. DeWine loved the way Amy Acton’s hair smelled after she took a shower, so he gave her the keys to Ohio and let her destroy it. As a long-married guy who is a closet Democrat, DeWine thought Acton knew what she was doing, so he defended her against all those evil business leaders who were outraged that DeWine and Acton had closed them down over Covid. DeWine showed himself to be an idiot who thought he was doing right. That’s why we have elections so that when we learn these things about people, we can get rid of them with an option, in this case, Jim Renacci. But honestly, there is only one right, not the right that Sheriff Jones comes up with, or his new buddy, Mike DeWine. But in our Republic, for it ever to really stand, it takes the taxpayers and respect for their vote. If they pick Thomas Hall, it’s not for Sheriff Jones to decide otherwise. Or for DeWine to attempt to hide four years of horrible management of Ohio behind one deal from Intel worth 20 billion dollars and to ride it like a bucking bronco at a rodeo. Corruption seeks to hide its misdeeds behind a façade that, if you know what you are looking at, can tell you the truth about the matter and allow voters to understand who they are getting involved with. And that is why corruption is a lot better to understand than to pretend like it doesn’t exist at all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Want to Know Why We Aren’t Using Ivermectin to Treat Covid: Read Ayn Rand’s ‘Anthem’ to understand

More so than before Trump was in office, Ayn Rand’s work has absolute power in identifying who the enemy of our modern times is and what can be done to defeat them. Before Trump, there were many considerations, and nobody really knew whether or not the American Constitution would hold up under the Obama presidency. But now we know it will. Trump was a good, Constitutional president, and he showed the world just how powerful America could be if it followed its Constitution. It took him essentially just a few years, even under great fire, to fix many things that had been long paralyzing our country from the countless attacks that came from those unnamed enemies over the last century. Even with all their efforts, America could snap back into good effect quickly, and that is what we learned with Trump, historically. So now that we have seen the Constitution tested authentically, we can now turn our attention to the enemies and understand them and their motives so we can eradicate them from our lives. And to do that, I can’t think of a better writer, or creative person, in all human history that has put their hand on who that enemy to humanity is than Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand is the Holy Water to evil in the world. They hate her, and for great reason. But she is very much a product of American culture. Specifically, under this current Biden administration, the most significant authority of what is wrong with the kind of people who want to end America. And of all her works, I would say that her book Anthem, from 1938, is the best at showing who those enemies are and what they want to drive us all to, and I’d recommend everyone to read it now.

I read many books; it’s one of my favorite things to do. I’ve read Brave New World, Animal Farm,and 1984. I’ve spoken a lot about the novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward from 1888, which projected a socialist utopia across the world. These are all dystopian novels that many consider irrefutable classics in literature, and they have gone to a great measure to shape our modern world and our opinions about authority and government. But a better and more hopeful dystopian novel has never been written than Ayn Rand’s Anthem. I’ve read all her books many times, and I don’t think there is a better novel of this type out there. Anthem isn’t very long; you can easily read it in an afternoon. But its scope and story are undoubtedly influential and insightful. As a Russian immigrant who suffered greatly under communism and retreated to America for a safe haven, Ayn Rand took her unique perspective and passion and translated it into this magnificent masterpiece. And even though at this point it is nearly 100 years old, it is as relevant today as it was then, perhaps more so. I tend to think that everyone knows these books until I hear the constant complaints by many regarding Covid protocols and the lack of use of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin to treat the virus, and I say to them, “didn’t you read Anthem? That’s what the whole book was about?” Of course, the look I get back is mystification. “What’s Anthem?”

Essentially the point of the book is that a future society has regressed along the Vico Cycle back to a theocratic society that has retreated to a time before technological invention. A village council of wise people called the Council of Candlemakers spent 50 years inventing and getting it approved, the great new technology of making candles. The lead character, who has never known anything about the world like the rest of society, but social collectivism, doesn’t even have an understanding of the word “I” or “me.” Yet through a series of accidents, he discovers a lightbulb deep in a tunnel that has been hidden from the world hundreds of years in the past, perhaps even thousands. And upon discovering the light bulb (again), he takes it to the Council of Candlemakers, expecting them to be thankful. But what he finds instead are a bunch of threatened people who have spent their whole life inventing the candle and sharing it with the world. The lightbulb would destroy their power and prestige in their community which has far more power to them than the convenience of using lightbulbs over candles in that particular society. Many before Covid came along couldn’t understand such a reference. But now, they have seen it firsthand. Ivermectin is that modern lightbulb that the health authority class is threatened by. They want power and control, not a solution to Covid, and there you have it; we have the evidence of the villains in Anthem, except clearly now in real life in a way that people can understand. 

The book, as I said, is very easy to read. It’s short. But to make things even easier for new readers, or even old readers of Ayn Rand, The Atlas Society back in 2018 turned Anthem into a graphic novel, which was then turned into a series of videos that were easy to watch. Eighteen episodes will take viewers through the entire book. When The Atlas Society did this work, Trump was in the White House, so I guess the effort went unnoticed. People had an Ayn Rand character in the White House, and people dropped off interest a bit because of it in this kind of reading material. Ayn Rand was very popular during the Obama presidency. Now that Biden is in the White House, which continues that “enemy” of America perspective, Ayn Rand is making a comeback. I have had so many people talking to me about Ayn Rand and wanting to know more about her that I decided to do this to make it easier for people to get easy access to all her great works. The difference between now and the past obviously is that Constitutional element. In Ayn Rand’s day, she saw only a gradual erosion until the world would literally be destroyed in the way it was in Anthem. But a hundred years later, the American Constitution is still intact and is working. Of late, the Biden Vaccine mandates have been slapped down by the Supreme Court in a healthy way, so we have survived a lot of trouble since Anthem was written. But understanding the motives of the bad guys is another matter. They are still doing their work, and we now must know what they are after and stop them in the tracks. For that, Anthem will help a lot.

The villains of Ayn Rand’s novels are very much a real thing; we see them every one, in our communities, our national governments, our businesses, and even our families. It can be hard to see them because of the emotion that comes with our relationships with them that can cause us not to want to know the truth. Yet the truth is the truth, and if we really want to solve our modern problems, we must not turn away from it. Literature is a great refuge to get our thoughts together and to seek solutions, and to do that; you must know how to identify the problem. Nobody but Ayn Rand was better at articulating that problem, and Anthem is a masterwork of hers that everyone should read. And to make it as easy as possible, the graphic novel videos are fantastic introductions to her work or tenacious reminders of its relevancy. Yet whatever the case, Anthem is the only way to understand Covid-19 because all other reasons for rationality fall short otherwise.

Rich Hoffman

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Sheriff Jones Sides with DeWine Liberals on Masks in Schools: Finding the corners of the political puzzle pieces

Sheriff Jones Flip Flops, But Why?

Here is how politics works, and even though Sheriff Jones probably won’t admit it, the timing of the Butler County health alert from the Sheriff’s Office says everything we need to know about the situation. Sheriff Jones often goes out of his way to contribute himself to the politics of the Lakota school system; he has done it against Thomas Hall’s H.B. 99, which would arm teachers in the classroom; he did it again in 2013 by siding with the tax increase the teacher’s union wanted. He certainly did it again recently as Darbi Boddy initiated a proposal to remove mask mandates in the public school even as Sheriff Jones announced his endorsement of the mask governor, DeWine struggling with a primary election. Puzzles like this can be hard to figure out until you put them together a few times, but with this one, the edge pieces were easy to spot, so the rest of the thing goes together very quickly. To help out the teacher’s union position on mask mandates, which they want to keep going infinitely, Sheriff Jones, who made international headlines with his former position on not forcing people to wear masks concerning Covid, has now reversed his position just enough to help with the upcoming vote in February on providing mask options to parents in the Lakota school district, or to impose mandates for further unforeseen durations, supposedly until Trump is in the White House again. Because the Biden administration will keep the mask mandates going as long as they can get political capital out of them, and the teacher’s union, all teacher’s unions, support the Biden presidency and mask mandates to hide that political incompetency. So this business of using kids to force a political message is exceptionally negligent, and all the participants are guilty in their own ways. Look at who is at the top of the list in endorsing Mike DeWine for re-election, who started all this mess in the nation to begin with. Remember, Ohio is #1 in the country for corruption under Mike DeWine’s first term. Does that sound like the kind of person a law and order politician would support?

Here is the List of RINO Republicans Who Have Empowered Governor DeWine to Destroy Ohio with Corruption.

Just as a criminal couldn’t break into a house and claim ignorance of the law once caught to avoid going to jail, the case for Covid now is well known. Just because many people have not come to terms with the reality that much of Covid has been purely political and points to political schemes extending beyond America’s nation, that doesn’t mean ignorance is an excuse for the further perpetuation of sheer stupidity. This is what all mask mandates are at this point. Just as we proved during 2021 that CRT was moving into all our public schools, and Lakota picked up new school board members because the blatant Marxist intrusion was well known before school officials could attempt to slide it back under the rug, the mask mandates are another progressive policy that has more to do with politics than safety, by a lot. For the actual situation on Covid and the political players involved, I would refer everyone to read the book by Kennedy, The Real Dr. Fauci. Kennedy is a Democrat, but he tells the story of Covid and who the players are and why they are. For those who are claiming ignorance as to why Covid is here and what we should be doing about it, I would refer to that starting point for reference. But for those who do know what’s going on want to return to life before March of 2020, which was the proposal that Darbi Boddy put forth for a February vote. 

Well, we knew this would happen once Darbi and Isaac Adi were elected to the school board. We had to have an election to bring some sanity to Lakota schools and all public schools, for that matter. And this mask issue was on the ballot in November, and Darbi is moving forward to fulfill an issue she ran on. Of course, the previous school board members and management team that has been in place during the Covid mess want to cover up for their complicity in the matter. And it is not surprising that Sheriff Jones is coming to their defense. He advertises himself as a Republican, but he has a soft spot for teachers’ unions.

The game goes like this, Darbi puts forward a controversial resolution. Kelly Casper immediately said that the resolution to lift the mask mandates went against the legal counsel of Lakota. She and Julie Shaffer have been pro mask for the kids since the beginning of Covid, for all the reasons that some people still think that Dr. Fauci is a nice guy they see on T.V. and not the snarling rat that most everyone else sees. To attempt to break up a possible 3 to 2 vote, Sheriff Jones comes out on Friday, January 21st appearing to have had a change of heart about Covid. However, for the last two years, Sheriff Jones has led the nation and the world to stand up against mask mandates in many cases. He has stated that he would not be the mask police even on foreign television. So why the change of heart? Well, you can ask him. I’m not sure he’d give a straight answer. Instead, we should listen to what people do, not necessarily what they say. 

I first noticed the Sheriff’s attempts to sway the newly elected Lakota school board on WLW in November of 2021, right after the election. His concern then was Thomas Hall and the proposal he sponsored to give teachers the option to carry weapons in class as first responders to potential school shooters. Sheriff Jones mentioned Lakota several times on his broadcast on the Bill Cunningham Show out of all the public schools in Butler County. Obviously, he was sending a message to Lakota, and knowing something about the political theater of Butler County; it’s not hard to find the edge pieces on this one. Several liberty candidates were newly elected in Butler County, and the Sheriff is known for asserting himself as the kingmaker in politics.   Many politicians won’t say anything to him because they want an endorsement from him when it comes time to go through the next election process. And like Sheriff Jones will say, “I’m just the Sheriff,” meaning he intends much more than what he indicates in most everything. That’s OK, I always say, politics is a blood sport, and I think that’s all fair in love and war. But all too often, these big government types, they believe that the rules are for everyone else but them and that they control the dictates, which everything always comes back around to where they should be, which is happening now, in Lakota. Julie, Kelly, Sheriff Jones, and the teacher’s union activists should have learned some hard lessons over the years. If they didn’t, they can’t claim ignorance now.

Meanwhile, the kids are genuinely suffering from the political theater that has gone on with Covid. They have been caught in the crossfire, and they have no idea what to make out of these things. The adults have let them down. Society has let them down. And now that we know better about Covid and the political motives, we have an obligation to do the right thing. Someone must take leadership, and that is what Darbi Boddy is proposing with her resolution to take the school safety measures back to pre-March 2020 normality. The tricks of scaring school board members who are typically more like Kelly Casper, who will take the advice of the experts over her own intellect, are not going to work forever. It’s disrespectful to see this game play out, where lawyers advising Lakota will point to Sheriff Jones and say about the Covid danger, “see, even the conservative sheriff is supporting masks.” Obviously, Darbi is very passionate about this mask situation and she wants a quicker resolution than the school board process typically allows. But she’s only on her second meeting. I think over time, things will smooth out. Passions are wonderful, but the game is the game and everyone has to play it to win within the rules.

All that theater is meant to sway a vote in February, hoping to scare off one of the three conservatives. If we haven’t seen this game play out many times in the past, it might not be so obvious. But unfortunately, we have. The teacher’s union even has Republicans to manipulate to their cause. Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, they all share a common problem; they are government employees who make their livings off taxpayers. And fear keeps taxpayers paying and not looking through the puzzle box to figure out how the pieces go together. This mask policy is crucial to them for many political reasons that go far beyond safety for students or teachers. It requires ignorant people to follow them or people too scared to think. So don’t think for a second that Sheriff Jones just woke up and changed his position on masks overnight. No, it has to do with politics and not caring one bit about the kids of the district, but the strength of the teacher’s union to win their first battle against an incoming conservative administration. And like they do at levy time, and the Sheriff is playing his part, they use children as their vehicles for political destruction to fulfill their member’s desires for selfishness. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business