Category: Education

Matt Huffman Understands Good Government: Conflict is critical to a properly run republic

People like the Title to my New Book, for good reason

First, I have to say that I appreciate all the kind words I’ve received over the title of my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  As I said in the video above, they have been whispering to me their enjoyment, almost as if they were afraid to say it in public because the word “gun” is in it.  Yet, that is entirely on purpose.  A lot in The Gunfighter’s Guide will challenge previous assumptions, the most of which is the nature of conflict in business and why we as a culture need to embrace that conflict more as we have in years past.  For a long time now, where we have been going has led to so much corruption because the value systems have not been on success, but in getting along.  Strangely enough, I was at an event with Matt Huffman, the President of the Ohio Senate, and he gave an excellent speech that displayed his understanding of this very need for conflict in any civil exchange.  Politics is a blood sport and was always intended as such.  They fight so that we don’t have to in general society.  But this is also the expectation in business as well.  If there isn’t conflict in a discussion, then why have the conversation.  All the consensus-building efforts that we have seen coming out of our academia are out of step with the American way of doing things.  It’s like telling us that American football shouldn’t be about putting on pads and hitting the other guy as hard as you can to stop them from scoring a touchdown, but that we should all play flag football, and that scoring isn’t all that important.  The title of my book evokes a truth that many people understand, and I appreciate that this early in the process, people already understand the need for a philosophic presentation of this very American concept.

Matt Huffman has done great in Ohio as President of the Senate

I had wanted to tell Senator Huffman how proud I was of him and the Ohio Senate in general for passage of Senate Bill 22, which took away Governor DeWine’s health directives over Covid-19 and future overreaches with legislative control.  If Huffman, George Lang, Terry Johnston, and much of the senate body had not moved to pass S.B. 22, Ohio would have been impeded by the recent Biden push for mass closures and mask mandates over the recent Delta Variant.  I thought it was a big deal when the Senate did what they did, and the House followed quickly.  DeWine had cut the entire legislature out of any covid protocols allowing the Governor to become a ruthless dictator over rights of health decisions which put white coat bureaucrats entirely in charge of all our lives.  And it went on for way too long, essentially because nobody wanted to have a conflict with the Governor.  Yet nightly at the Ohio capital, on other things, there were riots and vandalism over social causes that nobody wanted to deal with, and times were looking very bleak.  Trump was being pushed out of office by a group of radicals who were not afraid of conflict. Conservatives were not being met in the same fashion, allowing activists to roll over logic and goodness without fear of reprisal.   You might remember around Christmas of 2020 going into 2021 when I mentioned that Matt Huffman might be the next president of the Senate and that Governor DeWine’s powers would finally be quelled after a year of behaving like a complete tyrant off the rails and out of control. That’s what happened, Huffman was sworn in during the early months of 2021, and he went right to work doing what the legislature had been hoping to do for a long time, stand up to DeWine and return Ohio to civility with a proper government. 

Huffman told his story a bit of how contentious it was standing up to Governor DeWine, who did not want a fellow Republican senate to override his veto of S.B. 22.  DeWine tried to use the necessity of a single point of action to manage emergencies, which was always part of the poison pill of Covid-19.  It was presented as beyond legislative control where the Dr. Fauci types would manage our lives instead of our elected government because of an emergency health crisis.  But our constitutions do not indicate that liberty and freedom are only temporary factors of our daily life.  Even during an emergency such as tornado impacts, hurricanes, or health crises, all people still have their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And sometimes, we have to fight to maintain those rights.  This is what Huffman, Lang, and the rest of the Senate did when they told Mike DeWine to pound sand and suck it up.  They were going to override the Governor’s veto and take away his health directives.  DeWine had abused his power, and he needed a slap down.  It was an example of how proper government should look. It was the suitable alternative to open warfare with people storming the capital to retake their rights over the Covid restrictions.  In every state, the House and Senate must fight like that on our behalf, and in Ohio, it happened.  Fighting is not a bad thing.  When fighting turns to permanent damage, that’s another story, but people who enter the bloodsport of politics should understand that’s the nature of the game.

That is, after all, the theme of my book and why people are saying under their breath that they like the title so much.  It alludes to the American understanding that conflict is at the heart of our “republic.” When the law wasn’t present in times past of western expansion, the gunfighter’s brought some form of order to those far-flung regions.  Many people were killed in cold blood and drunken violence, but the presence of conflict was the first foundation for law and order.  If someone did something to someone, the threat of a gunfight was a genuine menace, and people thought twice about it.  And if they were caught killing in cold blood, the community often hung people right there on the spot, killing them.  Many times, innocent people were hung.  But people did think twice before engaging in destructive behavior because people were not afraid of conflict as they are today.  In so many ways, you have to look at our academic approach to conflict during the last century and question whether or not we have all been poisoned with the pill of globalism so that our republic would fall under those same conditions.  So it is certainly my goal with The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to resurrect the sentiment that conflict is good and healthy for maintaining a proper republic.  Not necessarily with violence, but in how Matt Huffman, George Lang, and others did with S.B. 22 in 2021, which has saved Ohio from a tyrannical Biden administration looking for ground cover for their many scandals.  Without the conflict with DeWine, Ohio would still be imprisoned by the white coats of bureaucracy.  It seems rare these days to see such conflict and courage, but it does happen; there are Matt Huffman’s out there who understand good government and utilize it to the proper effect.  And people understand that in my title, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, something important has been missing in our business and political cultures that need to be dusted off and resurrected to full effect.  And then, and only then, is when America is back and will sustain itself for the world well into the future.   

Rich Hoffman

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

The Alliance Between Big Pharma and Government: Covid is all about using you to promise market saturation

Government Creating Market Stabilization for Big Pharma

With Covid, you can smell the rat easily.  Sure, some people like to be scared; they want to go to haunted houses, ride roller coasters at amusement parks to get a thrill and watch scary movies.  And the nightly news produces almost exclusively scary stories because that causes people to tune in, partly for the thrill and partly for the comfort that bad things are happening to other people and not themselves.  In all of that is how we were scammed with Covid and the ridiculous protocols from the CDC.  Some people don’t want to see it because of their human desire to be scared.  But also, they don’t want to deal with it because they are too lazy to think.  However, if you’re going to see a big government scam, all you have to do is follow the money.  Ultimately, we can say that Covid has been a lot of conspiracies, and I’d say there is truth in most of them. It’s a form of control by the government over mass populations to see if they can get away with it. It’s been a chance to shape politics by steering mass society into virtual pens of control in experimental ways.  It’s been a way to commit voter fraud, which most of the Democrat party plans to use always to stay in power.  Just consider why they want open borders with illegal immigration. So they can overload votes with new voters who might be dumb enough to vote for Democrats who play Santa Claus every day, giving away things that aren’t theirs to give.  But mostly, what Covid has been, is a guaranteed market for the pharmaceutical companies to land their products. Politicians have had to pave the way for them because of their constant need for campaign donations.  By doing big pharma a massive favor by guaranteeing market saturation for big pharma products, the government plays the role through the legislative process as market mall cop in ensuring that everyone does exactly what big pharma needs them to do.

Sure, it’s happened many times before, so many times that many of us have just come to expect it.  The auto insurance industry essentially did the same thing when I was younger.  These days we all accept it as logical, but when I learned to drive a car, insurance while driving was an option.  If you had a wreck while going and it was your fault, then you had considerable trouble.  But you had a choice.  That led big auto insurance companies to lobby the politics of their state to offer relief from the many lawsuits that were not being collected from those who could never pay for the damages they committed while driving cars.  So, states like Ohio passed laws where every driver on the road would have to maintain insurance and show proof of it when called upon.  It was never a question of if a driver had insurance; it was just showing it when a cop pulled you over.  There are many other examples of this kind of thing where the government wrote laws that ultimately helped various businesses. Still, the insurance industry is one of the most obvious.  When politicians and insurance companies saw how the American people accepted these impositions against their freedoms so quickly, they were inspired to do it on other things.  Pretty soon, seat belts were made legal.

You had to click it or get a ticket.  Of course, insurance companies pushed this because they wanted to close up their payout margins.  They were given by the government a stable slice of the pie. The insurance industry didn’t have to drop their prices to earn a customer; the government handed it to them on a silver platter.  Now the insurance carrier wanted to make sure that their payouts were less, not more.  It was better for them to have a driver live in car accidents because dying was too expensive.  It is better to keep the driver alive, even if permanently maimed for life, rather than to lose that driver to a death payout if it could be avoided.  Seat Belts were the kind of law that paved the way for what is currently being debated, vaccine passports.  People accepted the logic, and the government made laws that benefited the insurance companies, and everyone was somewhat happy. 

But that’s not what happens; is that everyone stays happy.  Instead, once the government and the insurance industry saw how easily people would give up their freedoms for so-called “good reasons,” such as “safety,” who doesn’t want to live in a “safe” world, then, of course, they wanted to do the same kind of thing with every industry. That’s where the idea of insurance being a socialist right came about.  People accepted that mandatory insurance to drive a car was acceptable, so why not mandate that everyone have health insurance?  And then, of course, the government would maintain that insurance, which is the concept behind Obamacare.  Once Obamacare got involved, and the government stuck its nose into the 5th largest market in the American economy, trouble arrived for growth.  We heard less about stem cells and regenerative growth as medical innovations moved from new ideas to ensure insurance companies got paid.  And of course, competition in the medical industry stagnated as health providers could essentially charge whatever they wanted, including the big pharma companies.  Now they had guaranteed customers given to them by the government.  All they had to do was give some donations to critical politicians in their states, and they’d be on easy street.  It worked, people put up with it, and that’s the mess we find ourselves in today. 

Now you can see why the government mandates for vaccinations come into play over Covid.  For the first time, we have allowed the government to interfere with the natural immune system of human beings and have put the government in charge of maintaining health.  In all other times, people would get sick with the common cold or with some variation of SARS, Covid, or whatever.  People would take a few days off work to get better or not contaminate their co-workers, and life would go on.  But with Covid, something that turned out for most people to be a common cold with mild symptoms, the government got involved in managing the virus ultimately.  From social distancing, altering economic activity in very destructive ways, and the voodoo science of wearing a mask instead of using actual science, such as Regeneron cocktails and Hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus off.  This time, the government, with its partners in crime, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, moved to control information to create demand for a vaccine where they wanted every single person in the world to get it, no matter what the effect was.  For the first time in history, the world’s governments working together wanted to provide a guaranteed market for the big pharma vaccines for all kinds of mysterious reasons, many that we will learn about in the years to come.  We know that the government is attempting to tamper with markets for the advantage of the pharmaceutical companies.  Essentially for the promise that campaign donations will flow their way and everyone will be happy, just as they were when auto insurance was made mandatory.  We have all shown these dangerous liaisons that we will gladly put up with being pushed around, so why would they think otherwise? That is how innovation is killed when we allow politics to distribute money without merit to undeserving markets.  That is precisely what is going on with Covid, the masks, and the offered solutions to a made-up problem, vaccine mandates for all.   It’s not to save lives.  It’s all about control and making it easier for pharmaceuticals to maintain their markets for products without the worry of competition.  They suddenly don’t have to earn your dollars; the government is giving it to them unearned. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Biden Threatens Businesses With Covid: When anti-science becomes a weapon of cover-ups

Remember the FEMA Camps?

I’ve told everyone before what Covid was, why it was made, and what the world’s governments plan to do with it.  Just as a reminder, this push to impose vaccines on businesses and the Biden administration’s mask mandates are strict because they have no legal authority to do so.  So hoping that peer pressure will do all their work that the law forbids, they are implying to businesses that if they don’t enact stricter than the CDC policies for managing Covid, then they might create a perceptual unsafe work environment for their employees, forcing them out of fear of litigation to adopt the Biden tactics. That’s all it is.  Like China, the Biden Democrats and many foreign agents of mass corruption connected to this administration are in deep trouble with many things they have been caught in.  Such as the election fraud of 2020, which is presently unraveling, the debacle of Afghanistan, which will make Iran look silly in comparison.  The economy is tanking, and the Biden people need something to blame since their policies are stifling growth.  Oh, and also, Larry Elder is about to win as governor in California punishing Gavin Newsom for his lockdowns there harming one of the world’s biggest economies. They need a story to take people’s eyes off the southern border, which is a mess.  So many terrible things have been unleashed in the opening months of a corrupt Biden administration that these losers hope that Covid will save them once again.  Notice how Dr. Fauci has lost his mind over this Delta variant just as Rand Paul pressed him on his connection to the Wuhan lab in China and the funding by NIH of Covid.  We now know Covid was made in the lab there for what the Chinese imply is a bio-weapon.  Yeah, Covid is all those things, meant to hide these crimes and more.  The masks and vaccines are not about health maintenance at all.  And the push for vaccines has to have a majority of people near 100% to hide what the vaccine will do to people.  Suppose statistical sampling is 100%, and we all of a sudden have mysterious deaths, sterilization, and other ailments creeping into society within a few years. In that case, nobody will see that healthy people who did not take the vaccine are not suffering the same conditions.  If everyone gets the jab, nobody will know the difference.  This is what you get when malicious, bad people take over a government and get caught doing ill will on people and still hope to cover up their debacles.

I’ve heard these stories for years, and now it’s pretty clear where the old fears of FEMA camps came from.   I think the area I’m in outside of Cincinnati was designated Sector 5.  Troubled people were to be taken to the railyards just south of Indianapolis to be quarantined.  It was never quite clear who would go there, would it be sick people somehow made that way by the government or holdouts against some government mandate like resistance to the vaccination.  But given the conditions of our times, the forces at play have hit the panic button, perhaps too soon, and now we see what we see.  But it’s not a surprise to me at all.  Those FEMA camp rumors look to be more fact than fiction, and those were ten years ago.  I remember the pictures of the plastic coffins stored on the side of railroad tracks for what purpose nobody could imagine.  The world was simpler back then; nobody could imagine a day where the government would stop the economy and force all of us to stay in our homes under force.  Now it’s not so scandalous. 

I always took those kinds of things in stride.  I think the people who run these government agencies are idiots, and they can be easily beaten.  If they decide to intrude on our lives, then we are free to fight them.  I generally leave them alone as long as they leave me alone.  I don’t want such people in charge of my health or safety.  No doubt, they have been talking about this for a long time; the rumors made it out onto the Alex Jones show, well before YouTube made that show one of its first targets of censorship.  Now we know why, and we know that Big Tech was in on this game from the start.  Like I said in the video above, this is all anti-science. It’s been covered in Ayn Rand’s book Anthem, where people far in the future are dazzled to discover the light bulb again.  Their tyrannical society had traded science for submission.

I don’t think all of the government is in on the gig, but many federal employee types find complete authority attractive.  The Big Tech companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook played their part as government censors immediately with Covid.  They were in on the game plan from the start, and that would be the first place to go to prosecute for the attack on our country.  They denied medical help to people sick with Covid by censoring references to hydroxychloroquine and Regeneron cocktails to manage the virus.  We were meant to have the virus manage us, not science containing the virus.  That was always the plan from the very beginning, and many people knew it.  The conspiracy theories may not have been as sinister as we thought regarding the FEMA camps, but there was more truth to it than fiction, and we are in that nightmare now. 

But what caused the nightmare?  It was the cover-up of the crimes, and I don’t think what we see now was how things were supposed to go.  The Donald Trump presidency was not supposed to happen, and it pulled the scab off the wound created by the SWAMP too early.  The Democrats and their puppet masters had to push the panic button to lay ground cover for the many crimes they were caught in, which we see now.  They are caught in this election scandal, and people are unwilling to hide behind a curtain of wokeness to conceal the truth.  They might have in 2020 when this Covid game was first played on us.  But not now.

We know too much.  Everyone knows that the best measure to fighting off viruses is a person’s immune system.  Vaccination is a means to managing a virus in a society with weakened immune systems and wouldn’t be wrong if that were the case.  Yet, that’s not what we are talking about here.  I would never undermine my own immune system with medicine unless it were necessary.  And it’s not necessary.  This virus was created as an attack, not as some occurring natural threat, so the solution to it is not in vaccinations, but in politics, where the virus was really created.  And for the government, mandates are about as tough as wet paper holding up a paint can.  They have no legal grounds at all.  They have no power.  All they have are implied threats which are designed to scare a workforce into acting against employers.  That then forces employers to adopt the government policy to protect themselves from potential litigation.  And that’s all the government can do, is scare people into compliance because the actual science is weak and full of corruption.  As human beings, we should know better, and they think that fear will rule over logic.  But then again, these are the same idiots who have entangled themselves in all these cover-ups.  With their track record, why would anybody think that something they do would work now?  Think things through, dear reader. Don’t be a buffalo watching all the other buffalos being killed around you and just standing there grazing.  Because they think you will, stand there and take it.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

Freedom at the Big Bul Roadhouse

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

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

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

Sheriff Jones of Butler County

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

Sheriff Jones making fun of the Biden Administration

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

Corey Lewandowski talks to Butler County

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

Corey Lewandowski tells stories about Trump

Rich Hoffman

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

Lakota Votes for Mask Mandates: The squeaky wheel gets the grease

The Lakota School Board trying to vote on Mask Mandates

As it is everywhere, the health directors, national and local, want their power back. Still, the governors in many states don’t want to return to the kind of authoritarian rule that gave health departments so much power during the first year of Covid.  In Butler County, Ohio, where I live, the health director and bureaucratic officials have been working wherever they can to intimidate businesses and government establishments into CDC compliance for the sheer desire of wanting to boss someone around.  So, of course, they are putting pressure on several local school boards in Butler County to implement mask mandates.  In the satire above, which isn’t far from the truth, the Lakota school board is trying to figure out how to deal with the health director ahead of the meeting on August 23rd, 2021.  The Lakota school system is being pressured by outrageous compliance to CDC guidelines or self-imposed mask mandates. It’s a rock and a hard place for Lakota. They either deal with the wrath of the Butler County Health officials, or they deal with the anger of the furious parents.  And for this school board, at Lakota, it is way beyond their ability to deal with leaving them to pander to the squeaky wheel.  So if you as a parent don’t want masks on your kids while in school, you better get to that meeting and be that squeaky wheel.  Otherwise, the underhanded tactics of the health department are going to play their games of tyranny to establish authoritarian rule. 

Of course, no matter what you think about Covid, there is zero to less proof that masks do anything but make the situation worse.  That stupidity is for adults to sort out, but children should never be victimized to wear masks based on such flimsy science.  If people want to wear them, have at it.  Just as a casual observation, I’ve seen cultures wearing masks in Asian countries for years, and it’s always more about compliance than health.  This attempt to mask the American population is just more of that imposition of eastern cultures on western cultures, just as the Beatles have been trying to do for years and many thousands of other sources attempting to tell us in the west that yielding to authority is the way to solve problems.  No, it’s not.  I had my family at the zoo recently, and they were trying to push the latest from the CDC, encouraging people to wear masks.  Only a few dumb fools were doing so.  My wife and I went to Costco to get a hot dog and a drink for our date night, and they were encouraging people to wear masks, forcing their employees to do so to put that peer pressure on people.  But guess what, most people were not wearing the stupid masks, and I felt sorry for the dumb fools who fell for it.  Yet all the trouble starts with these crazy lunatics in the local health departments who are hungry for their mall cop powers to be restored to them by governors who have lost their ability.

Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, has been a disaster.  He wants to force children to wear masks in school, but the supreme court now challenges him after William Bertelsman granted a restraining order on Beshear.  These kinds of fights are happening all over the country, especially in Florida.  The trend is against the tyrants, the health officials.  Now that people have seen the game, there is no public appetite for the mask mandates.  The federal government has not made its case for why masks should be used.  They are hot, they smell bad and are gross, and they display a kind of anti-science that some backwater countries would implement as a means to solving problems.  And people are sick of them.  Even people who might be liberal are not wearing the masks if they can get away with it.  But all those places mentioned, Costco, the zoo, amusement parks, and the like, are feeling pressure from the compliance cultures to implement that stupidity, which is how the schools feel pressure to comply.  But the attack against our children is reprehensible, and it deserves to be fought with everything we have to fight with.  These school boards will cave if the parents don’t get involved.  Edgewood schools in Butler County have struggled with this issue for weeks, and the parents have spoken up.  Monroe is also going through tribulations.  If Lakota falls, the rest of them will follow.  And that’s the game the health directors want.  They want to rule in silence, from their offices using a phantom menace to scare everyone into some ridiculous authority rule.  So the voices have to be heard at the school board meetings. Otherwise, the school boards will yield to the pressure. 

Watching people wear these masks the second time around, who are in the extreme minority in public, you can almost see the deadness in their eyes.  That desire to comply with authority because they are too lazy to think is a public health crisis.  They are more dangerous to society than any virus because their willingness to comply encourages these bureaucratic tyrants to grab power as they are now.  Covid did not come out and kill everyone like it was told to us.  There are some heartbreaking stories here and there, but fewer people are dying of Covid than are getting killed in car accidents, and people don’t stop driving cars over every crash.  For most Americans, Covid is an acceptable risk.  They might stay home from work for a few days and get over it if they get it.  They want alternatives like a Regeneron Covid Cocktail or a dose of Hydroxychloroquine.  They may use ultraviolet light to kill the virus, a legitimate method of managing viruses, especially UVC light.  Science is great, and there are methods we all know about now.  But this dumb method of wearing a mask is as unscientific and barbaric as anything government sciences have ever come up with.  If public schools are ineffective, why would anybody expect Dr. Fauci and government science to get it right with Covid?  They are either treacherous lunatic terrorists for a new global order, or they are dumb as hell.  Or perhaps, a mixture of both.  But putting masks on kids and ruining their lives with the bad decisions of power-hungry health officials would make bad parents out of all of us.  Kids don’t deserve this stupidity.  It’s up to all of us as adults to at least protect kids from government absurdity, starting in our schools.  And for Lakota, while you still can, you better let the school board know how you feel.  Because if left to their own devices, they will yield to the Butler County health officials and their power grabs from the CDC to put the government in charge of our health, which they have proven entirely incompetent to handle.  They weren’t effective the first time around, and now that we’ve had time to reflect on the mistakes of 2020, why would anybody fall for it a second time?  What we are up against is sheer stupidity and nothing less.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Ohio is Number One in Corruption: Jim Renacci wants to be the Ron DeSantis of the state to fix that

Wind Turbans in Ohio, part of the progressive push to change the state into Green Energy

It’s not murky for me at all.  Mike DeWine screwed up as governor of Ohio. He must go. He needs to be primaried, and the Republican brand in Ohio restored to honor before a general election where a Democrat will have to be defeated at the ballot box for control over our state.  The behavior of Democrats in the House and Senate indicates that they have a plan.  That plan is to exploit Ohio as the number one state in the category of corruption and to use that to implement their changes toward even more progressive agenda desires, which ironically has caused most of the problems so far.  DeWine has been hiding his vast incompetence behind the Covid crises, like many in government have, and now it’s gotten Ohio Republicans in trouble, and that situation needs a fast solution.  And one of the first Republicans to offer that solution and throw his hat in the ring has been Jim Renacci.  I was happy to have a chance to talk to Jim Renacci a bit this past week one on one. It’s the first time I’ve had that chance since his run for Senate against Sherrod Brown a few years prior.  Renacci has an exciting story which I touch on in the video above, and I had thought for a while, well before he announced that he would officially run for governor, that Jim would be suitable for it.  His pitch is essentially to be the Ron DeSantis of Ohio, open up markets and opportunities, and bring to the state good management that is no-nonsense and productive.  But more than anything, he wants to clean up the corruption and repair the Republican brand tainted by Mike DeWine and John Kasich, both progressives who opened the door to all this corruption, to begin with. 

I thought Jim was joking when he told me that Ohio was the number one state out of all 50 states in corruption.  That didn’t seem possible to me, but sure enough, I went home and looked it up, and that is the case as of 2021.  When DeWine was running for governor, many Tea Party groups were already saying that DeWine would be a corrupt governor, but people were willing to give him a chance.  As it turned out, they were right, and DeWine has essentially run as a Democrat most of the years that he’s been in office.  To hide his many missteps, he has turned to Covid to rescue him as many blue-state governors have, and that was, of course, to conceal the underlying corruption.  That is the obvious problem when a governor who is supposed to drive on the right side ends up on the left.  A collision with oncoming traffic is inevitable, and that’s what happened with the FirstEnergy debacle in Ohio that Mike DeWine has his hands all over.  The net result is that Democrats are currently planning to exploit these collisions and take seats in the House and Senate because of the corruption and capture the governor race with a damaged DeWine.  So Democrats currently aren’t willing to make any deals with Republicans as they wait out the next election because they can smell the blood in the water. 

I’ve said it before, House Speaker Larry Householder and other Republicans did wrong when they allowed FirstEnergy to pour a lot of money into the Republican Party.  That allowed the FBI to make a bribery case out of the tragedy involving a few nuclear power plants being pushed to shut down.  But things are not always the way they seem.  FirstEnergy was fighting for its life as the Obama administration targeted traditional forms of energy such as coal and nuclear in favor of solar and wind.  I found a few of those ridiculous wind power turbans in Greenville, Ohio, in the video above.  I had seen them all over the United States this year, and it was insulting to see them in Ohio.   A more significant push is going on that is far more corrupt than FirstEnergy trying to buy off politicians like Larry Householder for their survival.  Jim Renacci understands that kind of corruption because he’s been a victim of it himself.  He got into politics as a businessman who had lost his Chevy dealership by that same administration who tampered with the markets to create a change state at GM.  The collapse of General Motors into bankruptcy meant that the government could help restructure them into producing eco-friendly cars, which is what they are presently doing.  The bailout they received from the government was just as corrupt as anything FirstEnergy was involved in.  The difference was that the Obama administration controlled the DOJ.  And when Trump was president, the same radicals were still running the DOJ because he refused to act in such a corrupt way and call them out on their activism.   So now the FBI, run by those prominent government activists, wants to destroy companies like FirstEnergy unless they embrace these new wind and solar Obama initiatives.  They are picking winners and losers, which led to the corruption that eventually involved the many Republicans caught taking money from FirstEnergy so that they could keep their nuclear power plants open. 

I would say that this kind of corruption is going on in all states, and all their legislators are involved in some way or another.  But in Ohio, it’s a Trump state, and it has a target on its back for progressives that go way beyond reasonability.  That means we have to take a stand with this governor race and clean things before the general election vote for governor takes place.  Republicans have to take that step with a governor prospect that can rebuild the party behind an anti-corruption platform, and for me, Jim Renacci is just the right kind of guy for the job.  President Trump likes Jim quite a lot, and a Jim Renacci ticket that is pro-business, anti-corruption, and knows how to stand up to progressive tricks is just the ticket for the current challenges. I’m against corruption of any kind.  I don’t want my state tarnished with any corruption, let alone being number one in the entire country.  That is just embarrassing.  Not acceptable.  So when Jim Renacci sat across the table from me and looked me straight in the eye and told me what he wanted to do with being the Ron DeSantis of Ohio, I was just a little encouraged.  Ron DeSantis is the new gold standard for which all Republican governors should aspire, and if Renacci has that kind of scope for the governor job in mind, well, then that’s something I can get excited about.  So far, other candidates haven’t announced themselves for the governor race, but I don’t think this is something we need to fool around with.  Republicans need to understand the battle plan.  We need to retake the House at the Federal level, and we need a leader to do that.  We need to unite behind that cause and the people who can make that happen.  And we have to repair the corruption problem left in DeWine’s wake.  That will take someone like Renacci, who is dedicated to the cause, can get Trump behind the effort, and is willing to do the job in two steps, repairing the Republican Party, then defeating the Democrat challenger.   It helps when you can talk to someone like Jim to see if they are up for such a big job, and based on my experience, he is. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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My Thoughts on Afghanistan: Facing down evil once more

Its Time to Face Down Evil

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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Screw Our Freedoms: ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ would have been different if written in Deadwood

Screw Our Freedoms, no, I don’t think so

It was pretty amazing to see the massive panic coming out of the Biden administration over the vaccine push and mask mandates.  Stunning really, from celebrities to Dr. Fauci himself, last week leading into this one has been a test of sorts for this global push for a central government to take over all day-to-day activity.  But for that to happen, they had to scare us into imprisoning ourselves into the cage they intended for us.  Instead, what happened was that they found most of us refused to enter and are running about doing our own thing regardless of their taunts.  That left Arnold Schwarzenegger to tell us on CNN to “screw your freedoms.” Dr. Fauci said pretty much the same, something in direct reference to Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, as over a million people descended on the Sturgis Bike Rally, an annual event I talk about a lot.   Despite the Covid warnings of the new “Delta variant,” people went anyway and didn’t wear masks.  People were getting tired of the government crying wolf every day, and they were finally starting to ignore them.  I would argue that people should have stopped listening to the government months ago, but ultimately, people were getting it, and the government has been in a bit of a panic.  So much so that Biden avoided talking about the evacuation of Afghanistan but instead deflected comment to the booster shot to the vaccine that would be available soon.  Covid is their cover story to hide all the crimes that have been committed, even when the world was on fire and all they wanted to talk about was a glass of water. 

This is Where We Are

God bless Kristi Noem, who went to Sturgis herself after a week of the press following Dr. Fauci and trying to put tremendous peer pressure on her to cave to the gods of Covid.  She rode her horse onto the stage at Outlaw Square in Deadwood carrying an American flag in front of a large crowd and gave an excellent speech on freedom.  The optics were tremendous, and you could tell by what the media didn’t show.  Hardly anybody covered a prominent American governor riding her horse carrying an American flag while wearing a cowboy hat down the streets of Deadwood, South Dakota, at all.  But for Kristi Noem, it was her answer to the criticism.   It was a kind of Braveheart moment in this new American story, and it infuriated the government.  Wait, Kristi Noem is the government.  So was Donald Trump. Let’s say instead, these insurgents connected to international Marxism have infected Washington D.C. and other academic circles with the intent to overthrow our American Constitution.  How about that?  We don’t want to overthrow the government.  We want our government to resume administrative power and take away the leverage that the spooks, kooks, and losers of international Marxism have over us presently.  We let them have that leverage after all out of niceness, and they misread that niceness as weakness.  But that niceness has expired.   

This is what Leadership looks like

While all this was going on, I read Vivek Ramasamy’s new book Woke, Inc. a few times, which I liked a lot.  But, there was a lot I didn’t like at all, which I attribute to him being on the inside of corporate America for a long time—even being tempted by the fruits of globalism.  I loved his book because I loved his perspective.  But as I closed the book for the third time in a 70 some hour period, I concluded that Vivek is still learning. He’s a brilliant guy who has made a lot of money, but he’s still the kid in India who grew up with a caste system spoiled by American capitalism.  He thinks the modern Woke problem can be solved like the story he recites in the book The Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor committed Christ to death because the Church no longer had a use for Jesus.  Jesus Christ had served his purpose, and now it was time to die and let the Church handle things.  Well, we can’t help where we are born, and I’m perfectly open to people fleeing from where they came from to come to America for a chance. I’m even more for America spreading its influence to many of those places so that they can get western civilization in their back yards, which makes what’s happening in Afghanistan that much more of a tragedy.  But in America, when we get tired of being poked in the eye by some bad guys, we won’t be kissing them on the cheek and leaving quietly as Jesus did in that story.  The Brothers Karamazov is a very European story. That’s not how things are done in America, or at least they haven’t been.  And that planned assumption that Americans would passively sit around and be bossed around was a bad one from the start.  Yes, there are plenty of bootlickers in America who will.  There are more who won’t, and that is what’s going on with the masks and the vaccines. 

Liberty or Death……..but where are the deaths?

I only bring up Vivek because he wrote a reasonably significant book that the mainstreamers have fully embraced.  He represents many people who hatched this Covid plan, and clearly, they don’t understand Americans.  I was enormously proud of Kristi Noem when she hoisted that flag on stage atop her horse in Deadwood.  I had just returned from that exact spot a few weeks ago.  Deadwood and South Dakota, in many ways, are vestiges of freedom that people growing up in India or Russia can’t even imagine until they see it for themselves.  And even then, the culture change is dramatic. It’s not an accident that Mike Lindell held his Symposium in South Dakota. That’s where the heart of America is, and you can certainly feel it when you visit. It’s a long way from Wall Street and the hacks of investment that Vivek knows.  People who ride horses, shoot guns, and love their American flag aren’t putting up with what they are seeing, and the current government is just now getting a feel for it.  These kinds of Americans aren’t going to be controlled by Facebook or Google. They’ll just come up with their alternative.  They aren’t wearing masks or have the government tell them to take the medicine they don’t want.  And if the government gets too pushy, they’ll get shoved back.  When people wonder why Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires,” as Biden calls it, they haven’t seen anything yet when they try to go door to door in Ohio or South Dakota to confiscate guns and force people to take a vaccine.  Instead, they will see something far different from what Vivek Ramaswamy proposed with his example of Christ versus The Grand Inquisitor.  If The Grand Inquisitor tried some of that stuff that he tried to pull on Jesus Christ in the city of Deadwood, or Sturgis………well, I would promise that he would have been shot dead before he ever had a chance to sentence Christ to death.  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great book would have been a short story instead of a great literary classic if written in Deadwood.  And the bad guy would have died quickly and spectacularly under a hail of gunfire.   The American way to fight these things ultimately isn’t with a kiss on the cheek, but a hand on our guns and the willingness to defend ourselves when pressed by an authoritarian government that does not have our best interests in mind.  And it’s good to see people finally sticking up for themselves because that is ultimately the way to peace where such a tragedy could be avoided.  Do like Nancy Reagan used to say, “Just Say No.”

 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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There is Nothing Worse than Saying Something Cannot be Done: Managing unknowns for victory

Sometimes the Answers are Where Nobody Looks

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

Bullwhip Speed and Accuracy

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

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

Bullwhip Speed Switch

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

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

Its all in fun, but is it……………………..?

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

Rich Hoffman

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

Covid is the New Excuse to Hide Laziness

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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