Category: Education

The Cause of Economic Depravity: Duds, derelicts, scumbags, pot-smoking losers, liberal behavior that destroys society

Where else would you want to celebrate a silver anniversary but Costco? Yet that’s where my wife and I went after 35 years of marriage to spend a day together and enjoy what the new Costco in Liberty Township, Ohio had to offer. Out of all the options that are out there, all we really wanted to do was buy a new kayak for some 2023 adventures and have a hot dog meal together. And that’s how it is when you are married for so long. You get a real feel for what your spouse likes, and you get to graduate from any pretension of social circumstance. And the new Costco is fantastic; it was bustling on a Sunday afternoon, and it seemed much busier than it was at the previous location down at Tri-County, which is several miles south of Liberty Township. Now I’ve talked about this situation before, how money tends to move from neighborhood to neighborhood based on the rejection of liberal areas as opposed to conservative regions. Money flows to where conservatives reside, generally leaving behind the toxic stench of liberalism, and you can plot this out on a map all across America. And that was never more obvious than when the Costco in Tri-County moved just a few miles north to Liberty Township, Ohio, to essentially get away from the derelicts that were attending that store, driving away good people who otherwise would have wanted to visit. 

And my wife was certainly one of those people; she would never have felt comfortable going to that Tri-County Costco to have a hot dog meal to celebrate a wedding anniversary. We would go there to have an occasional hot dog together and meet for lunch or while busy things were happening in our life, and it was convenient. But there were a lot of slugs at the Tri-County store that the new store just didn’t have. Now Costco is an excellent example because it has a stable baseline measure. You must have a membership to even get into a Costco store, so a unified value is already established. That means that the typical attendees are regionally inspired. And during our anniversary meal at Costco in Liberty Township, the store was jam-packed, and there weren’t any derelicts, slobs, or slugs of any kind, making it a very nice experience. I’m sure Costco and other businesses would never admit to this problem because it would get them into all kinds of social trouble. But I can say it. People don’t like to be around slugs; when a store gives them a slob-free experience, they will flock toward that economic opportunity. And when I say people are not of a preferred standard, I’m not talking about skin color. There were plenty of diverse people at the Liberty Township store from all over the world. But they at least shared values of a social standard that was refreshing. The cars in the parking lot were all nice; there were not a lot of people with neck tattoos, looking like they just broke out of prison. Nobody smelled like pot smoke standing in line with us. It was nice, and the people there agreed, and it made shopping for things much more fun. 

This is a problem of social management; when an area government becomes too big and starts looking to make victims of its residents, then the bi-product is liberalism. And from there, bad behavior is often rewarded or overlooked. And social conditions in that community go downhill quickly. This can happen in just a neighborhood or in entire states, such as California is these days. It can ruin a community over a decade, or it might take a generation, but eventually, when nefarious characters start bringing bad behavior to a region that people call home, then good people tend to stay locked up in their homes, or they move away. And Tri-County is one of those obvious areas that used to be one of the most vibrant centers of economic activity in the state of Ohio. But as liberal policies failed to regulate bad behavior, then good money packed up and left. And people who had money simply stopped coming to visit because they didn’t want to be around the bad behavior of an out-of-control youth or people who obviously were not sharing values of worth with other people. They didn’t dress well; they spoke poorly to each other and otherwise presented themselves as disasters of intellect and objectionable to a shared experience. This is the cost of too much government that imposes high taxes that pushes people away, leaving behind only the leeches who live off the efforts of others. People with money tend to have values that attract it, so economic depravity follows liberal political policies. There aren’t many places in all of the world where liberal policies equal sustained wealth generation. Wherever big government imposes bad social behavior degradation is soon to follow, including well-known cities like Paris and London. 

Developers have solved this problem of protecting retailers by having privately managed offerings, such as Liberty Center, which is near the new Liberty Township Costco, or the Greene in Dayton, which are self-contained cities of their own. They give you the look of a city environment but are carefully managed to keep away the derelicts and slobs. You won’t find gang behavior in those places with graffiti all over the walls, and that’s what shoppers want. They want to be free of such menaces so they can spend their money on things they value without the threats to their safety, perceived or real. I know many people who have tried to give Over-The-Rhine a chance in downtown Cincinnati only to have their cars broken into and have the women catcalled by unchained youth openly smoking pot on street corners. Only liberals are willing even to look the other way with that behavior. Conservatives, they just don’t go, and they keep their money. And those are the facts, bad behavior pushes away financial wealth and creates a depleted condition. Then it’s so rare to have such an experience as my wife, and I had at Costco that it was nice enough for us to celebrate a wedding anniversary there and to relax. There were a lot of people, but the crowd had shared interests. Many were like us; they wanted to buy a new boat, then right next to it, there were bacon and potato skins. How could you not like that? But nobody wants to deal with people with very little value for things in life, regardless of skin color. Bad behavior will turn away economic activity more than any other detrimental condition. And when communities like Tri-County fail to manage their standard of living and let things slide downhill, the public transportation system starts to bring duds in from the deprived areas; then, the virus spreads to those nicer areas. And it is a virus; it’s a virus of bad conduct. It either spreads to others directly or it inspires them to pack up and leave for an area without such people. And that is a condition of management that is consistent no matter where in the world you go. And it’s why my wife and I went to Costco for our 35th anniversary as opposed to any other place.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why We Love Freedom: It’s the key to economic viability and production in any culture

It’s one of the things I like most this particular time of year, the spring months ahead of summer, when stores like Cabela’s put out their Holiday attire. With Memorial Day and the Fourth of July coming on the horizon, there are a lot of patriotic garments that they offer to satisfy the sentiments of their customer base, which, to say the least, are not Karl Marx fans. It’s always a reminder to me of where people are generally, away from the news and in reality. When I travel around the country, it’s pretty easy to see where people are politically. And Cabela’s understands that, as does Bass Pro. The same company essentially owns them, but they know their customers, and I enjoy going there to see what’s the latest in outdoor trends. These stores, dedicated to adventure and patriotism, are such wonderful assets, and I have never gotten tired of the Cabela’s in my neighborhood of Cabela’s West Chester, Ohio, since it opened. Let’s just say I spend a lot of time there. On this particular visit, I found a really nice Under Armor camouflage shirt that would be perfect for the summer season and all the outdoor activities I have planned. And it had a nice logo on it that said “Freedom.” It was a whole marketing line of t-shirts they have in all kinds of colors and styles, and they were selling like hotcakes at a maple syrup festival. I bought the shirt and other related items and immensely enjoyed the experience. But I had to ask myself as I watched others doing the same thing, what does everyone think that “Freedom” means? Why do we say it? Why was it such a powerful marketing tool? Under Armor is trying to appeal to those sentiments, so why was it such a powerful statement that might provoke someone to buy it, as opposed to a statement that might say, “Compliance?”

What do we mean when we say we want and expect “freedom?” Freedom from what? Freedom from government, Freedom from our parents? Freedom from work? Freedom from corporate influence, hostile governments, greedy financial institutions, politics, taking our kids to soccer practice, public schools that can’t spend our money correctly and waste it trying to indoctrinate our children into a Marxist ideology? We have a lot of hooks in us by the nature of living life. But if we had to put our finger on the specificity of the meaning of Freedom from an American perspective, the way Cabela’s is marketing it is the Freedom to live your own life the way you want to. It’s undoubtedly not Freedom from responsibility. And the more successful you are in life, obviously the pressure of responsibility increases. But what is specific about American Freedom is the notion that the value of a developed individual life is recognized as significant, and the results of that development and uniqueness benefit our national culture. In America, you can be a slug, barely rubbing two pennies together and living out of a van, nearly homeless, or you could work hard and become an executive for a major company. In America, you can literally have access to anybody at any level. A woman can date a multimillionaire if she is attractive and can get their attention, as opposed to a more controlled society that works within a caste system, as it is throughout India, Nepal, and into China. In Iran or Pakistan, a woman might be the most beautiful person in the world, but nobody would know because of their regimented society. And the hope to date or even marry someone outside of that rigid system is an impossible concept. 

In America, we have an expectation of choice. We can choose to be successful or not, to spend time with people of any level of input. Of course, you would have to work hard to move through social circles, but if you choose to work toward those goals, the doors are open to the hard worker, and we have that Freedom of choice. And you see that when you travel and go to summer activities where people have RVs and boats, earned assets that represent their hard work or lack thereof. I am always amazed by the variety when I go to campsites with our RV and my children. Some people have multimillion-dollar rigs decked out with all the luxury one could imagine. Many times, those rigs are more elaborate than their homes. And they might be parked next to some scrappy dude who hasn’t washed in a week living out of a tent in the bed of his truck with an American flag stuck out of the hood with a crude drill hole applied to stand it proudly upright. And they will talk and kid around with each other without any pretense of snobbery. They subconsciously appreciate each other’s choice to live a free life. And the results of those decisions provide different toys in life to enjoy. But they celebrate their ability to make that choice and not have a government or social construct make it for them.

This is why China must steal nearly a trillion dollars a year in intellectual property theft because even with the rigged financial system that has put them on the front burner for corporate communism, their culture is dying regarding creativity. They might have a lot of hard workers and an obedient society ready to do whatever they are told. But they aren’t very creative, which is common in communist cultures. Yet invention comes from Freedom. Good ideas are born when people are free to think outside the box. I have had several occasions in my life where I’ve had to deal with the United States Patent Office, and let me tell you, it’s always very busy. There are a lot of good ideas in America born every day, and those ideas come to those who are free to have ideas and are bold enough to act on them. And boldness comes from Freedom of choice. When people are free to express themselves either boldly or rigidly, there are consequences to that behavior that have predicted results. But when people are not free to think for themselves and act accordingly with some sort of market incentive, a society quickly shows the results in stagnant behavior. So in that regard, which is why Cabela’s markets “Freedom” the way they do, Freedom is an essential ingredient to the potential for a vibrant and inventive society. And that’s what we celebrate in America, the Freedom of choice. And from those choices, we have seen proof that society flourishes without a complicated caste system driven by religion or politics in limiting options for the human experience. And that’s what we celebrate on our patriotic holidays, the ability to have a choice. And perhaps to show off our new boats, campers, fishing poles, guns, the things we could buy because we chose to take a risk and hit it big, or work hard all our lives and treat ourselves to a new toy. Or just to spend time outdoors with family and friends because we have the leisure time to do so. Freedom is important to the American lifestyle, and it’s more than a tagline that refers to the period of the Founding Fathers. It’s an important attribute of our economic viability and our culture’s purpose. And it’s always under threat by oppressive forces that are jealous of it, and it’s something we must defend diligently. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Way to Have Honest Elections: Just call Frank LaRose in Ohio, and he can show you how

How could anybody not think that election fraud is a real problem? After all, look at the amount of money that is at stake, the enemy countries out there who want to put people sympathetic to their cause in our government for leverage. Likely, election fraud has been a significant problem the entire time that mass media has been involved in the conduct of our election cycles. We should be looking for cheating everywhere, all the time. And to maintain secure elections, we must take the process seriously, and that just hasn’t been happening. The election fraud of 2020 goes way beyond hurt feelings that Donald Trump didn’t win and that Republicans didn’t maintain control of the White House. The fraud was so ostentatious that it was no longer speculation of election fraud but a grim reality and to what extent it was occurring. Obviously, there were political class members on both sides who wanted to see election fraud happen to maintain their control over the government institutions themselves. Mitch McConnell comes to mind, as do people like Bill Barr: the FBI, the corporate boards of major media companies. What we had once suspected was now a confirmed reality, and now in the wake of all that a few years ago now, there are still those who want to deny that it did happen so that they can continue to benefit from the rigged system and allow global influences to manipulate American interests for the goals of insurgents hostile to the American idea.

Yet the solution is relatively simple now that we know what we know, and rather than argue with people about election fraud and deal with all the many court cases that are required to fix it, there is no hope of such a thing happening by the time of the 2024 election. So what is anybody supposed to do? With such a massive election fraud machine that literally has millions and millions of greedy hands in it to manipulate toward controlled advantage, what options can a government that is supposed to be ruled by the people utter to save its election system from the barbarous pirates of finance and political discourse? Well, I happen to know Frank LaRose, the Ohio Secretary of State, a bit, and I would gladly put you in touch with him to learn what he has done in Ohio to secure elections. I would say that what Frank has done in Ohio toward the goal of election integrity should be the standard for the rest of the nation to follow, and it’s all very simple. Of course, the bad guys are suing him left and right because they know how good his policies are for secure elections, and they are hoping to see his methods overturned in court by the 2024 presidential election because, in the game of “lawfare” the way liberals like to fight, they have no chance of winning any Democrat seats in Ohio without election fraud. So they are in a bit of a panic. The two best things that Frank LaRose has done to secure elections is to mandate a photo ID that is government issued. That can be a driver’s license or just a card issued for free by the BMV. Very easy to get and is the basic way to ensure that the person voting is who they are. The second thing that is done in Ohio is probably the most important, which is a real problem in this modern age of early voting, is that vote counts need to be counted by election day, not many days after. 

The way the game works, and it’s a well-thought-out scam that Democrats and some Republicans have fully endorsed over the years under the banner of “fairness,” is that mail-in ballots were ripe for fraud because they could be added or subtracted depending on what the final vote count margin actually was. In Ohio, there is early voting, but the general rule is that everyone must put their pencils down by election night, and the vote counts are due. Ohio achieves this by inputting those votes into the system as they come in so that by election night, they can be part of the vote. States like Pennsylvania don’t start counting those votes until election day, which is how this mess of counting votes days after the election began, and election results were not known on election day but days later. States that continue counting after the election, which was the case in several state races involving congressional seats, already know the margin they need to put their favorite person over the top, so they keep counting mail-in ballots until they reach their target. And if they don’t have enough actual mail-in ballots, they make them up until they do. That’s simply no way to manage any accurate election, and it has purposely opened the door to rampant election fraud. Remember when Pennsylvania, over the weeks after the election came up with a million extra votes to put Joe Biden over President Trump? And the courts didn’t want to touch the case because it would open up the entire system to a complete lashing, and nobody had the stomach for it. Frank LaRose was brought in to testify how Ohio managed, and many in the process know this little trade secret. But admitting to it would essentially commit thousands of well-respected people to a guilty plea of sedition against our country. Election fraud is serious, and many people went way too far and got caught doing it. The most recent example is the monstrosity in Arizona with Katie Hobbs, who essentially managed her own election. Good election security essentially comes down to having a good secretary of state. If you don’t have one, you can forget about it. It’s that serious.

But rather than cry about it, just fix it. If everyone wants to prove they have honest elections, then at least ensure that early ballots are counted by election day, like in Ohio. And that will stop this trend of counting votes after election day, as we have seen becoming a major problem over the last two elections. Democrats knew what they were planning to do to cheat the 2020 election; they warned us ahead of time that Trump would appear to win in a landslide and that over the following weeks, Joe Biden would pull out the win. Well, they did that because they knew what the voting margin was that they had to come up with regarding fake votes. And that was their strategy all along, and why they allow their candidates to run their campaigns in their basement because they really think people are so stupid that they won’t see what they are up to. The best thing is to remove the temptation to cheat by ensuring that results are counted by election day and not after the results are known. The gap was so significant in Pennsylvania that this problem became apparent. So in the future, for those who want honest elections, just let me know, and I can put you in contact with Frank LaRose, and he can help your state run a fair election. And you better do it before 2024 because Democrats are planning to cheat again wherever they can. It’s part of their campaign strategy disguised as some “get out the vote” effort. But in reality, it’s just planned fraud, and the way to keep them from doing it is with some simple ground rules. And by doing as Ohio has, voter integrity will become much better. And the election results will be noticeably improved. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Interview Between President Trump and Steve Bannon: A political class that wants to keep the bar low hate those who challenge them

For some strange reason, people have all the wrong values about what makes a good president, and they are reluctant to support President Trump in public. And when I say that, I’m thinking of people who think Ron DeSantis is a better option. This past week, Ohio Senator Matt Dolan made it clear that in his future political efforts, he wasn’t in favor of Trump, which is just bizarre that he thinks that’s a smart political calculation that people will respect. Because when Trump recently sat down with Steve Bannon to give an hour-long interview on the Warroom podcast, the Trump everyone should know was clear to see. Steve Bannon used to work for Trump, was one of his chief strategists, and they know each other well. And Steve knew how to get the soft side of Trump out in the interview. And it was glaringly obvious why Trump won the first time and continues to win. And in being so obvious, it’s then clear who all the bad guys are out there, making it much more conducive to defeat their hostile interests. I’ve said I like Matt Dolan as a person. But what in his mind does he think is needed in politics that he couldn’t support Trump? It’s not that Trump needs Dolan’s support. Instead, the other way around, for anything Dolan might want to do as a senator in Ohio, Trump would be an excellent name to have behind it. But somehow, they were likely the same people he listened to when he changed the name of his baseball team from the Indians to the “Guardians.” Too many politicians think that playing nice and sucking up to the mob will show the voting public that they are willing to work with others instead of fighting for their rights as their elected representatives. 

One of the reasons Trump has been going around and doing interviews on outlets like The Warroom is because he’s putting out a new book, Letters to Trump, which is a collection of letters from many celebrities who have sent the President very nice letters over the years. And in many cases, it’s letters from people who have been recently hostile to him once he entered politics. Names like Alec Baldwin are featured. People at this point forget just how popular Donald Trump has been for many decades; after all, he did have 14 seasons of The Apprentice, which was the top-rated television show produced by NBC for a long time. Under any other condition, if a president or former President has been on a television show, that show would be on syndication perpetually. But it’s hard to get any copies of past shows of The Apprentice under any format, even DVD because the media culture has so invested of itself into the destruction of Trump’s image that they would gladly sacrifice any amount of profit for themselves to destroy any potential of President Trump entering politics again. Why? It certainly works against their self-interest. Leaks from the recent Tucker Carlson firing at Fox News indicate that there is a belief among the executive staff and board that if only they could get rid of Tucker covering Trump accurately, it might harm his re-election chances. Fox News isn’t that influential, folks. More people watch the Warroom over the course of the week; that is the changing marketplace. Yet we see these little pockets of the belief that the media is compelling, especially among cord-cutters, and that politicians think that it’s still fashionable to play softball in politics when the opposition wants to eradicate you and your country along with it.    

The book Letters to Trump is filled with lots of personalities that essentially show how cheap some of the biggest celebrities of our culture are, that they were so nice to Trump when they thought there might be some opportunity for them by sucking up to him while he had the number one show on television, or even before when he had all the hotels and casinos and was on the cover of every tabloid magazine with a new hot model during his playboy years. Everyone wanted to be near Trump; they wanted a donation from Trump or a kind word from Trump. Then to see how many of those same people have turned against Trump once he entered politics is very jolting to people who aren’t prone to such contrasts. But people get it; Trump is still the leader in the polls for all the same reasons Trump had the top-rated show on NBC for 14 years, which the media is trying desperately to hide. Everyone thinks the people out there are stupid. But people get it. They know Trump is the answer to many political problems because he’s a real person who has done real, significant things in life, and our politics is run by looters essentially who do very little and take a lot from the world to produce consistently bad results. And people want successful people running their country with a proven track record over many years. And Trump is undeniably that. He did great the first time around; people had good lives with Trump as President, no matter their political affiliation, and who in their right mind wouldn’t like that?

Watching this interview with Steve Bannon and President Trump was more interesting than other interviews because both men have accomplished a lot in their lives before ever entering politics and had very interesting things to discuss. And that is why the political establishment so hates both men. What people who hate Trump, or Steve Bannon for that matter, hate most is the effect of accomplished people in politics. It really comes down to the old labor union’s jealousy about merit. If one person works harder than all the others, it makes all the lazy people look bad. And where the rubber hits the road with Trump, many lazy people make a lot of money off political inefficiencies, and they hate Trump because he wants to solve the problems. But to the political class and all the support groups that advise them, there is a lot of money to be made off chaos. So they never intend to solve the problem. They want the problems. And voters want solutions, which is why they are done with politics the old way. They want Trump because they want results, which is what many of the bootlicker types out there are terrified of. It’s not just Trump himself they fear, but their own role in a world that expects results. How can they compete with a President Trump, who has accomplished so much over a lifetime, and feel like they have a co-equal seat at the table? So rather than improve themselves somehow, they would rather tear him down to preserve their public appeal as a looter-class politician. And that was all so obvious in Trump’s very unique interview with Steve Bannon. People understand what the problems are in the world. They understand the threat of globalism. And they don’t see anybody else out there who can fix it. But Trump can, and that’s what people are supporting, someone who isn’t afraid to fix things. Who doesn’t write suck-up letters to people hoping to get a job. But they want the person that all the suck-up letters go to because they want to win at life, and not experienced the managed failure that the political class has given them for over a hundred years. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Bud Light Should Go Out Of Business: Corporate Communism was never going to work

Even non-political people are upset at Bud Light’s move to put the little Pee Wee Herman guy on their beer cans to promote alternative sexual lifestyles. It’s no surprise that beer sales for Anheuser-Busch are way down, catastrophically down, but it’s entirely something to see that impact in an intimate way. Recently I was at the Back Porch Saloon in West Chester, Ohio, where it’s a popular drinking spot for the business world, and people I spend a lot of time with, who are usually avid Bud Light fans, were refusing to order the brand, instead picking anything but, because of the embarrassing marketing campaign that has clearly backfired. These people order buckets of beer that come in an actual bucket of ice full of beer to be set on the table for rapid consumption while dealing with the world’s problems. These are monster truck, deer hunting, American football fans who tag beer to their lifestyle choice as an associate garment to express the values of their existence. And having the little gay guy on their beer cans was a bridge too far, and they did not want anything to do with the brand. To see this behavioral change up close at a recent dinner was a bit stunning. It’s one thing to hear about it on the news; it’s quite another to see people you know change their behavior entirely so quickly in retaliation. I could have told the Bud Light people not to do it, not to listen to the goofy Klaus Schwab loser from the World Economic Forum. But the Bud Light people got caught hiring woke people to manage their brand, and they bought the bait that people wanted their product so much that they’d overlook any social justice message the company was going after to get a better ESG score. Instead, people voted with their dollars, as any market economy should expect. 

The Disney Company is going through the same mess, they went openly woke several years ago, and it is impacting their brand. Looking at their money and health, it’s not a good story. It costs something in the neighborhood of 5.5 billion dollars to operate that company, and they just don’t have the kind of revenue that they are used to getting coming in because of their commitment to woke political causes, the gay lifestyles, the Democrat political position of the global citizen movement, and other non-American values that come from the bullet points of the World Economic Forum. If you really trace back the behavior to single point causes of switching from money market management, where dollars represent a vote for the value of a product, and the transition to ESG value systems, then it’s BlackRock who has made the biggest move to switching public sentiment. The plan was to switch all these economic values away from the dollar and onto ESG, and now we are seeing the backwash. Disney is in real trouble so long as people are out there who refuse to buy Bud Light beer because of the push to accept transsexual social issues. The mistake came from corporations’ attempts to assume that they controlled public sentiment and that people wanted their products so severely that they’d accept social positions to get that product. Disney is learning the hard way with seriously declining revenue. They don’t have many billion-dollar films on the horizon to cover their operating costs as they did during the past decade with animated films, Star Wars, and Marvel. Now that they’ve gone full woke, as they certainly did in the monstrosity, The Eternals with actual gay kissing in the movie, they have destroyed their brand, and the revenue shows it. The decision-making behind the choice for woke films is the same as Bud Light. And the market results were predictable. 

When you hire people to run these companies for purely woke reasons because they are women and open to progressive ideas, then it should not be surprising that they lead their companies down a destructive path of revenue generation. The arrogance of many companies buying the World Economic Forum nonsense, and the BlackRock political activism, is that people are suckers and will buy whatever companies want to sell them, which is obvious. The game’s rule is that spending money on a product is a vote. Companies would have to work hard through advertising to build a brand; then, people would show their appreciation by buying the product. But in this new communist view of the global market, corporations want to do as little as possible to compete, so they seek the safety of government alignments under communist controls to make it easier for lazy CEOs to show quarterly profits to shareholders by tricking them into this smoke and mirrors ESG garbage, because they had to hide that corporate communism was actually hurting their market growth, and they couldn’t show shareholders continued increased projections. So they tried to sell this social and environmental score stuff that average people have no desire for as a new value—then thought that if they could enforce corporate policy through BlackRock to control most corporate boards, the public would be forced to support them if they wanted their beer or their entertainment options. Instead, what has happened is that people moved as they always do toward choice. So long as there were choice options in the world, people would always move in that direction. But the stupidity of the Desecrators of Davos types, the Larry Fink’s of the world, the Klaus Schwab insanity, was that so long as progressive politics controlled the big brands, like Disney, like Bud Light, that people would then be forced to embrace their woke ideas, and that has turned out to be very wrong.

Communists tried this kind of thing with the Berlin Wall, they tried it in Cuba, and they tried it in China. Communism has consistently failed, and this rebranding of the communist idea through corporate cultures will also fail, just as seen with the Bud Light brand. And governments, in partnership with this communist push, are trying to make it hard for competition to exist so that people don’t have other market options to go to. They thought they had it all worked out, that the transition from capitalist markets driven by shareholder values would merge seamlessly into ESG scores that would make corporate communism the taste of the day. And the little gay guy on the Bud Light cans was an ostentatious dip into the cold pool of reality. And that reality destroyed a brand that many assumed was foolproof. Beer sales are almost as common as water in America, and the corporate pinheads from the World Economic Forum thought so little of the buying public that they thought they’d buy the beer no matter what was on the can. But quickly, they found out otherwise, just as Disney did when they put gay and trans characters into their movies, only to have the public massively reject those efforts. And that splash of reality that market share would still go to those who most reflected what the public actually wanted was a scary reality. One that I knew would never work, but one that apparently all those woke people at the corporate boardrooms were disconnected from reality and didn’t understand. Well, they do now; everyone is learning that this ESG attack on capitalist markets wouldn’t fly. And that became most obvious at the local level among people who are largely not interested in politics. That’s when you know the people behind the movement are in serious trouble, and they seem to be mystified as to why.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Magnificant Launch of Starship: A Jealous, Fat, Mother that wants to Sabotage her son’s hot wife

The biggest story of the year so far was undoubtedly the SpaceX Starship launch that occurred on April 20th, 2023. It was the largest rocket configuration that ever attempted to fly, and they managed to get the monstrosity to leave the pad and achieve supersonic speeds in its first flight. I stopped what I was doing when the launch occurred in Boca Chica, Texas, around 9:30 AM. And the rest of the world was watching too. Suddenly nothing else was more important, and it was nice to see. But of course, there were problems. The force of the launch damaged the launch pad, some of the Raptor engines did not ignite, and others burned out during the flight, leaving the upward trajectory to fall short of its orbital goals. The craft lost control in the upper atmosphere and had to self-destruct in what SpaceX called “an unscheduled disassembly.” We were watching an entirely new sector of the economy blooming before our eyes. Starship was essentially a giant space bus that would make it possible to move civilization into space with routine, reusable space flights, much more effectively than the Space Shuttle from NASA was able to. Starship was a game changer, and they actually made the thing fly, which many thought would be impossible. So with everything going on which seemed so important, there was nothing bigger, better, or more dramatic than the launch of SpaceX’s Starship into orbital testing. There are more phases to test, such as the orbital spaceflight itself and reloading back on a pad in Texas for rapid refueling and relaunch. Yet, there is a lot more going on with this launch than just a technical achievement. The entire world was not happy about it, even though they were paying attention. You didn’t see Joe Biden stop and give a press conference about this event from the Rose Garden because, in essence, the world’s politics did not want to see SpaceX achieve anything, which became apparent in the hours after the launch. 

All the news coverage was negative to one degree or another. The key reports talked about the damage to the launch pad and that the Starship had exploded on its first flight. There was almost a jealous parent syndrome going on when a son brings home a hot young girl he intends to marry, and the mother is a fat piece of cabbage shaped by years of bad decisions who says nothing but bad things about the young wife-to-be. Of course, the son wants his mom to be happy, but she’s overtly jealous and can’t say anything good because here is a nice young couple who have a chance to do all kinds of great things together, while the mom’s life is essentially over. So she jealously criticizes everything about the young couple to their face, and even worse, behind their backs, making it impossible to have a conversation with her about anything because she is so filled with jealous hate. That global mother is the earth, and the way she intends to manage her family is communism, as China has been selling it to the world. And with communists, a centralized government intends to prevent options for the children so that they are easier to control. For top-heavy governments filled with lazy bureaucrats, they are always looking for the easiest options, so they wish to limit the desires of the human race to fit their limited abilities. Space, in this case, is the hot young wife that is filled with promise colliding with the desire by governments to rule at all costs. They want Covid restrictions and economy lockdowns, while the children want to be free of such parental figures and a chance to do things their own way in the world. That is what Starship brings to civilization.

The plan is for Starship to launch a new craft several times a week within a few years. The assembly line-like approach at Starbase, where the Starship launches, currently have plenty of other rockets ready to go. That’s the way SpaceX operates. Even with all the damage, SpaceX will have another craft ready to fly in a few months, and they’ll stay along that path until they achieve stable flight that is so routine that people won’t even pay attention anymore, much the way that the Falcon Heavy launches are now, that launch so often that nobody hardly takes the time to watch them, even though every one of them is its own minor miracle of science. In a short time, Starship will be able to take people into space by the busloads, and they will unlock a whole new economy where the tools of space will suddenly free mankind in ways that recorded history has never been able to achieve. The ability to set up space stations on the moon, manufacture in the weightlessness of space, and travel to Mars and other places is a game changer that many haven’t come to terms with. And yet launches like the one early in 2023 drag that angry mother along for the ride that is way beyond their control, and they don’t like it. 

A quick reminder that when NASA landed people on the moon, we had two significant events that sought to pull mankind back into the worship of ancient Sumerian gods, such as the Cult of Ishtar with the Stonewall Inn riots at the end of June 1969, then again a month after the July landing on the moon with the Woodstock music festival. What we saw was a crawl by the timid of our society back to the primitive grasp of that jealous mother because they lacked the courage to embrace this new future where mankind could build a rocket and land people on the moon to walk around, pick up rocks and practice their golf swing. The governments of the world should be more supportive, just as they should support the young son who brings home the hot wife-to-be, untarnished by the mistakes of age and a fresh outlook on life. Space is an opportunity for everyone, and SpaceX’s work is destroying the yearnings for global communism because it brings too many options to civilization, requiring an entirely new political philosophy. Knowing all that, the way that the news media is these days, entirely on board with centralized governments controlling every aspect of society, this push into space does not fit their comfort zone of technical innovation. The imagination and ambition of our society were outgrowing the governments that wanted to hold it back with silly rules and regulations. And many of those static figures hoped that SpaceX would fail and continue to fail. So all they could think about during that magnificent launch was their hope that it would all go bad and that; hopefully, Elon Musk would get discouraged and stop trying to get into space and would shut up, sit down, and take orders from an authoritarian government like everyone else. Instead, what SpaceX continues to do, and why people cheer on those launches the way they do, is because space gives people options. Options that organized societies have always struggled with. How do you boss around people with kingly roles if people can just pick up their stuff and leave? And with that, there were many animosities that Starship had a successful launch, that it had left the pad and achieved great things that will bring tremendous new options to all existence. Which clearly the tyrants of the world do not want to see. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Fox News Cutting Tucker Carlson: Corporate structures failing everywhere and trying to hide why

It was no surprise to me that Tucker Carlson was removed from Fox News, even as the number one guy. I’ve been saying it for weeks; it’s almost as if Tucker was trying to get them to fire him so that he could be free of that corporate structure. We are all getting ready to go through a highly unusual period in world history that was a long time coming. There is a belief, especially among the communist-minded, that they could be as rulers, the center of all thought and activity. And that if only they captured the corporate structure, they would always capture economic flow. But the truth was that corporations existed to fulfill market needs and that invention was only part of that discovery. The condition always existed; people needed food, recreation, security, and social and intellectual advancement, so it was the problem of corporate structure to fulfill those market needs as they presented themselves through the measurements of money. Money, particularly capitalism, was the best measure of this incentive-based economy, so corporations would rise to meet those needs and attempt to make a profit from those efforts. Since America had the capitalist system, it obviously made more money than the rest of the world, leaving other economies struggling to figure it all out. But there was a problem; it was getting harder and more complicated year by year for CEOs to stand before shareholders and explain a lack of quarter-to-quarter increases. Because if an economy doesn’t continue to expand, such as in America, where our 19 trillion dollar GDP continues along an upward spike, then CEOs can’t tell shareholders where those subsequent profits will come from. 

Over the last several years, CEOs and corporations, in general, have turned toward globalism to reach new global markets and continue to expand that upward trajectory of profit-based reporting. But the problem was, the rest of the world didn’t think like America. They were struggling with some balance between outright communism, complete centralized control of their governments, and socialism, where the “state,” a collection of mindless bureaucrats who have yet to prove anywhere in the world that they can do anything right, is going to control the means of all production. So there has been a collision that most in America haven’t noticed too much because they only really care that they can get a Happy Meal from McDonald’s at will when they want it. So long as they could do that, they didn’t care much about globalism, communism, the World Economic Forum, or what John Kerry said latest about worshipping his long lost mother, Earth, with a sacrifice of our capitalist economy to the gods of communism. And along this process grew the belief among corporate circles that they controlled social fulfillment and not the other way around, where market forces were determined by social need. Communists have always gotten it wrong. Yet more and more, our colleges, our board rooms, and our CEOs have read all the wrong books, listened to all the wrong people, and have turned more and more inward to share the belief that it was corporations that decided the fate of economies. Not something they had to work with to find their place in it. And that’s what has happened to Fox News. They started their organization as an alternative to corporate media, dominated by CNN and the mainstream outlets that leaned politically left at the time. Fox offered a center-right option that Americans were hungry for. They put on some attractive news anchors and turned loose a market need that was much in demand, and they had success until they tried to change that formula. 

That formula really began to change when Glenn Beck was removed from his 5-6 slot over ten years ago, mainly because the billionaire tycoon George Soros was tired of Beck doing stories that showed what he was trying to do to America through finance. Fellow billionaire and progressive pal Rupert Murdoch listened to Soros and the New York Society of upset progressives sent Beck packing. A few years later, they would do the same to Bill O’Reilly, another number one talent that they removed essentially because they felt that Bill legitimized Donald Trump by allowing him to announce his presidential campaign on his show. Then from there, the ball really started rolling, whether it was Dan Bongino, Rudi Guiliani, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Ed Henry, the list goes on and on. The more effective the MAGA movement was, the more desperate progressive radicals who always intended to spread communism worldwide and into corporate structures became. Like self-centered children who believe the world centers around them, they thought that Fox News had created Donald Trump, and it was Trump’s sales of capitalism that were interrupting the plans of globalism most, and they had to destroy that means of communication. 

That government beast serving globalism is very attractive to the American intelligence agencies who were caught allowing election fraud in the 2020 election, so they had to do something to attempt to bury their complicity in that massive crime, so they blew on the mind of Ray Epps to provoke an insurrection on January 6th. But people saw it for what it was, and Epps has been well hidden from the public since that January 6th event in 2021. After Tucker Carlson did some excellent reporting on Ray Epps and the general condition of government activism around January 6th, it was evident that Fox News would cut him too. They didn’t care if he had the number one show. They had fallen into the belief that they “Fox News” had made Tucker Carlson. Not that Tucker—and those like him—made Fox News as is usually the case of market-driving influencers. Then Fox News had to settle the Dominion lawsuit because they were actually all complicit in the election narrative, which would have been exposed in court, so they settled a massive payout to keep the case private and not released under the lens of public exposure. Remember when Fox News called Arizona for Biden when people were still in line voting for Trump in 2020? Yeah, there’s that and much more. So 60 Minutes doing the work of the Deep State, globalists who are terrified that Trump will win the Republican nomination played their part in resurrecting the Ray Epps story so to set up the next lawsuit against Fox News, which showed itself to be willing to settle lawsuits making it a prime target for everyone who has an ax to grind to get a little money in their pockets, so the rest was history.

The next day after the 60 Minutes story, Tucker was released, and the political left cheered, thinking they had done something substantial. They had eliminated the voice of the MAGA movement, and now they would be one step closer to keeping Donald Trump from winning the nomination. But that only shows how stupid they all really are. I’ve said it and said it over and over for many months now; Fox News was holding back Tucker Carlson. Tucker would be better off away from Fox. Fox was lucky to have a guy like that. But Murdoch knows he’s not going to live very much longer. His kids are radical New York lefties who will destroy Fox anyway. So now is a chance to sell off Fox News before they screw it all up. Likely Murdoch has in mind Larry Fink’s group at BlackRock because through Fed activism, BlackRock, Vanguard, and StateStreet own most of all the corporate boards that are out there, and they are all equally failing to meet market trends versus the imposed ESG measures. So Fox is ripe for buying, primarily if they can protect themselves from another lawsuit, this one coming from Ray Epps, and sell the company while it still has value before the kids destroy it anyway. And the progressive radicals, like Larry Fink, can hang the head of Fox News over their fireplace. And they all think they will have then stopped the MAGA movement. Yet, in reality, all they will have done is decentralize that MAGA movement, which will then make it much more powerful and less restricted. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Yes, Lakota Schools Are Letting Boys Use the Girls’ Bathrooms: Why liberals hate Darbi Boddy

I think the only reason many anti-Darbi Boddy people hate her with so much conviction is that she does not look like the bottom of a foot, as most other education types do. Most people who do work in the field of education are not what you might call attractive. Instead, they look like potatoes that have been left in the basement too long on one side and are in a perpetual state of rot. That thought came to my mind as I saw Darbi Boddy, the second-year school board member from Lakota, at the Republican Lincoln Day Dinner, a glamorous event celebrating conservative values each April with Ron DeSantis speaking about his education reforms in Florida. Darbi was dressed well, and a long line of people wanted to take their pictures with her. There was quite a crowd, but we did get a chance to talk about how things were going and what she had in mind for the future as one of the most important political offices that any property owner could vote on. We send so much money to these public schools only to have them used against us as a backdoor for extreme liberalism distributed like a weed into our community with the intent to rot the minds of our youth. When you get a chance to meet Darbi, it would be hard to understand why so many people hate her. But it becomes apparent when you look at the line of people waiting to shake her hand and take a picture with her. Fellow school board members Kelley Casper and Julie Shaffer could never get a reception like that, and jealousy is undoubtedly a factor in the way that women get jealous of other women for obvious insecurities.

For all those reasons and more, Darbi Boddy is one of the most controversial figures in Cincinnati politics; she is a Butler County version of Marjorie Taylor Greene, only with a softer presentation. She and I did get a chance to talk about a few Lakota problems, and one was the transgender radicalism that is exploding in all public schools across America as a clear strategy by progressives that was unfolding. Darbi, unlike me, thinks that public education can be fixed or at least improved. Where I tend to think all elements of public education are ready for the junk pile, I am happy to see at least that people like Darbi want to try and make it work, especially considering how much money gets wasted on it in our community. And to that point, she told me about some of the challenges regarding boys and girls’ bathrooms that were trying to emerge again. Listening to her talk, she sounded very reasonable, leaving it clear to the mind of any decent person the precise point of view that people hated Darbi for purely cosmetic purposes and because she was a conservative more than any other reason. I was impressed with her statement that her main reason for dealing with many of the problems she has become wrapped up in is because she wants kids to have a stable environment to work in. And the liberal politics was intrusive to them, especially the trans bathroom issue where boys were using it as a means to get into the girl’s bathroom. Of course, at a recent school board meeting, the rest of the board stated clearly that they didn’t think that was happening. But then, after the meeting where Darbi brought the issue up for a vote to put the issue to rest, Lakota spokesperson Betsy Fuller stated that only under exceptional circumstances were boys being let into the girl’s bathroom and that the issue was distracting for students who would rather not think about those kinds of things.

After speaking with Darbi, I always leave with the thought about how bat-crap crazy women can be with other women, just over cosmetic looks, and how nuts Democrats are who are so full of hate, they want to protest the sun coming up. Darbi’s argument about removing political radicalism from kids so they can just be kids makes a lot of sense. But then again, Lakota schools are filled with radical, progressive liberals, from the school board down to the class-to-class teachers who are teaching CRT and are supporting trans activism, and those people, if left unchecked, are looking for a co-parenting relationship with the community’s kids, and to teach them all the wrong kinds of things. If Darbi wasn’t there to protect them, who would? The radicals would say that the best way to protect the kids would be to get rid of Darbi because she is the center of political controversy. But without Darbi, these people would have unhindered access to children, which is a terrifying thought, when you find out how radical some of these people really are. Darbi, in person, behaves very professionally and has genuine sincerity for the betterment of children in the classrooms. And the people who hate her hate that she’s a conservative who is not afraid to express it in public. And they hate her because of what they intend to do to innocent kids, which Darbi stands in the way of. 

You always have to watch it when the public relations people are controlling the message, and Betsy Fuller made it clear without trying, that boys were being allowed in the girl’s bathroom under unique conditions, as expressed in an email to the media after Darbi proposed a ban on the entire idea, for the safety of all kids. At a fundamental level, boys are dirtier than girls, and if they don’t sit down while using the restroom, they tend to make a mess of the seat, making it very inconvenient for the girls who have to use it after them and it’s just not fair to the girls. The other school board members were a bit outraged by Darbi, for all the reasons stated that they would be, but that didn’t change the fact that Lakota is supporting transgender radicalism, which is more of a religious issue than one of political inclusion, which is an entire problem of its own under a separation of church and state argument. Public schools have made it clear that religious references such as the Ten Commandments were not allowed to be displayed, but then they are very supportive of the rainbow flags of the Pride movement, which is a direct correlation to the Cult of Ishtar. That support was evident in Betsey’s statement to the press; they prioritize inclusion among kids that identify with gender questions, which are purely political in their progressive push culturally. And as Darbi made it clear to me, kids just want to be kids. Adults are trying to push all this sex agenda radicalism onto them, abusing that innocence between the child and adult relationship that is often detrimental to the child’s development. When you really peel back the layers of hate that have been applied to Darbi just for existing, it becomes clear that it’s not because she’s a bad school board member. Quite the opposite, I think she is the best out of the current four, and Lakota would do well to get four more just like her.   And if they did, at that point, Lakota schools might actually serve the community well and spend the vast amounts of money that are sent to them by the community wisely. And kids might be able to have one thing less to worry about than adults with radical political agendas who want to pervert children sexually for their own maniacal purposes. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Chick-fil-A Gets It: Recruiting Homeschool Kids is the Wave of the Future

It’s not artificial intelligence that everyone should be worrying about. The question as to whether or not artificial intelligence will take over the world and surpass the human being is a far less severe problem than what history will show results from the attempted takeover of the Liberal World Order during Covid. Covid was a bioweapon meant to destroy cultures while leaving the infrastructure intact for the hostile agent that employed it. Destroy the people without destroying the actual assets. After three years, people just now admitted that Covid came from China, and our government is willing to say so. But that took too long.

Meanwhile, the social distancing policies, where the damage really came from, were created by the government to inflict on its populatios around the world and destroyed a great deal in the process. But in that effort, people discovered something I have been warning about for over thirty years, as the public schools were shut down, and people had to care for their children at home. Suddenly people didn’t have access to that free babysitting service, public education, and a substantial cultural revelation was exposed to people for perhaps the first time. No longer were there theories about what was going on in public schools, but in the vacuum of daily noise, parents were able to see it for themselves as the push to work from home and the confidence that a “new normal” would result from shutting down the public school system across America and that nobody was ever coming back anyway. But things had to return to normal, which left all the leftist radicals exposed to what we are seeing today, and that’s good in its own way. At least people now understand what a devastating concept public education is and what it has done to several generations of children.

My wife and I whenever we could homeschool our kids we did. It was enormously difficult, and we did not have family and community support. Some fractures within my family are still very strong today because things were said that could never be taken back. But the social pressure for my wife to go out and get a job, process our kids through the public education system, and allow the government to co-parent our kids was never in my plans. I couldn’t wait to get married to my wife at age 19 so that I could get off the grid of processed human beings and raise a traditional family of my own, essentially to show the rest of the world how stupid they were. And my wife and I are about to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary. We’ve done it the entire time as traditional families did; she was a strong, central figure housewife. We built our whole family around her. My job was to provide income and emotional stability, to change the oil in the cars, and fight off any bad guys that might stick their noses into our business. Her job was the traditional full-time, around-the-clock stable mom that everyone could count on seven days a week under any condition. And the results were that our way of life flourished during Covid because we weren’t dependent on the ridiculously stupid outside world.   And my kids made the decision very quickly to homeschool their kids because they were raised correctly as children themselves, and they wanted to provide that level of security to their children even as the world crumbled away into stupidity and dust. It was an inconvenient time when I met my wife; we were just starting out in life. But I knew when she was being pushed into a fashion model occupation by many forces and all she was talking about with me was being a housewife that I had found the perfect person to do what I wanted to do, which was raise a traditional family in the traditional American ways and spit in the face of a progressive society. My hatred for that society goes back to my youth, so by the time I was 19 years old, I was more than ready to swipe at the endeavor. 

After Covid failed to destroy our society, and the yearly homeschool conventions returned to Cincinnati each April, my kids take the day off and go to it to get supplies for the upcoming year. They have been homeschooling their children for two years now and never plan to return to the public school system. The results in their kids are just too dramatically positive. It’s hard work and takes supportive spouses, but the effort is clearly beneficial when you do a side-by-side comparison with other kids who have been processed through the public education system. And what’s interesting is to see how many other parents are figuring this out as well, by the amount of growth my kids have witnessed at the Cincinnati Homeschool Convention downtown from each year they have attended. It has grown a lot; there are many more homeschoolers than there used to be. But one thing they noticed this year, as opposed to years past, is that Chick-Fil-A was there recruiting workers, which said a lot to me. Of course, Chick-Fil-A would do that, they have such nice kids working at their stores, and people are always flocking to go there for a chicken sandwich. The company Chick-Fil-A recognizes the next-generation problem that the biggest challenge is in staffing with good, quality people. The kids coming out of public education are not as reliable and good as those homeschooled.

When we talk about the modern labor shortage, it’s not because there is a lack of applicants to fulfill an economy that does 19 trillion in GDP per year. Many jobs go unfulfilled, and artificial intelligence can hopefully help cover those employment gaps. The problem is that there aren’t enough quality candidates. Now, Chick-Fil-A has a good recruitment and training program that staffs their stores with good kids with fundamental Christian values, and that is what the customers want when buying a Chicken Sandwich. But to keep that recruitment up to their company standards, they are turning to homeschool conventions to recruit new employees for their stores, which is a very telling admission. This is one of the methods Chick-Fil-A uses to get better workers over their competitors. Going after homeschooled kids are going to be the wave of the future, as most corporations who listened to all the same dumb advice about embracing woke values are learning sequentially that the advice was terrible and they are going to have to change their behavior for the future. Companies looking for good employees will not care about their college education, what high school they attended, or whether that school won a national championship in football. They will care about whether or not the kids come from backgrounds where the parental structure was good; homeschooled kids would be a great bonus. And are the kids engaging, willing to work, and confident enough to continue learning as an asset of their corporation? Chick-Fil-A gets it, and the trends in the future of employee recruiting will be along those lines, throwing out all the previous measures entirely because they will historically be proven to be completely ineffective. 

Rich Hoffman

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Getting Away into Natural Bridge, Kentucky: The ultimate kind of Rebellion, Kindness, and Defiance

April is my birthday month and is always a positive benchmark for me. It’s always been my favorite month with all the life that returns from a long winter, and I always use the month as my own gauge into successes that need to be celebrated and things that need to be improved. But as a treat to myself, I wanted to go on a camping trip to Natural Bridge with as many of my family who could go and get off the grid for a few days in a place I grew up enjoying. My grandparents were from that region of Slade, Kentucky; during prohibition, my grandpa and his family ran moonshine, which I respect. I view moonshine differently than drug dealing for several reasons, even though I dislike intoxication of any kind all the time. I like to see independent and free people pushing back against a tyrannical government, and during prohibition, the government was out of control and deserved to have pushback, and that my grandfather and his father certainly did. Currently, we have a very dangerous government that is way beyond acceptable tyrannical tolerance, so for my birthday, I wanted to revisit a state park from my youth nicely nestled in the foothill mountains of the Appalachians and recharge. Over the last few years, my favorite mode of travel has been RV camping, so I wanted to take ours and live out of it for a few days, which is precisely what we did, and it was a wonderful experience. One of my sons-in-law brought their own camper, so we had a nice little family get-together down in the hills of Natural Bridge, Kentucky, and get away from the government for a bit.

Slade, Kentucky, where the Natural Bridge State Park and the world-famous Red River Gorge are located, is unusual because they have a particular hostility toward big government. Many census takers have found it impossible to do their job because the local residents simply don’t like government. So when you want to get away from big government and deal with people in a traditional Christian background setting in the Bible Belt, there aren’t many places in the world better. I’ve been to Natural Bridge a lot over my life, especially as a little kid. It’s been about ten years since my last visit. It’s not that it’s hard to get to; it’s very close to Cincinnati, Ohio, where I live. But my schedule has been busy; since my last visit, I have traveled around the world a few times, been to many countries, and experienced unique cultures. My opinion about the Slade, Kentucky region isn’t for lack of knowing anything else. But instead, it’s because I’ve seen a lot of other places that I appreciate that one of the best travel destinations there is, in my opinion, one that I knew well from my youth, was literally in my own backyard. It was a lucky experience to have, out of all the places in the world I could have gone, to have such a relationship with literally one of the best places there is. Our camping trip was wonderful, we had a nice campsite nestled in the hills, and we lived off the bare minimums and were able to let the world go for a bit, which was the present I wanted to give myself this year for a well-deserved birthday.

My wife and I started RV camping during Covid, and we will likely never do anything else again. I like hauling around my hotel room, bathroom, and refrigerator. It makes traveling so much better to step away from the grid as much as possible. I have a TV in my RV that we can stop and have a snack to take a break from driving and relax. Camper traveling with an RV has been a great experience, so doing that kind of camping at Natural Bridge brought together parts of the world that are favorites. It was all a gratifying experience. A lot of my family was able to come along, so it was nice to be around them and celebrate life while stepping away from the world of problems that traditionally come from government interference in our lives. Living out of a camper for a week in April of 2023 was enormously rewarding and recharged my spirit considerably. As a family, we had a good trip, and we were all grateful to have it. 

My wife and I had an interesting experience, a few actually, but one that reminded us just how good the world is without government in it. And people still live and get along without the stupid government imposing themselves into our lives. People left alone by government tend to do the right things without having a parental authoritarian in the form of government looming over our shoulders. For example, we went into town for some ingredients for smores and other snacks. And one of the items we needed was more firewood. So we were going to pick some up from a gas station down by the Mountain Parkway with a nice store. But the nice clerk there was a mountain woman from Appalachia, of course, and she told us that the wood that the gas station was selling was too expensive and you didn’t get very much. So she told us to go down the road around 400 yards to a tire mechanic with a little shed behind a Subway restaurant. He was selling a whole-wheel barrel of firewood for ten bucks. So we went down there to see him, and he loaded us up with firewood for our campsite. He had a rough mountain man accent; I would have needed subtitles to understand what he said. But we paid him the ten dollars, and he gave me a very large wheel barrel of wood to load into the back of our hatchback.

We couldn’t understand each other, but we quickly became good friends. That region is famous for many campfires, so he has many customers for his little enterprise due to the many campers who come to climb the world-famous Red River Gorge. It’s kind of a hippie culture, the rock climbers. More libertarian than anything. We probably wouldn’t agree on presidential picks or even drug usage. But we all do share a love of independence. Many of them come and camp with four people in a one-person dome tent with hundreds of others who can barely rub two dimes together in their pockets. And I find them refreshing, especially at Miguel’s Pizza, where they hang out. I’ve had pizza from everywhere, and the pizza they have at Miguel’s is a real treat. It was wonderful to pick some of it up and take it back to our campsite, where I had my reading chair set up next to the fire as all the kids played and enjoyed each other, and I had a stack of books to read well into the night as the sun set outlining the mountain tops and the dark sky stars made themselves obvious. It was a nice place to be, and it was certainly a great birthday present for me. No matter how much money you throw at recreation, it never gets better than that. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business