Category: Google

Billy Gates Wants Censorship: These losers are about to bite the dust

Big Tech wants Censorship to Protect their own Ass

Of course, there is a lot behind the ridiculous Biden administration speeches on January 6th, 2022. But to see it, you must look at the people who illegally put Biden in office, not the puppets themselves, the old man, and that sleep-around girl, Kamala Harris. What they said to America about the FBI instigated riots at the Capitol building was a poke in all our eyes, but why they said it is quite a testament to the things that are coming. I’ll say it for the hundredth time, my wife and I were talking about it extensively today at breakfast, before 6 AM; the most significant thing we did for ourselves in 2021 was to travel around the country in our RV and get to know the real people who are out there. Not the Washington D.C. swamp creatures who want to be paid with extorted taxpayer money to run an inefficient administrative state that serves themselves and not the rest of us. If we hadn’t traveled so much, I don’t know that I would feel so secure in our position right now. But I do, and quickly to me upon watching the Biden administration attempt to make January 6th some kind of ceremonial thing for the insurgent, anti-constitutional, political left, they showed the cards they had been trying to conceal for over a hundred years. They are desperate and out of control, and the cracks are showing in a very desperate way. 

The people who have propped up the Biden administration and put them in power are in a panic since it has become quite evident to them that the Bill of Rights in America is not going to allow them to do what they wanted to do, a complete overthrow of the American way of life and incorporation of the United Nations into the managing structure of our domestic affairs. The Second Amendment has given people that extra bit of confidence to stand up to an out-of-control government over Covid concerns. The line crossing that has been going on in Australia because they allowed for strict gun control by their government has not panned out in America. That has infinitely frustrated anti-Americans like Billy boy Gates. Little Billy these days wants censorship because his control over social media, or we should say, many hundreds of millions of dollars of influence, has not moved the needle toward an authoritarian regime that would allow pinheads like him to run our country from some wine cellar in Davos. Mark Zuckerbucks has expressed the same desire for more censorship and federal control of free speech on social media platforms because they are losing control of their control, and they don’t like it. 

In hindsight, from Twitter, the plan was clearly to control free speech. Twitter was set up like an ant trap, where we expressed ourselves in ways that algorithms could detect, and we’d take all that code back to our nests so they could kill our colony. And by kill, we mean our notion of a free speech republic and surrender it to a totalitarian Big Tech control of the entire world. Hey, we can’t blame them for trying. From the dawn of mankind to the present, every destitute soul has attempted to abuse their authority, and these losers are no different. They are just the latest to try and fail.   What pains us is that we wanted to trust them; we liked them. And now that we have been let down by the boy wonders, the Billy Gates types, the whitewashed Mark Zuckerberg, the eastern philosophy loving Jack Dorsey—they sold themselves to us as friends, and now we are quite hurt to see their true intentions. And being the geeks that they have been most of their lives, they miss that trust now that they’ve lost it. For them, it is quite shocking to see that all the billions of dollars that they have in a bank account can’t buy them the love that they have lost over the 2020 election and their perpetuation of Covid as a mask for their malice. 

Just as they put the clamps down on their social media platforms and attempted to launch Chinese-style controls on all speech, the American free-market responded by separating from their control and launching competitive media outlets, like Roku’s Real America’s Voice and the social media platform Gettr.  And coming up in 2022 will be President Trump’s own media company called Truth Social. I already have an icon for it on my desktop, and from what I’ve been able to see, it will be a very successful platform that any in that Davos crowd will not control, and that has everyone in a bit of a panic, which was reflected in the Biden speech. This literally is their last gasp of air before they choke on the notion that they have less control over the population now than they did before 2016. The big difference is that many of their methods have moved from conspiracy theory, the uncomfortable suspicion that they all wanted to rule as a global government at all costs, to the literal realization that was precisely what they were doing. Thinking and knowing are different things with different contexts once the reality is established, and now that it has been, Billy Gates and Zuckerbucks can see the writing on the wall for their future and their entire life’s work. With all they’ve done, they are being foiled as we speak, and that wasn’t something they considered in their many mad scientist’s plans to take over the world for the good of us all.

So they are doing what they do; they are asking for an authoritarian government that is centralized and run by their campaign donations to give them the power they don’t have, which our American Constitution limits for these specific purposes. And they are now starting to doubt that they will ever get such authority, especially with the mid-terms coming up. If Republicans take the House and Senate in 2022, their long-laid plans will be over, and they will lose billions and billions of dollars. Of course, they don’t care about the lost money, but the impact to their reputations is hurting them most. They have been bragging about what their money could buy to people for years, and now they are watching it all blow up in their faces. So keep that in mind as you watch commentators try to get their minds wrapped around Biden’s January 6th speech. They know what they did, and they are caught and trying to use that incident to cover up all their crimes. But what we have here is an insurgent government paid for by these Big Tech corporations with global intentions to enslave us, and they miscalculated how much people would hold on to their rule of law by Constitution. And now that they’ve seen how deeply it runs, and what little they can do actually to maintain control of media, politics, and the various homes spread out across the nation in any sustainable way, they have panic in their actions that show us just how poor a hand they’ve had all along. It’s time to push up the bets because these losers are about to bite the dust. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

We’re Not Anti-Government, We’re Anti-Stupid: Government needs to be the refs, not the players in the game

We’re not Anti-Government, Just Anti-Stupid

I’ve heard what Steve Bannon has said about Elon Musk on the War Room podcast, and I understand it to a point. Yes, Elon Musk has made deals with China, and knowing what we do now, in hindsight, it was a terrible idea. It’s the same situation with other billionaires like Ray Dalio. He has invested heavily in the prospect of an expanding middle class in China, where corporations think all the new money in the world will come from. I would not say Steve is wrong. But he’s only partly correct. People evolve their beliefs over time depending on good and bad ideas that transpire through the course of events, and they do change their minds; and I see in Elon Musk a mind that is evolving in the correct direction. Our job as change agents is to allow changing minds into our tent for tactical reasons, but without losing ourselves in the process. For instance, during the ESPN2 Manning podcast of the Monday Night Football game, Aaron Rogers abruptly started talking about Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged. Here we have a sports jock speaking in popular culture about Ayn Rand, one of the most controversial writers in American history and world history. Many of the ideas discussed on the War Room and here on the Gunfighter’s Guide are percolating into popular culture, which is a great thing. But with new interest from people who may not have been thinking about such things in the past come all their past mistakes. So, I think it’s a good idea to bring them into the camp, allow them to get warm by the fire, and keep our eye on them as to misdeeds. But in the case of Elon Musk, he said something recently that is irrelevant to his patriotic status and is entirely accurate and worth talking about as a critical strategic need within the freedom movement.

I heard it in a couple of different interviews; one was with Musk and the satire website The Babylon Bee. I can understand the skepticism of Bannon in what Musk’s intentions are since he has been so profitable in relations with communist China. But I see other things going on with Elon Musk. He is a problem solver, and he’s looking at the potential for a Mars colony and thinking about what kind of government will allow it to thrive, based on what we all know now from history and what is working up-close here in the present. He has been told no on several permits to fly Starship into space on test flights due to environmental concerns, so he is seeing the negatives of a communist type of government up close and personal. He may have profited from those relationships, but he has also learned some valuable lessons that are worth listening to. These days Musk is saying that governments should be more like referees in society than players in the game. That, in essence, has been the goal of the Tea Party movement for years, and it is undoubtedly the intention of the MAGA movement. Musk said it nicely in a way that many have struggled to put words to for a long time when talking about limited government.   What is it, and why does it work better? 

People have always associated me with an anti-government movement. That is how they often see the freedom movement in general, whether we are talking about the Tea Party, MAGA, or the current America First Policy Institute. The people who make up the name-calling are usually significant government types who love Karl Marx so that less government would be detrimental from their point of view. And by default, whether it’s a sports jock like Aaron Rogers, a political strategist like Steve Bannon, or an eclectic engineer with vast financial resources to make what he wants, the name-calling by the left usually defines the political reality because all the names mentioned are too busy being productive to work together on a counter-punch. But Musk and his need to solve the problems of interplanetary sustainability must figure out the puzzle of good government, and it has taken him more toward the freedom movement than toward communism. For that, many should be grateful. Because once thought like that enters popular culture, to the point where Aaron Rogers is talking about Atlas Shrugged on a football broadcast, there are significant cultural shifts on the horizon that few are really prepared for. Arbitrary definitions of people are not as crucial as proper utilization of the sentiments.

I would never have called myself “anti-government.” Instead, I have always been “anti-stupid.” There are many stupid people in the world, and the bigger the government is, the more of a chance that stupid people will end up in government, causing all of us a headache. So, it’s quite natural not to want stupid people to be in charge of our lives, so in that way, we want the small government to weaken the impact that stupid people will have on our lives. But what Elon Musk said was more on target. Government is there to make sure that the rules of the games we play in managing our society occur to bring about the best outcomes.   As I say in the video above, we can look at an empty field and consider it without value until we decide to play a soccer game or football game on it with all the rules that have been created to allow the drama of such an event to transpire. Government should referee those games; they should not be the players themselves. Because many of them are stupid and valueless types of people, our current government wants to use the protection of the referee position to rig the games for wins instead of letting the games play out and evoking a winner and loser based on skill and persistence. 

And that is the real goal; we aren’t trying to get rid of the government; we need the government to make sure that things work right in society. But we must distinguish that government is not a player on the field but are just there to make sure the game is fair. In essence, the heart of all our problems is that too many in government presently want to be the players, not the referees, and they got into politics for all the wrong reasons. From Elon Musk’s point of view or Aaron Rogers, they have previously functioned quite well in the world with the political rules bent slightly toward corruption. Still, nobody cared as long as they got what they wanted out of the deal. But upon success, and continued frustration in dealing with the government, whether it’s over a permit to fly into space or Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates, the bug of awful play-calling has affected just about everyone these days, and they are looking for solutions. Our task within that movement is to find them a place around the campfire and expand the reach of our shared objectives, which is to see that our games in life are fair so that we can then concentrate on being the best we can be within those rules. And in any healthy society, whether on earth or Mars, that needs to be what we spend our time on, and not trying to fend off referees who want to be the players of the game, without the risk of being exposed as unskilled and stupid.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The CDC is Guilty of Murder, and Economic Suicide: Japan solves Covid with Ivermectin

The Solution is in Ivermectin

Another thing I have no more tolerance for is Covid. We know how to manage it. We know how we got it. We know what to do about it. And now, we are simply going through the pain of a corrupt political system trying to cover up their missteps and deliberate crimes, which is why we continue to hear all the nonsense about Covid and a CDC that is as effective as a wet paper towel these days. Out of a seven-day workweek, I speak to brilliant people in Japan about four of those days, all hours of the day due to the time zone differences, so I know firsthand how they have dealt with Covid. When they had the Olympics, because the world’s eyes were on them, they played along with the stupid World Health Organization methods of shutdowns and social distancing methods, to significant economic cost to them.   The Olympics were supposed to be good for them, but Covid wrecked their plans, and they weren’t happy about it. They are a solution-based society, so it wouldn’t take long for them to get their arms around this problem, and I knew it was coming in real-time. Once the world took their eyes off them after the Olympics were over, on August 13th, Ivermectin was granted permission for use in Japan. Fourteen days later, case counts started to plunge to near zero. Japan stayed on a health emergency status until the end of September just to make sure they were safe in their control of the virus. Then by October, they were back to full business and not shutting down again. They needed to make up lost ground and impact on their economy, and they needed all their people healthy and back to work. So they treated the virus instead of running from it like Europe, and the rest of the world have been doing. 

In my situation, I speak with people worldwide in most of the time zones, so Covid has been a continued conversation over the last few years now, and what different people were doing about it to manage their lives. Knowing what I do because of that perspective, I don’t care how big the government is, how wealthy the billionaires are, or how powerful the tech companies may be. Everyone who has participated in the Covid game should be punished in ways that would discourage the behavior in the future. Every entity that openly has lied to us about Covid, the vaccines, and the use of therapeutics such as Ivermectin has committed crimes on many levels. What they did was purposeful. Censorship from them is just another form of admission. With Twitter and Facebook taking down therapeutic mentions, they act as the Ray Epps of tech media. They are guilty of all the damage that continues with Covid crises outbreaks, from the psychological side more than the physical. The pain of Covid has been selected, by our government, specifically by the CDC, for purely political reasons. All the lost money and lives resulting from it are their responsibility. 

To prove what I’m saying, I present here in this article, while it lasts a YouTuber doctor, a very good one, Dr. John Campbell. He studies medical statistics for fun; he’s not a Trump supporter or really even political. He just likes to look at data and talk about it medically. His report verified what I had heard from Japan on the ground, that Ivermectin was a solution that the country had embraced to deal with the Delta variant. Obviously, the Omicron variant wasn’t yet on the horizon in October when the case counts went to near zero in Japan, but what we know of Omicron is that it’s even milder and is more like a cold than anything dangerous. It certainly isn’t the message that Democrats want and need to deflect the public away from their terrible performance, their lack of new ideas and their desires to turn the United States into the model for the Great Reset with the United Nations. Japan couldn’t afford more lockdowns, just as most countries clearly know by now, so they took action, and the results are apparent. The pressure from countries like Japan will kill this Covid nonsense in the future, who have just decided to create solutions for themselves instead of following the same government science into perpetual economic depravity.

And for Twitter and Facebook to deprive people of these known solutions, it’s malicious at best. Our government has access to this same information. It’s not like Dr. Campbell is a crazy conspiracy theorist. Ivermectin worked for Japan and everywhere else in the world where they have used it. But Covid was never about solving the problem, which was created by the government purely for the purposes of government. Covid was about telling people what to do. As of the start of the new year of 2022, the CDC has issued new recommendations for isolation and quarantine for the general population.   Regardless of vaccination status, they are, what’s the point, to stay home for five days. If you have no symptoms after five days, you can leave your house. Then you should continue to wear a mask around others for an additional five days. How about that? That is the science of this ridiculous government that only wants to stay in charge as an authority in people’s lives and ignore a proactive solution that could make Covid disappear forever. And to perpetuate this bad, made-up science which has absolutely zero functional reality to it, the Big Tech companies are trying to scrub any information that might make people question the government science. Crimes on top of crimes, on top of crimes. After what we have learned by the CDC, particularly in ignoring Ivermectin and other treatments that could eradicate Covid, they are actively looking to eliminate any competing information from other sources, such as Dr. Campbell here, and to act like the Wizard of Oz and keep you from looking behind the curtain.

But when we come out of our cultural bubbles, as I often do, we can see the truth that is out there beyond our horizon. American science should have led the world toward a Covid solution with innovation and bravery. Instead, too many Americans chose to listen to the authority addicts at the CDC and surrender their lives to government authority out of sheer laziness in not wanting to think for themselves. And now that the government and Big Tech have tasted that power of manipulation, it will be harder than ever to convince them to surrender that power without a significant conflict. Yet there is no question now, as opposed to when Covid was first introduced, there are ways to treat it, to stop the spread. To contain it. But the government wants nothing to do with that kind of talk. Because they want us all to be submissive to them and to bastardize science for the sake of power. And the result has been one of the most destructive things ever done to the human race. For what they’ve all done, they must pay and spend heavily. We can’t let what they did with Covid ever happen again, and so far, there has been no action taken against them to keep them from trying in the future or even to change their behavior in the present. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Ray Epps is all that Matters: January 6th was a government entrapment plot, based on the behavior of Richard Trask

Who is Ray Epps

As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t anything to talk about regarding the so-called January 6th Insurrection if the name of Ray Epps isn’t involved. The guy was everywhere in D.C. the day of the Trump rally and the night before trying to instigate people into a froth of anger and enter the Capitol building in protest of the election fraud that had so many people already disappointed. You can tell by the federal government’s behavior that there is something really wrong with this case. They have arrested people who had far less to do with inciting violence and vandalism than what Ray Epps was caught on camera doing. Yet, Ray is driving around his ranch in Arizona without a care in the world while many people rot in jail, stuck without due process by a government that has turned against them completely. If that weren’t enough, while we sift through the smoke a year later of what happened on January 6th, and establishment types try to use it to hide all the other destructive behavior that has been going on in the SWAMP, the kidnapping plot story of Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan has taken on a life of its own, thanks to a wife swapping, tattooed freak of an FBI agent, Richard Trask and the night he tried to beat his wife’s head in after a swingers party that unveiled to the world a level of entrapment that the FBI had directly been involved in. 

At this point, do I have to remind people of all the times over the last decade that the FBI has been caught tampering with crime to provoke an outcome? Because that could go on for days, I’m thinking presently of the evidence coverup from the San Bernardino Christmas terrorists; remember that one? I haven’t forgotten, that’s for sure. The Trump years in the White House have clearly shown that the culture of the FBI is in political outcomes, not a blind pursuit of justice. Also, from me, a bit of a disclaimer, I have several former employees who have left me for these kinds of aims in life, so I know quite a lot about the subculture of police work at all levels. There is currently a young man I am quite proud of who is working in the White House as a Secret Service Agent. He was there when Trump was, and he is doing just the same good job for Biden currently. Good kid. But…….I have many people I know who are just like Richard Trask, even down to the swinger’s lifestyle, who have populated local law enforcement, the FBI, and other roles. So I can say with a lot of confidence that Richard Trask as the lead FBI agent who entrapped militia groups in Michigan into plotting the kidnapping of the governor during the Covid lockdowns in retaliation for her brutal behavior, is common. Richard Trask is not unusual, even though many are shocked by the revelations of his character. 

Trask was an anti-Trumper to an extreme, leaving behind many social media posts forecasting his behavior. Ultimately, he used his power as an FBI agent to steer angry people into a direction the government wanted them to go so they could make a story about it. Left to their own devices, those militia people would have sat in their cabins complaining about the government while they cleaned their guns. But Trask and his fellow FBI agents wanted to shove them into a story by pretending to be one of them, complete with the crazy wild beard and tattooed bodies. The FBI stoked the plot to kidnap Whitmer, then once the followers in the militia started making plans, Trask turned it into a public relations incident that the media then took the handoff and broke the story in a way that made everything sound like a vast, right-winged conspiracy, especially coming from Disney owned ABC News. 

Well, while a lot of this was going on, Trask’s personal life was a strange brew of characters. He was trying to get his wife to buy into some experimental sexual escapades when they found themselves at a swinger’s party at a hotel in Michigan near Kalamazoo. Apparently, Trask drank too much or was drugged while there. Whatever the case, the couple left the party feeling like many couples do at things like that, guilt in what they were doing, exposed sexually in uncomfortable ways, and not really knowing what to do with their emotions after. Once they returned home, they got into a big fight in their bedroom where Richard Trask proceeded to beat his wife’s head against the bed while he choked her in a way that looked to intend a terminal outcome. She called the police; they picked him up. Because of the unusual behavior of a federal officer, the story got out. Over the months that followed, we learned that this was the same FBI agent who planted the story of the Whitmer kidnapping. So, there you have it all within the Trask case, a motive that it’s a cultural problem at the FBI, not just a single individual. Trask didn’t do all these things by himself, he had a lot of help, and even after he nearly killed his wife, it took the FBI a few months to officially fire him, which they had to do publicly. But just think of how many Richard Trasks are out there working as FBI agents right now who are just like him? In my experience, it’s most of them. It comes from the way they recruit, the kind of agents they hire. As I said, I know the type very well. 

Knowing all that, let’s move to January 6th. The FBI knew there would be hundreds of thousands of people coming to the Trump rally angry at election fraud. The FBI needed to do something about it because that’s what they are expected to do. Of course, just as they did with Richard Trask, they would attempt to infiltrate some of those groups to influence them into behaving in a way that the government could use as public relations against the angry Trump voters. They felt they had to put such a large group of people on their heels while the government tried to cover what they did with Covid and the election results. Such as, who told five states to stop counting ballots on election night 2020 just shortly after Vegas bet makers had called the race for Trump? What form of Ray Epps is there in that story? People had a right to be upset, and the FBI wanted to change the story. So, there was Ray Epps, doing essentially what Richard Trask did, and the only reason Ray is still out there is that he didn’t do anything stupid like go to a swinger’s party and try to swap his wife for the night for some strange sex with drug-laced losers and low life intellects. Instead, Ray did what all federal plants try to do; he is staying low keyed on his property, hoping the story will cool down at some point so he can re-emerge back into the public. But a year later, independent reporters are starting to get it. They have been going to see Ray at his home to find out why the FBI has never picked up Ray, even though many people are still in jail awaiting some sort of bogus charges for the “insurrection” at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Sadly, the evidence points back to a guilty government where many politicians are playing their part in the coverup, particularly Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi. The hundreds of thousands of people who came to hear Trump talk that day scared them to death. And they needed some way to take the light off them, just as Trask tried to do for his favorite political governor, Gretchen Whitmer. She was in trouble with the people for the draconian lockdowns, and Trask took it upon himself to bail her out with this entrapment plot of militia groups. Now, does anybody really think that the FBI didn’t take the same sort of extreme action against Trump supporters on January 6th? The fact that Ray Epps has not been arrested tells you everything you need to know.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Corporate Selfishness: They don’t respect our time, or money

They Don’t Respect our Time

It’s not enough to talk about the Constitution as it applies to the government and the people who elect it. One of my concerns about the purpose of my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is to more appropriately define the relationship that corporations have with society and government in general. This has essentially been a problem since the Jackson administration, where Cornelius Vanderbilt first exposed the cracks of corporate power in the years that followed. Now, of course, I’m not a believer in heavy regulation, and I do not think the government can manage power well at all. So they are certainly not capable of controlling corporate governance and shouldn’t even try. By nature, they always need money, and corporations all too easily buy them off with donations, which is why most of the corruption we see these days is happening. Corporations do not care about the Constitution. I have never been in a business exchange in all my years where business people suddenly said, “oh, that might be unconstitutional.” They simply will say, “well, if people want to get paid, they’ll put up with it.” That is why Biden attacked the vaccine mandates the way he did. The American Republic is most vulnerable through its corporations rather than through Constitutional mandates, so this is a long-time problem that needs a very modern solution. I have started to tackle this need in my book, and I’m sure many discussions will spawn from the continued necessity. 

So it is in that context, I say, especially among the new tech companies, that corporate America does not respect the people they do business with, and that needs to change dramatically.   It is a good thing that all companies should cherish to have a customer. But, corporations, whether it’s McDonald’s, Disney, network television, Wal-Mart, etc., have evolved over the years under government protections to disregard the customer experience. With more and more technology emerging, they have really come to abuse their relationship with consumers. And consumers have accepted this abuse by default because it’s coming from every direction so fast and furious that we haven’t really taken the time to understand what is happening to us. This is most obvious in the complete disregard of our personal time and freedoms concerning our corporations. Corporations, by their nature, are like only children; they assume they have exclusive access to the attention they want without considering all the other elements that are competing for the same time and money. For instance, McDonald’s isn’t thinking about the time and money that P&G is committing to new shampoo when it comes out with a new fish sandwich for the season of Lent. But the consumer only has so many hours in the day and so much expendable income. So when all these various elements seek selfishly to consume every waking hour of a customer’s life, there are lots of adverse effects that cascade off the experience that has a negative impact on the nature of our government in general.

For instance, I’m a Call of Duty player. I’d play it a lot more if I could, but I sleep about 7 hours a day these days. The rest of my 24 hour day is carefully planned in 15-minute increments. I do not have “free time.” I have lots of managed time, but I do not have empty time that is filled by random behavior. So I maybe get a half-hour a day to play Call of Duty which I consider a luxury. Now when you are in the Call of Duty world, or the platform of PlayStation in general, they make it so that you could easily spend 24 hours a day playing their game and their game only. It is quite a culture of game players, and I can see why many people who want to be good at it would easily stay home and play that game all day, all night, for seven days a week. There is enough content to really just live in the Call of Duty world. No wonder our employment numbers are so low now that the government has taught people that they are willing to pay people to stay home. I look at the number of people playing Call of Duty with me whenever I am playing and think a lot about all the lost productive time spent on that game. Sometimes, if I worry about something and can’t sleep very well, I get up at 2 AM and play a few rounds, and there are always thousands and thousands of players in the queue ready to play any game I pick within the Call of Duty environment.   But it gets even more complicated than that. Call of Duty is just one game out there; many other games are just as popular, such as the Madden games, Fortnite, and many others, all that have their game bases filled with people willing to spend their time and money on those products. But, time in a day is not infinite, so there is a management problem that we have to deal with as a modern consideration. And the corporate influence is committing the same problem they always do. They assume that the consuming public will put 100% of their time into their product in the same way that an only child expects their parents always to be available to them. 

But, while we are trying to find all our passwords to all our media accounts, and playing all these games, and are under pressure constantly to update our media accounts and to read all the legal agreements with each one, people have no room to figure out the origin of Covid, or the FBI tampering in Michigan with the Whitmer case, or the paradox of Ray Epps and the FBI attempting a false flag on January 6th, as they usually do when the government needs to make a political case beneficial to them, there is no time for people to give to these subjects because they are too worried about what their password is to their Diseny+ account. Or their bank is changing their account number because they are doing a system update. And at work, people might have an account for Microsoft Teams, their inventory systems, their clocking systems. Everywhere people turn these days, there is some technological incursion for their time that is not being managed, hurting the American family and their productive output. I would say that the solution is not more regulation, but is more like I say in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. The way to punch back at corporate selfishness is to hit them where they genuinely care to protect, in their self-preservation. Right now, they assume that consumers will always be there for them whenever they decide they want them. But by applying constitutional concepts to even corporate culture, as it should have always have been from the start going all the way back to the Jackson administration, many of these modern problems could have been alleviated. Consumers could still be consumers, but they would be more than that to the world of corporate America. And that’s what’s missing now, is that people are people who should be respected first and foremost, starting with their time and money. Because just as every only child must learn at some point, they are not the only things in the world that matter. And to truly be balanced in the world and good, they must learn to deal with the rest of the world respectfully and with excellent quality.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Jared Schmeck is Just the Beginning: Americans are better than anybody in the world at sticking it in the eye of authority

Jared Schmeck is a real American

Of course, the Democrats support the filibuster change in the senate. Biden knows he didn’t win the election and that none of the Democrats will win anything in the Midterms. Democrats are not the majority in America. They know it, and voting proves it. They can only hide their extreme minority opinion by cheating in elections. So for them, it is a nail in their coffin to contemplate tighter controls on future elections. They have convinced us to open up the voting dates and voter ID parameters, but that has proven to be a disaster. And after 2020, of course, voting rights will have to be much more tightly controlled. There will never be another election in America where the entire nation openly accepts the results.

Democrats have been pushing their luck for decades on vote cheating, and this time they just went too far. A certain amount of cheating in places like Philadelphia and Detroit were give-ins that we put up with to get along with Democrats. But never again, after what happened in the middle of the night, where “someone” stopped vote counting in five critical states after Vegas had called the race for Trump around 10 PM on election night, will our society ever go back to what it was. When we all woke up on election day, we were told that Joe Biden was going to win and that massive leads in Pennsylvania would be erased for Trump and that we were going to like it. Take it, or take it, the media told us. We had no other choice. Our country’s corporations had taken over our government, and they were letting us know that we had no choice but to go along if we wanted to get along. Because they didn’t care really what we thought about it, they were taking our government from us.

That’s why it didn’t surprise me in the least to hear Jared Schmeck tell Biden on Christmas Eve, “Let’s Go Brandon.” As incompetent as the Biden administration is, and to not screen their calls any better than they did during a call to promote Santa Clause, Trump supporters got a different kind of Christmas present from a young dad and Trump supporter. The “Let’s Go Brandon” rally call has been fuming all through 2021 and epitomized the thoughts of a majority of Americans. More than 75 million people voted for Trump, more than any political figure in history. It all started at a NASCAR event where fans made television cameras nearby know their feelings about Joe Biden. Of course, the camera crew could hear what the crowd was saying, “F, Joe Biden.” But the news reporter stated on camera, even as we could listen to it for ourselves, that the crowd was saying, “Let’s Go, Brandon.” As the election results of 2020 and the panic over Covid continued, most Americans can see the con game in real-time because they are free to think about such things. Here was a group of people saying obviously one thing, but the media said that it was something completely different. So to reflect that paradox, among disenfranchised Trump voters, “Let’s Go Brandon” has become a thing to remember the ridiculousness and corruption of our political system in general and our media culture that is obviously controlled by a corporate narrative that thinks they are actually in control of our government through soft money, dark money, all kinds of money. And that our Constitution to them is meaningless. 

I think we all understand the problems of our government, but this illusion that the media has created over the years is kind of like holiday dinners where you put up with loved ones who may have fallen off the wagon over the years. Usually, our dealings with them are short. Once they leave, we don’t have to deal with them for another year, and everyone goes back to their own little worlds. That is how this massive corruption has managed to take hold the way it has. That is why all the cheaters of the 2020 election thought they would get away with it. Suddenly the undesirables weren’t just stopping by for Christmas dinner; they wanted to come over for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July too. They were sticking themselves into our lives in ways that crossed the line. And people weren’t happy about it. I thought hard about it after the election. I was so thoroughly pissed off that my wife and I packed up our RV and traveled the country extensively through the year. I was pleased to meet many, many, many people like Jared Schmeck. They were at every gas station, restaurant, and rest stop from Cincinnati to Idaho and all the way to the border with Mexico. My wife and I went to all those places in the heart of America to get to know if we still really had a free country to live in. If the people living in the country really still believed in the Constitution.

As it turned out, I wondered after all our trips if anybody had actually voted for Joe Biden. He certainly didn’t get the number of votes that the election results showed. Democrats had cheated massively, and they had been caught. And even with all their tightly controlled messaging, so many people hated Biden that spillover into something like that Christmas Eve Santa call with Jared Schmeck was bound to happen. There are millions of people like Jared out there. The media has tried to ignore them and cover everywhere that they aren’t. But, because of the incompetency of the lying Biden administration, that is becoming impossible to do.

I was listening to that call live. My home is a nerve center of monitoring whatever is going on in culture for people who know me. I usually have my reading chair in my living room that has four points of media coming to me at all times, not counting the large television we have there, which is always watching something from football games to movies. At that station, I monitor podcasts, videos through the computer, audiobooks, all types of information, all at the same time. Then in my gun workshop, I have an additional three inputs that are always playing. That way, I don’t miss anything as I move around my home. So I was listening to the Biden call with Jared as it happened. I even turned down the other inputs to hear it as it started to sound like something that was about to fall apart for Biden.

When it did, of course, I laughed pretty hard for a long time. Not only was it funny that the Biden’s were clueless and incompetent even to allow the call to happen in the first place, but that the spirit of America was very alive at that moment. Even with all the media manipulation that is going on, the censorship, the threats from the left toward violence, Americans can stick it in the eye of authority better than anybody on planet earth. Here it was happening in quite a spectacular way on Christmas Eve, a year after the misery of the 2020 elections made it look like all was hopeless. It was far from hopeless, and we see that in people like Jared Schmeck. The media wants to think of him as unusual. But he’s not. Actually, I learned this year that he is pretty common, more so than all the Democrats put together. And it is that which they know too, which scares them the most. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Political Climate Change Hoax: Yes, the Great Lakes are draining and will soon be gone

Climate Change is Rediculous

Oh my gosh, Greta Thunberg, an 18-year-old girl from Europe, is challenging Joe Biden on climate change. And California realizes that with all their hack and slash economic policies; they think they will save the earth; they won’t reach their emission goals until the next century. Meanwhile, the socialists of the world are making climate change the centerpiece of all their concerns displaying to everyone how little any of them know about actual science. To the smart people out there, they have seen the shell game. It’s the same stupid game that the left has been playing with Covid, phony statistics, phony scientists who are no better than whores on K-Street, that will say and do anything for a federal grant. They’ll “love you a long time” for the right price, and they’ll put anything you need in an Excel spreadsheet. But it came to a point for me while I was doing some additional research into the origins of life across North America. Hint, the Indians were not indigenous people in America; that too is a made-up lie meant to despair the creation of America in the first place. As I have reported in many places, some of the best archaeology we have in North America points to the mound-building culture that looks like it dates to the periods of Stonehenge. As it so happened, I was reading some of the books I recently bought at my last trip to Stonehenge and comparing them to the investigations into what is called “The Giants of Ohio,” and America in general, and that drew my eye to some of the radical swings in sea levels over just the last 10-15 thousand years. Yes, advanced people could easily have come into North America during the Archaic Period, and it’s pretty clear that they did, bringing with them a world economy that nobody has been thinking about over the last hundred years of academic study. 

Since I live in Ohio, the Great Lakes are a real treasure to the state that I think about. Most people know what they are and think of them as a kind of inland sea. Also, people might think of them as very old, but the truth was that they formed during the Ice Age, really in geological terms, was just yesterday. Humanity was building advanced societies, such as Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey. At that time in the world, the Great Lakes of Ohio and Michigan were former river valleys where massive glaciers were taking the path of least resistance, moving along slowly there. The weight of the glaciers was so great that they actually pushed down the earth’s crust in those locations displacing the curvature of the planet itself. As the ice melted, without the aid of global warming by manufactured contraptions, mind you, the water stayed in those low spots and formed the Great Lakes. The weight of the water and ice was negligible. However, when the mass changed, the water began to flow toward the St. Lawrence Seaway at an increased rate.

Fairly recently, scientists have discovered that the Great Lakes are actually draining at a rate faster than the rivers can supply them. Many in the region know that Niagara Falls is the point where all that water flows from Lake Erie into Lake Ontario. They also know that where the falls are currently will continue to move all the way down to Buffalo, New York, year by year by a few feet each time. It won’t take long before the falls are gone altogether. In fact, the whole of the Great Lakes, except for most of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, will be gone entirely in a few thousand years. Chicago will sit in the middle of nowhere with vast farmland to the east where people could walk over to Michigan. The same with Detroit and Cleveland. They, too, will be sitting on land that extends far into what used to be the lakes but will by then be vast expanses of farmland. The lakes are draining because the earth’s crust is trying to push up from under the weight of the water from where it was pushed down by the ice from the Ice Age. The more shallow the water gets from the lack of weight, the faster the landmass pushes up. In our lifetimes, we will see a significant loss of shoreline in those city areas because of this effect. Of course, none of this climate change results from a single human being. It’s just part of the lifecycles of the earth.

One thing that struck me when studying my books from Stonehenge and is something I learned about while visiting Dover on the east side of England facing France across the English Channel is that; just as the future of the Great Lakes, people used to be able to walk across the great body of water there. Back in the Ice Age, sea levels were several hundred feet below where they are now. Looking at the English Channel today, it seems impossible to consider such a thing. But that is what the latest science says. Ocean levels have constantly been changing, well before there were ever any people. My daughter and I had a wonderful time hiking Dover’s Cliffs, and I often think about it. We told my son-in-law and my wife that we were going to use the restroom and take a few pictures of the cliffs there and the massive English Channel. We’d be back in a few minutes, so they waited for us in the car. We came back seven hours later. It was an excellent adventure, but what made me lose track of so much time was in learning about these little details and how they have played out against the many changes the world has seen in geologic time. 

The point of the matter is that the climate change activists are phonies looking to convert capitalist cultures into communist ones and count on our ignorance to believe them. But reading a few books on the matter and just some casual investigation will prove that manmade climate change is a thing of politics. Climates have been changing on earth for millions of years. As humans, we have been lucky to have had our entire civilization spring up so quickly between these geological catastrophes, able to leave for space within a few thousand years. That is a miracle, and that is science. Trying to bend our economic system to some made-up whims of worshiping the earth is just downright stupid. And anybody who believes what these political hacks of climate science advocates say is ridiculous. Whether by accident or on purpose, the information to refute climate science activism is abundant. But like Covid, the government is seeking to exploit ignorance in favor of political power. And that is a game where the enemies of capitalism need to be defeated spectacularly. And just consider how pathetic their cause is, where they have an 18-year-old nobody as their spokesman. She’s not a scientist. She’s not the next Albert Einstein. She’s just a teenage girl. And that is the best thing that the climate change movement has going for it. Because the facts are not on their side, and anybody willing to look at them can see that quickly.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Stupidity of a Billion Dollars for Tri-County Mall: Its bad behavior that killed the shopping complex, money can’t fix that

A Billion Dollars for Tri-County Mall

Believe me, I want Springdale, Ohio, to succeed. My idea of going into the big city when I was a kid was going to the Tri-County Mall and the surrounding areas. They had everything there, and I have always loved it. When I was first married, the Forest Fair Mall opened just down the highway at Forest Park, and it had all kinds of exotic stores and places to eat, along with a movie theater. I thought I was in heaven. I raised my family in these malls, and I would love to see them stay alive. But I think the city council of Springdale is smoking crack if they think voting to spend a billion dollars on refurbishing the Tri-County Mall into a mixed-use development is going to work. It’s enormously stupid and is doomed to fail, and they should not do it. Instead, they need to understand why those malls failed, why all those stores and restaurants left, and make changes to their communities. Because if you don’t change the behavior of a community, throwing money at it won’t improve a thing. Instead, money is made in all economic activity because of behavior. Behavior is not changed by money. Behavior makes money. Bad behavior destroys money. 

From Springdale’s point of view and that of Forest Park, they blame Liberty Center’s success a few more miles north along I-75 for their demise. That state-of-the-art mixed-use community is a real treasure, and it’s where I go these days when I want to go out on the town. I love Liberty Center. It’s great to go see a movie. Eat at a nice restaurant. It has a traditional mall environment, and it also houses an outside mall area that feels like a downtown kind of atmosphere. But you know what it doesn’t have, thugs walking around with their pants half down acting like they will beat up all the customers. Liberty Center is privately managed to get rid of scum bags and losers when they threaten the positive shopping experience of the guests, and they do. They don’t put up with gangs of kids hanging out at Liberty Center, which is why the shopping area is doing well. That is also what destroyed Forest Fair Mall and Tri-County Mall. It wasn’t the change in box store status that came with online retail shopping. It was more that moms found it easier to shop for things from their living rooms rather than go to these malls where young people hang out and misbehave, dropping F-Bombs as they walk by and acting like they might be raped at any moment.  

This isn’t a racist thing; as much as progressives would like to make it so, it’s a behavior issue. When I was young, Tri-County and Forest Park were considered great places to live. Fairfield, which was just next to Forest Park, was voted in Playboy magazine to have some of the most beautiful girls in the country. I went to church in Fairfield. I dated lots of girls from Fairfield and Springdale. I used to be a driver for some of the old Cincinnati Bengals players after they retired, and they lived in Forest Park. I would take them home to their wives in their nice Forest Park homes. Those cities were family-friendly and full of economic prosperity. But as liberal politicians moved into their city councils and mayor positions, they brought many progressive ideas, which we all talk about now. But I was pointing all this out 20 years ago, and the writing for the decline was on the wall. The more liberalism moved into Springdale and the Tri-County area in general, the more that families moved out, north into Liberty Township, West Chester, and Mason. The smart money is left to get away from the bad behavior of progressive politics. And that same story could be said in just about every city that has seen its wealth leave, dropping the value of their communities to derelicts, government addicts, and substance abusers. People do not enjoy being around lousy behavior, and when they see it, they avoid it with other options. That is what killed Tri-County Mall and much of the retail in that area. The local government failed to protect their families by allowing bad behavior to move in and take power with some woke view of the world from a progressive perspective. 

Putting a billion dollars into the same bad behavior will not succeed in Tri-County. Case in point in Over-The-Rhine in downtown Cincinnati where Vine Street repurposed itself to give the illusion of a safe space. The problem is, the surrounding areas are still hives of gang activity and bad conduct up and down Liberty Street and around Findley Market. Instead of crime happening on those streets, gangs like the Glacier Gang follow millennials back to their homes in the suburbs of Sycamore Township and Mason and rob them there. It’s not something they are talking about on the news because they are afraid that people might stop going to downtown Cincinnati for a night out, but it’s a real problem that always stifles economic growth. Bad behavior kills the making of money. 

Oh, I’m sure people reading this who are in denial will say that such judgments are “racist” or are coming from the mind of “white supremacy.” Well, I’m none of those things. I would tell anybody who wants to know to interview any mom-type outside of the I-275 loop and ask them what they think of Tri-County. They’ll say openly that they don’t want to get robbed, raped, or groped because many moms over the last decade who have shopped at Tri-County Mall have been harassed in some way by gangs of youth who didn’t respect the shopping experience. Was getting raped an exaggeration on the part of the moms? Maybe, but it’s how they felt while going to the mall, so they instead turned to online shopping to avoid the threat altogether. Then once Liberty Center opened, they went there instead or made the drive over to Kenwood. With that said, Liberty Center has its own problems. It needs a government bailout as we speak because it’s not hitting the targets it needs to financially. Much of that is due to the changing market of box stores compared to online shopping. It’s a challenging environment these days under perfect conditions. But then-Governor DeWine of Ohio shut down the state economically, which hurt Liberty Center immensely. They still haven’t opened their playground there over liability concerns. The government often gets in the way of positive economic growth, which is undoubtedly the case at Liberty Center. 

To show how stupid government can be, just think of the Springdale City Council, knowing all I have said here but refusing to admit to themselves because of their progressive politics that somehow a billion dollars of investment will change anything. Who in their right mind will invest in a restaurant or store in this new complex knowing that the people who will be giving them money will likely bring trouble with them? And who is going to live in these new apartments? People who don’t care about getting their cars broken into? Or harassed as they are walking down the sidewalk with a gang of kids playing rap music out of the trunk of their car and selling pot out of the front seat? No, you can’t put lipstick on a pig and pretend it’s a flower. It’s still a pig, and until the government puts value on good behavior in their society, they will always see a loss of revenue 100% of the time. It’s a fundamental law of economic activity which progressives choose to ignore. But it certainly doesn’t make it any less relevant. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Mythic Realm: Understanding Elon Musk, Bob Iger shortcomings at Disney, the Build Back Better disaster, and why communism always fails

The Mythic Realm

I could actually write a book just about this topic of the Mythic Realm. Still, recently, an opportunity came up professionally where I had to talk to many political people and business people in the same Christmas setting.  I was near a whiteboard so I could tell the story of what I put on the video here contained.  The subject was a bunch of things that flow together to my eyes.  But to the groups of people, they understood some of it, but not all of it, because of the bubble concept that I explained in the video.  Most people all their lives never leave their bubbles of understanding, and I don’t look down on them for it.  I see it as a natural condition of the human race.  But when the topic of Elon Musk came up and all that he was up to, and understanding why Build Back Better is such a bad idea, or the vaccine mandates for Covid are so destructive, the answers to all those questions are often outside of the bubbles that people live in.  So I put together this little video to explain it to people who want to begin understanding some of these kinds of things, such as where economic power comes from.  It’s not the Political Realm or even the Business Realm.  All economic activity comes from the Mythic Realm, and it is there that we should always focus on creating more!

I also put in this article the WSJ interview with Elon Musk in its entirety where he said that the Build Back Better concept should be “deleated.” As I explained, Elon Musk is more shaman than industrialist, even living in a state of depravity to stay authentic to himself.  To my mind, our American society should be producing hundreds of Elon Musk types instead of a few here and there.  When I think of Elon Musk, aside from his tamperings with the political and business realm, I think of people like Thomas Edison, Tesla, the actual man, and Albert Einstein.  What people call genius, they say such things because, from their point of view in one of their social bubbles, the ideas from the realm of myth seem so extraordinary.  But really, it’s all point of view.  What always matters is the Mythic Realm because it is there where all ideas that generate all economic activity are created, which then cascades into all the organized elements of society.

I provided in the video an example about the aviation industry.  Where Prometheus came from stories about building fire or Indian legends about Thunderbirds who could fly, the idea for flight came from the human imagination in thinking what could be.  Then along came the Wright Brothers, who converted their bicycle profession into the first functioning plane.  From there, the political realm instantly saw the benefits, decided to utilize the airplane during World War I, and created rules and regulations for constructing airports, parts suppliers, and general aviation functions.  Then, of course, the Business Realm figures out what companies need to form to meet the world’s growing political need for airplanes.  And from there comes the Cultural Bubbles of all the individual companies that started making airplane parts and the workers who inhabit those cultures.  The exact trajectory of thought could be said to emerge from the auto industry, smartphones, everything that we consider economic value.  When I talk about intellectual currency, this is what I’m talking about.  Financial currency is needed to flow in the political, business, and cultural realms.  But intellectual currency is required to feed the Mythic Realm, and without that position, nothing new in economic energy is produced.  Therefore, the goal of our society or any society should always be to make more Elon Musk types, or even George Lucas, who created Star Wars.

I always talk about Star Wars because, as a kids product, it does a great job of creating ideas in the Mythic Realm among people in our society.  There was an excellent interview with Bob Iger from Disney, who is stepping down now as CEO.  I think he did a pretty good job stabilizing Disney as a company, but his problem was that he spent his entire time as CEO in the border between the Political Realm and the Business Realm, where most CEOs and CFOs think all the real value is.  But when it came time to make more Star Wars movies, he was lost, and what he made was a bunch of corporate woke garbage.  The fans became angry at Disney because the new films and books were made by a guy who was obsessed with the titles he held.  He made a mistake almost all corporate people make, putting their imprint on something that flows out of the Mythic Realm, but that they never understand the ideas. They end up smashing them into the bubbles of business culture, assuming that everything will just work out.  But it never does.  That is why Elon Musk tends to disparage titles in these companies and offices.  In the Mythic Realm, he likes to have all the executives close to where the action is.  As a modern company, Disney does OK if it sells the fantastic work created by people like Walt Disney.  But because they live in their corporate bubble, people like Bob Iger are paralyzed to do anything new, much like the Chinese suffer from their centralized communism. 

This is essentially why socialism and communism never work because they insist on an old aristocratic European view of the world that never figured out these things.  I feel I can talk about it because, really, for the first time in mass culture, we have a time where we can look at all these elements as an entire whole.  I read so much and from so many different sources that it is evident to me.  I don’t know that such an understanding of social constructs would have been possible 100 years ago.  But with the benefit of hindsight and great modern examples of success in the Mythic Realm, we can see these things clearly now.  When I shared these insights with that large group, they all seemed to have an “oh my gosh” moment, so it seemed like a practical thing to discuss.  When we want to understand the world around us, whether it’s Build Back Better, Star Wars success under Disney, Elon Musk and his quest for Mars colonization, or the intricacies of why capitalism works better than communism at managing society, understanding the Mythic Realm is the key. I’ve said for years that despite all my interests, I appreciate nothing more than mythology because what humans do better than any other known form of life is generate imagination, and therefore a change in circumstances directly derived from the mind.  No matter what someone thinks about God, it cannot be questioned that the purpose of human existence is to use the imagination to continue expanding what goes on in the universe.  We are not so insignificant as a species to assume that nature rules over the minds of humankind.  But that humankind is part of nature and the ever-evolving process of creation which the universe craves.  And once you understand that, everything else makes a lot more sense.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Best Thing I Received for Christmas: Todd Minniear in Liberty Township

I Got Todd Minniear for Christmas

Another question that comes up always after Christmas, mainly out of obligations of small talk, is what did you get for Christmas?  Was it all worth it?  Did you have a good Holiday?  Well, for me, this year, I did have a great Holiday.  But it wasn’t just family gift exchanges that I enjoyed.  Just a few days before Christmas, at the Liberty Township Building just down the road from my house, Todd Minniear was sworn in as my next trustee, one of three.  He is the product of a series of off-year elections where constitutional conservatives were targeted for election to either replace liberals or offer a more conservative candidate aside from the ones traditionally provided.  For me, it was quite a nice Christmas present to have Todd give me a call and invite me to his swearing-in, which I went to and was greeted there with a kind of class reunion from the various campaigns of 2021, and it was nice to see all that hard work come to some positive culmination.  I say it all the time, if you want a good government, then put good people in it. Don’t just sit on the couch and hope things work out alright.  Either run yourself for an office locally or support someone who wants to.  After the Trump presidency, that was certainly my story where obvious political shenanigans to remove him from office took place.   The audacious behavior of the national establishment is something I’ve seen plenty of times locally, over thirty years.  And the election of Todd Minniear, a constitutional and freedom-minded purist, was a significant achievement in my community and was a sign of things to come nationally. 

Another thing I say all the time to just about everyone I speak with is, “don’t be a victim.” Never allow yourself to be a victim in the story of your own life.  Those people we put into elected positions in our republic are never supposed to be our “betters” or some useless member of an aristocracy.  They are there to represent us.  But that’s not the way the political class views that relationship.  Often, they get into public office for the attention of it and the power that follows by having their hands on the levers of rules and regulations that govern our lives.  In the case of a local trustee, the question is often, “can I build a new pole barn on my property to hold my classic car.” The politicians usually will reply, “but think about the lowered property values of the community.  They don’t need to be penalized because you want to protect some gas-guzzling old car that should be on the junk heap, according to the United Nations.” They don’t say that they often work to protect the interests of those who give them campaign donations to keep them in power instead of representing all the community’s people all the time. I’ve been involved in politics in some way or another all of my adult life, and I have seen all the kinds of corruption that can come out of it, all the ugly stuff.  And I understand entirely how that corruption comes about and how to fix it.  The solution is to follow the Constitution of the nation and our state.  If everyone did that, things would work pretty well.  When politicians get away from the constitutions and bring their personal desires or biases to an issue, that’s where corruption starts.  

I don’t think any politician gets into a public office with the idea of becoming corrupt.  They get that way because they lose their way while solving problems.  Corruption starts to eat away from them once they get off the constitutional script.  For instance, I have several very close personal friends who are politicians.  People like George Lang. I’ve known George for a long time since he was a trustee in West Chester, well over a decade ago.  We bonded over Tea Party ideas of small government and the novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.  George has a habit of giving that novel out as a Christmas present at Christmas time.  He believes in the ideas in every aspect of his life.  Even though now he is an establishment figure, he is still the same person.

Because he is a big-time senator within the state, many people assume that politics has made him corrupt.  But I know personally, it hasn’t changed him at all. He’s still the same Atlas Shrugged-giving guy.  We might remember when Paul Ryan was also an Atlas Shrugged fan, but when Mitt Romney wanted him to be his VP, all that Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand stuff was tossed away so that they could become the next power player in congress, eventually becoming Speaker of the House.  Some people can handle the pressure of public scrutiny, and some can’t.  George can; Paul Ryan couldn’t.  Power has a way of altering people into the most profound things in their hearts.  George, for instance, at this Todd Minniear event, was pressed about several projects that involved tax money distribution.  His answer was a classic George Lang line, and he didn’t just say it because I was there.  It’s what he says all the time to everyone, “don’t give the government or me any more tax money. We’ll just spend it.  Keep your money. Our job is to take the barriers out of your way to living a good life.” 

I’ve watched several good politicians like George Lang get elected into more and more positions over the years.  And at that Todd Minniear swearing-in, several of our Lakota school board members newly elected were there as well, more parts of a future solution.  Locally, I’ve always looked to West Chester to ensure more small-government ideas found their way to the trustees.  My friend Mark Welch and others there have done a great job of keeping the government’s small and business engagement very high.  It is the model of what should be happening all over Ohio.  And if we can primary Mike DeWine as governor of Ohio and replace him with Jim Renacci, we’ll be able to do great things in Ohio.  But Liberty Township is where I live, and the trustees there have always been Republican, but more of the Paul Ryan type, and not so much that of George Lang.  At the start of the election in 2021, I didn’t think a freedom candidate like Todd Minniear could find his way on a Republican Party that was still much more like the Republican Party nationally of 2012 and not so much like the Trump Republican Party of 2020.  But Todd won with a solid majority, and he had a tremendous amount of people show up to support him, which is unusual at these kinds of events.  And as I stood there watching Jennifer Gross, our member of the Ohio House, swear in Todd, I could see where our country was headed.  And it made me very happy to see.  All the hard work that goes into these kinds of things was certainly worth it.  For those wondering about it, I would say that doing such things is some of the best Christmas presents you could give yourself.  Often there isn’t much personal satisfaction in politics but putting the right people in the correct positions at the right time through a vote is one of the most rewarding things anybody can do in a healthy republic.  And in Liberty Township for Christmas of 2021, I can say that seeing Todd Minniear sworn in for public office was the highlight of my Holiday season. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business