Category: Google

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

Democrats Only Have Two Choices: The crush between a rock and a hard place

Democrats are Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I’ve spoken to many people over the last 48 hours who are genuinely terrified about the depth and evil of what they see in the opening days of the Biden administration.  Now we’ve talked about it a lot here at this site and the Rumble account that hosts the videos I put on here, and I have to say that I’m not surprised by any of it. We’ve always been at war.  It is sad that people are being killed, whether in Afghanistan or other ways politically driven.  But in many ways, we are better off knowing what’s going on and seeing the results rather than allowing them to loom concealed in the background of everything corrupting our very essence of American ideals and the spawns of capitalism which free the world from tyranny.  With all that said, I am not the nightly news, and this site does not thrive off the misery to keep people coming back.  Usually, when I write something, it isn’t to scare my readers and watchers but to give them hope and a solution to the problems.  So, within that scope, I see a great deal of good coming out of the present circumstances, so to relieve your minds, I’m happy to share. Knowing these things, it’s by no means an opportunity to sit back on your heels and let everyone else fight these battles.  But if we fight the battles that need to be fought, I can assure you that one of these two paths of resolution will mature into a solution for our country shortly. 

Many people don’t know that Marjorie Taylor Greene filed three articles of impeachment against Joe Biden.  One is over issues involving the CDC; one is over the national security crises at the southern border.  And the last is over the mishandling of Afghanistan.  Most of the media looked at the move by Greene as a publicity stunt; however, these articles of impeachment are much less of a stunt than the actual actions by a Nancy Pelosi Congress in attacking President Trump.  Nobody in the media or congress will take them seriously today, but tomorrow……well, let’s say there’s some meat there to consider.  I was at an event with my congressman, Warren Davidson, such a good guy, and he sees the situation just as clearly as Marjorie Taylor Greene.  He has a much cooler head for a reputation, which isn’t necessarily a fact, just a reputation. Something to consider.

Congress looks very poised to flip back to Republicans in 2022, so Democrats will lose their majority, and Republicans will then be able to consider these articles of impeachment at that time.  And the Senate is very much at play unlike the attempted Trump impeachments.  This time the Senate may have the votes, and even some Democrats may vote for impeachment.  Why?  Well, I’ll explain that in a moment.  Now, know that impeachment is very much on the table as we go from 2022 into 2023.  I know many will say we can’t wait that long.  The country will be destroyed by then. That may be true and is, I think, part of the progressive plan to destroy America before America can fight back.  But I think the resolution of the American people has surprised the progressive attackers, those billionaire class of people from Davos, the Chinese communists, the Agenda 21 types in the United Nations, the members of Socialist International who are now hiding their names under dozens and dozens of philanthropic non-profit foundations.  I don’t think they expected the MAGA movement to still be so strong well into 2021, and there is panic presently in their ranks.  America will still be America by the election of 2022. 

Then there is the other problem, Dr. Frank and Mike Lindell’s work on election fraud.  The incredible rise of new news networks such as Real America’s Voice, which hosts the Steve Bannon Warroom, and the Water Cooler has replaced what Fox News and the O’Reilly Factor gave to Republicans.  If corporate Wokeness so well described in Vivek Ramaswami’s new bestselling book Woke, Inc. thought it could control the flow of information through censorship with Twitter, Google, Disney, Linkedin, Facebook; they were sadly mistaken.  Replacements of information flow quickly rose such as Gab and Gettr and Newsmax, One America News, and other sources have grown as fast as the deceptions against us by those corporate hosts have done their malice.  The election fraud story is getting out from the 2020 election.  Most people believe there was a fraud, and the evidence is not contained within the corporate media structure, which is a real problem for Democrats.  Again, they planned to have all this trouble put to bed by the middle of 2021, and it’s only picking up steam; it’s not going away. 

The election fraud problem is a real challenge for Democrats because they can’t prove there wasn’t fraud, even though people believe there was. Now that Afghanistan is such a disaster for the Biden administration, many Democrats are already thinking of cleaning their name of him. Because they think he’s going down anyway. Kamala Harris is not ready to be a President.  So, the cracks are more than a problem in this dam of information. It’s all about to break for them, and they are looking for an excuse to free themselves.  That leaves them two ways to clear their name from the failed politics of this internationally driven Biden administration; they can throw Biden under the bus on the election fraud and begin to support these state audits.  That information would clear them from the continued support of the failed administration.  Or they could vote to impeach because they are outraged by what has been happening in Afghanistan, where incomprehensible neglect and stupidity led to many people being killed. America was shamed around the world with a military loss that will never be forgiven.  In that way, Democrats will have to pick their poison.  Their decision will be which one they could hope to survive from.

And ultimately, that is how you win this game.  We don’t need to storm the capital with guns or fight this corrupt government in the streets.  We already have a checkmate on this chessboard.  They hope that you’ll go to the bathroom and take your eyes off the board so they can cheat their way out of it.  But I am saying that it’s too late.  They have already lost by one of these two paths.  The urgency of those paths will be because Democrats will have to distance themselves from Biden over Afghanistan.  People are still upset about the Democrat debacle over Benghazi.  But this Afghanistan situation is much worse, and it’s happening every day.  The Biden administration can’t survive this, but only through their international sponsorship, which is very happy that America looks like fools over the issue.  But for Democrats not getting money from international sources must go back to their districts and raise money. Nobody wants to give money to losers who caused the embarrassment of Afghanistan.  So, there you have it, that’s where we are all going, and it looks like tomorrow will be a better day because of it.  Still, we must do the leg work.  We can’t sit on our laurels.  We must fight.  Yet, we can at least see the objective and the result.  It’s within range for us to take our country back.  It’s certainly not hopeless.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

Remember the FEMA Camps?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

We Don’t Have the Right Politics for Space Travel: We’ll have to change that before settling Mars

To move into Space, we need Capitalism as the driver of our politics

I am by far not an Elon Musk fanboy.  I like a lot about Elon Musk and the great work he does with Tesla and SpaceX.  But I’m not crazy at all about his talk about universal incomes and climate change.  I view a lot of what he says as a guy throwing up ideas, much the way he runs his companies, and if someone can shoot holes in his thoughts, he welcomes that chance.  He sees it as making things better.  I could talk and argue with Elon Musk all day and year, and I would have fun doing it.  And I think he would too.  But I found an extraordinary moment from him recently on Part III of the exclusive Everyday Astronaut interview where Elon walked them around the Starbase facility ahead of a Superheavy launch attempt. I’ll put those interviews up here for you to watch, but I found them remarkable.  Space X is how most companies should be run. It reminded me of the eventual aim of my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which is to learn not to be afraid of those who intend to impose fear on you.  To learn not to fall in love with rigid rules and to reunite yourself to risk because that’s how the human race advances.  During Part III, Elon paused and referred to just that very concept.  But he knows he can’t say such things.  He has all kinds of people who follow him, liberals, conservatives, people who have no idea what they are.  He currently has to work with the Biden administration if he wants to send ships into space.  He must also work with other countries, like China, because we are all tangled together in unhealthy ways.  So, I get why he couldn’t say what he wanted to say.  But I am under no such restriction. 

I don’t typically think of the “degrowth movement” as an accurate word. Still, the way Mark Levin talked about it in his recent book, American Marxism, seems more appropriate when talking about the sciences than just saying “socialism” or “communism.” Many young people think of these things not as a recent threat but as an ancient menace that expired well before their time.  But they understand growth, and for this topic, it’s certainly the correct way to term what the political left has been doing.  Elon Musk has played around with left-leaning ideas, such as the universal income, electric infrastructure ran by solar, and even smoking pot on a podcast to show how cool and hip he was.  Those are all things that have made me ignore what Elon Musk has been doing.  That is until he does something magnificent like developing the Falcon rockets for reusable landings and building the Starships in Texas.  Slowly over time, I’ve watched Elon as he has tried to do “growth” things in a world run increasingly by “degrowth” personalities; he has been getting frustrated.  For instance, he moved to Texas, leaving California behind after the ridiculous Covid policies shut down the state economically.  And recently, when environmentalists threw protests toward his desire to build a Starship factory at the Starport facility because of water concerns, he sounded more like a Trump supporter than a centralist libertarian. 

Musk is trying to do all pro-growth in a world being drug into a no-growth period by the participants of the Vico Cycle, which I explain in detail in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  These cycles are not new to the human race, they have occurred many times in the past, and we end up constantly re-inventing ourselves.  And that is what Elon Musk sees he is up against, and he let it out a bit during that Part III interview.  That was the primary reason I wrote my book, to help people not repeat the past, but to punch through into this new space age not with restriction and fear, which the communists of the world want, but with unrestricted adventure fueled by the power of capitalism.  When it comes down to the various philosophies, we cannot all have different ideas about the direction of the human race.  We either want to grow or retreat into the huts of history and return to yelling at lightning bolts and attributing gods to their origins to make sense out of a storm.  Or, we want to fly about those mysteries into the worlds beyond and fulfill our quests for adventure, both large and small, on a vast playing field of unlimited possibilities.  The two views of the world will not live together forever.  The inflection point is upon us.

And that’s when Elon Musk realized that everything done at SpaceX would disappear in an instant without him.  It is he alone that is doing all these outstanding achievements.  Sure, he has lots of brilliant employees who do the heavy lifting, but he provides the vision, and without vision, nothing happens.  If human beings are going to be a space-oriented society, then a new type of government will have to be embraced.  The one we have now, which fought hard to keep Donald Trump from being president and wanted to get rid of him when he was, will not allow the efforts of Elon Musk either to carry humans into space.  We have to solve one problem at the philosophical level if we are ever to put 1 million people onto Mars like Elon Musk wants to do.  We have to have a growing economy with an increasing workforce to accommodate it all.  To have hundreds of thousands of people on the moon, Mars, and wherever else in the next couple of decades, Elon can do the math that was in his words during the interview.  The illogical politics of our current moment, driven by communism and Marxism, are just wrong for the adventure of space. 

Going even further, we have never solved these problems even in our science fiction, except perhaps in Star Wars.  People need to be free, adventurous, experimental, and free to fail for space to work.  A micromanaging government will always be in the way of what Elon Musk wants to do.  He can only smoke joints so much, enough to keep the parasites off his heels.  He can only spout off so much greenie weenie appeasement to keep the environmental protestors from standing in the way of a new Starship manufacturing plant in the middle of the desert.  And that is the point of my book, not to crawl back into the Old West and sleep in hot unairconditioned cabins using the restroom outside.  And getting water with a bucket every time you wanted a drink.  Modern conveniences are good to have.  But what we may not want to leave behind is the courage and adventure of discovery and wealth building.  I would say that those are far more essential things than climate preservation or the appeasement of soft-natured Marxists looking for a big daddy government to care for them the way their parents failed.  Once we solve those problems, we can then move to space.  Elon Musk has figured out how millions of people are excited about it and follow his every move.  They don’t know that the politics they wish to ignore are just the very thing that will keep their feet on the ground and their starships from flying.  We must solve the politics before we can solve the space. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Good Guy J.D. Vance: There’s a long way to go, but he’s certainly one you’d like to see get there

A Good Guy, J.D. Vance

Nancy Nix continues to be a great example of influence leadership in Butler County, Ohio.  I attribute the success of any endeavor, whether it’s a successful business or a political community, to the strength of its influence leadership, which I spend a lot of time talking about in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  Influence leaders are not the ones who put a spotlight on themselves; but instead, they work as leaders in ways that aren’t traditionally measured for the success of any enterprise.  And that’s what Nancy does, and how I finally was able to meet J.D. Vance after many other opportunities to do so came up short.  I had wanted to meet J.D. since he is running for the Rob Portman senate seat.  I had been writing about how much I like Jane Timken in that role.  I had liked Josh Mandel because I know him as a Tea Party guy.  But I’m not crazy how he has managed the pressure once he did get essential seats.  Timken just picked up an endorsement of Kristi Noem, which meant a lot to me, but the big drawback there is that she’s too close to Mike DeWine.  When I have talked to her personally, she is quick to explain the complexity of that relationship.  I give her some room there because everyone has to have some representation as a party leader even if she doesn’t agree with everything they do.  But the question is, to what effect would other things be accepted in accepting a few screwballs here and there?  Some other candidates for this Rob Portman Senate race are not viable, likely under 10%ers who just muddy the water.  But J.D. Vance is one whom I’ve wanted to like because I liked his book Hillbilly Elegy when it first came out, and I have thought he did a great job in the media covering that book and talking about Trump’s White House.  Yet he seemed too good, so I have had questions for him that you could only tell upon meeting someone, and until Nancy managed to get us together, I would have never otherwise known. 

When reading the Hillbilly Elegy, I had thought that it was precisely people like J.D. Vance who should be managing our affairs in government.  After all, he checked all the boxes; he was a lawyer trained at Yale, worked in the tech industry, was a Marine, and rose from the ashes of Middletown, Ohio, which is literally in my back yard to move into great things of personal achievement. They made an interesting Netflix movie about his life and family based on the book, and I wondered if his wife was as sweet and understanding in real life as she was in the book and movie.  As it turned out, she was.  And when meeting J.D., you can tell without a shadow of a doubt that he is a good guy.  A very good person and the reason for it is that he had a good family.  Sure, the Hillbilly Elegy was about severe dysfunction at certain levels. Vance’s mother is now known so well for her history of substance abuse.  He had a wild childhood that crushes most kids in most families, most of the time.  As J.D. says in his book, he is astonished to come from his childhood and into this new life as a normal person.  I don’t think I am too surprised that J.D. is such a good person because even with all the dysfunction with his mother, he had a very good family otherwise.  Many people inside the Beltway politics don’t know that those from the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, on down into Tennessee and Virginia, are pretty intelligent.  They have been ridiculed and made fun of in every way that society can make fun of a people.  But I’ve known them all my life, and I have had family members go through the same kind of thing as J.D. has.  Luckily my parents were rock solid, but I have cousins and aunts and uncles who were every bit as troubled as J.D. Vance’s mother was.  It often comes from being too smart for their own good, which gets them into trouble, and they turn to drugs to shut out the voices of logic that run counter to a crazy world.  Reality is just a little too real for them, and they collapse on themselves.  But in J.D. Vance’s story, his strong and deep family is pretty standard among the people I know, and yes, they are Trump voters.  They listen to Alex Jones in the garage through a rebel radio network.  I have family, in fact, that still lives down in the areas of Kentucky, such as Slade and Buckhorn, who are so suspicious of census workers that often those government workers disappear, never to be heard from again. 

I had a few copies of the Hillbilly Elegy; I bought the updated paperback when it came out after the Netflix film was released, and J.D. had added the new afterword at the back of the book.  There he explains that he took his book proceeds and bought the property down in Jackson, Kentucky, where his grandparents were buried, and stated that he wanted to preserve the land so that his kids could enjoy it as he did.  I brought that book with me for him to sign at our meeting, which he did.  Yes, J.D. Vance is a really good and sincere person.  He is the real deal.  But my concern was how would he hold up under the pressure of politics once the honeymoon was over and his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment was over.  After all, it’s not a question as to whether he can get elected.  J.D. has some great campaign people.  He has great fundraising and support.  He is great at television and other forms of communication.  He has a supportive wife.  You can check all the positives.  Is he tough? Well, he had to be to come out of childhood without being a mess.  Can he stand up to corruption?  I think he has no tolerance for corruption and can afford to stand up to it, knowing that he has a good family to lean on no matter what happens in his life.  So, I asked him the question I wanted to ask, why I needed to meet him. “So what will make you different than Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, other Mr. Smith Goes to Washington types who get into the Senate with great intentions only to get buzz-sawed in that corrupt culture?” And he said the only thing that could be the correct answer; he said, “well, it’s going to take a coalition of about 8 or 9 people, and from there, we can begin to turn the tide.” It was good to hear that he understood that beyond just campaign talk.  Everyone has great ideas when they are trying to get elected.  But very few know what to do once they get there.

J.D. Vance on the Warroom

J.D. Vance was ready for the buzz-saw.  His wife was there, and I could see her look; it was the look of a supportive wife who would have enjoyed being anywhere but there because all the handshaking was not her thing.  But in her was that same kind of unconditional and dependable love that J.D. had with his Mamaw.  How do I know, because I have a wife like that, and I had a grandmother much as J.D. did.  Appalachia women from the mountains and the wild men they married and tamed.  It’s a Middletown, Hamilton, Ohio kind of thing.  And when you find a wife who understands, then it can make a person nearly invincible.  And for those reasons and more, J.D. Vance is a good option for that much-needed Senate seat. There’s a long way to go in the race yet. Still, I would love for a person like J.D. Vance to fill such a seat when the world is desperately hungry for those kinds of people to manage our government with influence leadership and a tremendous personal foundation for truth and justice for all.  I want to see how all these candidates hold up under the pressure in the upcoming months, but I can at least say now, I am cheering for J.D. Vance.  I hope to see him intact at the finish line.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

The Lakota School Board trying to vote on Mask Mandates

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

My Thoughts on Afghanistan: Facing down evil once more

Its Time to Face Down Evil

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

This is Where We Are

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

This is what Leadership looks like

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

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

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

 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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Woke, Inc. and The Gunfighter’s Guide: Meeting Vivek Ramaswamy and entangled fate

Woke, Inc. and The Gunfighter’s Guide

I was introduced to Vivek Ramaswamy by the great Butler County, Ohio treasurer Nancy Nix.  You might ask what makes her great; well, she has the books balanced in Butler County, where we all live, Vivek, Nancy, and about 400,000 other residents, and we are operating financially at a surplus.  Not a small town, but she and others like her serve Butler County as a fine example of good government, proving that it is possible.  She knew some of the things I have been doing, and she certainly knew Vivek as he was a very wealthy ex-CEO of biotech firms who wrote a book called Woke, Inc.  He was the featured speaker that night at the Middletown GOP office, which I had attended to hear what he had to say.  Nancy thought Vivek and I might have an interesting conversation. That’s when I learned that Vivek had been in attendance at a big campaign rally that I had organized a year and a half earlier where he had an epiphany to change his life, quit his job, and write this book.  Because at that rally which was saturated with political correctness, he saw a very good friend of mine, a CEO who at significant risk, came out publically in favor of Trump, and Vivek thought that was pretty cool.  It inspired him, so he sat down and wrote Woke, Inc for the next year and a half.  I accepted a warm handshake from Vivek and got along well with him for the rest of that evening, enjoying the early preview of his book that wasn’t due to come out for a few more months.  I made no mention of my own book, but the more he spoke that night, the more I realized that something weird was going on in Butler County.  After all, J.D. Vance was from Middletown who wrote the Hillbilly Elegy who practically lived in my backyard.  Now Vivek was a multimillionaire investor and biotech wiz who had decided to turn against woke culture and spill the secrets of that inner sanctum, and of course, my various projects. That’s a lot of exciting debate for a relatively small part of the world in southern Ohio. 

Vivek’s book came out on August 17th, and I immediately read it a few times.  I love the book, there are many things I could debate, but in essence, it’s a great book with a mass-market appeal that I want to cheerlead on as much as possible.  The more people who read it, the more people will understand what kind of fight we are in to balance out the needs of government with the needs of capitalism and the corporate alliance that has drifted away from America and merged with the Davos crowd of international conspirators.  I will likely read Woke, Inc. several more times because it is written at a high level and is filled with great information.  But the more I read it, the more I felt that my book, ironically comes out on August 28th, just a few days after Vivek’s contains the answers to many of the questions posed in Woke, Inc.  I found it incredibly ironic that two people from roughly the same area with different backgrounds would independently identify essentially the same problem and attack it almost like a question then answer.  For instance, a couple of the chapters from Vivek’s book, most notably “The Rise of the Managerial Class,” were the very aspects I was targeting in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as a way to contend with.  Ultimately, what was driving woke culture was fear, and I intended to teach people not to be afraid.  Once fear was conquered, many of the mechanisms mentioned in Vivek’s book would be eliminated.  But here were two people who independently arrived at a driving need and only shared a few chance meetings in getting there.  How inspired Vivek was from the event I hosted, I don’t think, will ever be measured.  But the irony was not lost on me. 

Where my mind has gone, however, is based on my background, not so much as a business manager and poker player with investor house money, but from my own experience at managing fear by taking away the option of people being able to scare you.  So I took my experiences as a gunfighter, for sport, as a foundation for approaching woke culture, just the latest rendition of socialism and Marxism.  Where I planned to give a review of Woke, Inc., which I’m sure I will at some point, I couldn’t stop thinking about how his book almost ended with a segway into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.   Yet mine is targeted to influence leaders, not necessarily a mass public.  That would be the case for most of my stuff.  But in all these explorations into an epistemological philosophy, you have to start with identifying the problem, which Vivek did.  While I could tell that Vivek was working out some things in his approach, he comes from a background in India where ideas of capitalism were romanticized as a way to opportunity.  In Vivek’s world, arranged marriages were very much a real thing.  My approach was to strip away the façade of the progressive era and set my book in the Old West, a period of American history that most people can agree on and have some relationship from which to build.   We live, after all, in a time when wokeness is seeking to erase our history, so we forget who we are.  Where toxic masculinity is illustrated so that Western civilization’s fall can be ignited without challengers, the danger is very much real.  So I set my scope there and then used that platform to teach people how to be all those great things again to attack this new “Managerial Class” that Vivek spent much of his book talking about.

I did enjoy Vivek’s book a lot.  If I didn’t have the experiences, I mentioned I would still feel that way.  One thing I talk a lot about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the value in “ghosting it,” and if something I did a year and a half ago inspired such a brilliant mind like Vivek’s, that makes me happy to hear.  I would suspect that Vivek, a big-time insider, had been thinking about these topics for a long time before he took his plunge into independence.  Reading his book, it sounds like he is making a platform for a political campaign for the future, where he wants to fix these kinds of woke problems as a legislator. That’s all great; it takes all sorts of people independently to make things happen, which is evident in some of the writing coming out of Butler County, Ohio.  Nobody was talking to each other, yet here come all these exciting ideas to contribute to a social need that has been brewing for a long time.  I tend not to spend much time thinking about that kind of thing.  Whatever divine intervention is doing its magic, I welcome.  My goal is to do what I can every day to make the world a better place in whatever way possible.  And in that regard, I am proud of Vivek.  He could have chosen a cushy life and easily become a billionaire by just riding the coaster into the station, especially for a guy like him, charismatic and full of energy.  But if I had any part in inspiring him to write Woke, Inc. with a political rally, well, I can say that his book inspired me of just how vital the themes in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business are for a hungry public looking for answers.  In that way, the world may just be finding a way to step out of the smoke and into a prosperous new tomorrow. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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A House Divided is OK: What I learned from Gretchen Wollert’s book ‘Born To Fight’

Its Better to be a House Divided than to put up with Evil

When Gretchen Wollert sent me an invite to review her new book, Born to Fight: Lincoln and Trump, I’ll have to admit that I was a little skeptical.  And I always think about that skepticism whenever I bring out a new book as I am now.  Many people are out there writing books, so how are you supposed to know one from another now that publishing has decentralized?  Ironically, we live in a time when more books are produced and sold globally, yet human beings seem to have lost the means to their intellect.  But there was something about Gretchen that I liked a lot, so I read her book and found it quite good.  It was more than just another book on Trump riding on the coattails of his presidency.  What she did that was unique was compare President Lincoln and President Trump in a parallel that was oddly similar in so many ways.  Not to mention was an unusual reminder of the times we live in and how they aren’t much different than how things were before and after the Civil War.  Where I didn’t expect to learn much new for me, it turned out that Gretchen’s comparison over more than 100 years of American history was the exact thing needed to answer a question I had been thinking about a lot lately, whether we should be a house divided or value the ways we are different.  And to accept that fate. 

In my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I have many quotes that I like a lot. Still, as I read Gretchen’s book, one came to mind how the Civil War started essentially because Lincoln was elected. Soon after he won his re-election, he was killed by a radical leftist, an actor from that social order, just a few days after the war was over.  JFK was killed very early in his term, again by a radical leftist—an open communist that many think was deeply tied to a newly created Deep State.  By the time Trump came along, the killing of presidents had changed. My quote reflects this transition as such: “Once the dandies of the world took ownership of production, the means to a living, a new way of killing people has become fashionable–the ruining of their reputations or at least the attempt of it. These days we call it “cancel culture,” but that is just a new name for an old practice: that replaced the honor of a gunfight to the death to preserve honor and integrity.”  The attempt to kill Trump was under the new method of erasing him from existence, starting with Twitter.  The modern belief is that a killed reputation is better and cleaner than actually shooting someone in the head, removing them from life itself.  We might now look at the behavior of the political left and our modern Deep State and be shocked into inaction by the evil of it all, but it’s not new. It’s a repeat of history over and over again.  These repulsive forces against the righteousness of America will never go away until they are defeated and utterly destroyed.  There has always been an assassin element rooted in political parties in America, so far always on the political left, and our good Christian sensibilities have usually turned the other cheek over and over again, empowering the bullies.  But what is happening now is not unusual.  It happened before, which is what Gretchen was able to capture wonderfully in her book.  And if we don’t put an end to it, we will see assassinations physically or by social ostracization well into the future.  There is no making peace with it. 

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Now Lincoln tried to bring everyone together by stating that a “House divided cannot stand.” And to this day, many Republicans are still saying it, and they are always the first to compromise.  That gives the wild communists always left-leaning the power and leverage politically.  They know Republicans will move off their position; they never meet anybody halfway.  Democrats take and take and take until there is nothing left but an empty husk of the country.  And if you don’t do what they want you to do, they plot to get rid of you in every way possible. That’s how they function.  They know Republicans don’t want a “house divided,” so they are always looking to show just how much the house is divided.  And they use that leverage to dominate the right in every way.  That is until people voted for Donald Trump, and he was willing to fight the good fight against the Deep State, much to the political left’s consternation.  But this time, the left was slipping, and they had to get rid of Trump before they lost their grip on power, which I would argue has already happened.  The left has power on paper.  But they do not have the hearts and minds of the masses, and that brand has been forever damaged.  They are presently living a very slow-moving death. 

I closed Gretchen’s fine book thinking that America can stand as a divided house.  Ultimately, Lincoln picked a moral war that killed hundreds of thousands of people for the idea of freeing the slaves.  The battle was a bloody mess, and it had to happen to do what was right in the world.  Trump, in his way, had to stand up to China and the jealous villains of the world who wanted to see the end of America. Trump’s America First platform was, in its way, a demand for freedom from the clutches of Chinese communism that had been well planned and was well on its way before Trump took office.  The violent reaction to Trump being elected was much the same as the South had toward Lincoln.  There will always be these violent uprisings when people pick a president outside of the forces that think they are in control.  And to take a page out of President Roosevelt, which I think is another good comparison to Trump, peace is no good if we allow evil to boil into life.  Specifically, Teddy Roosevelt said, “the pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.” When we see evil, we are compelled to face it down and destroy it.  Not to make friends with it. 

Ultimately, that is what I learned from Gretchen’s book.  For her point, she wanted to show how similar the lives of Lincoln and Trump were.  But it’s in the context of history that the more powerful message is clear to all.  As the American people, we always have picked the right kind of fighters to do what needs to be done.  The forces that want to keep us under control have always sought to kill off our champions for justice, which we have seen in our own time with how Trump has been treated.  But as we’ve seen, this isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.  We must allow for the house to be divided, not to sacrifice everything to unite it.  We need to have our battles; we need to fight the fights.  And through the smoke, we need to see who wins.  But to accept evil, no, we can’t do that. 

Rich Hoffman

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