Category: Hero

The Benefits of Trophy Wives: How women really make the best economy possible

Communism has been presented to us in many forms and in ways that many never suspected.  However, the perpetrators have been caught in how they structured stories for COVID-19, election fraud, and many legal cases against President Trump.  In the desperation to keep Trump out of political office, all the old games have been utilized, and outright communists and their wealthy donors have revealed the game plan.  And how assumptions flow through society as values, such as feminism, racism, or wealth distribution.  And how people find themselves followers of some communist political movement without ever realizing it until it is too late.  Specific to our topic here, what is the real essence of hatred for President Trump and his lifestyle?  I have pointed this out before, but perhaps not in the required detail, especially now.  And much of it traces back to Melania Trump, the President’s supermodel wife.  She represents an aspect of capitalism that the enemies of the world want to destroy.  The counter to communism’s basic premise of “equality.”  How can you have an equal society of beautiful women marrying men just over their money?  To obtain such beautiful women and show that you are better and more hard working, men generate a lot of financial wealth as job creators to access such women.  The criticism of the classic trophy wife is that it’s shallow for a woman to marry a man for his money and power.  People should marry over “love” and friendship, and men should cry and let their spouses feel their emotions as a soothing venture.  Trump doesn’t cry; he doesn’t seek comfort in the bosom of his woman.  He audaciously pursued wealth to access the most beautiful women in the world, and he married one, and now she has the opportunity to be the First Lady of America again.  To the communists of the world, this has been a massive problem because that was an attribute of human society that they have been trying to erase. 

I was in Japan recently with some friends, and our host told one of our young and single members at dinner that he needed to find a nice Japanese girl and marry her.  In Japan, even though they have gone through the motions of letting women work with men in the workplace, traditional marriages to traditional Japanese women who devote much of their lives to sustaining their husbands’ happiness are treasured.  And still, around much of the world, arranged marriages to unite family powers and political associations are very much at the core of their society structure.  Arranged marriages are expected and encouraged from the Near East to the Far East, such as Japan.  People don’t marry over love and personal fulfillment of choice.  They do so to align with rigid social structures.  And upon considering that and meeting several Japanese women who were working very hard to be good wives to their Japanese husbands, this trouble about feminism in the United States becomes grotesquely apparent.  The concept that men and women should marry over issues of equality and that the man should do the dishes and share in all Mr. Mom’s duties has its roots in communism, as a way to attack the economic engine of America and replace it with the destruction of the family and the relationships between men and women.  And it wasn’t an “organic” movement that just happened; it was created to destroy our culture.  And you don’t notice that until you travel to other countries untouched by such parasitic utterances.  Traditional marriages are still valued in Japan.  But because they are collectivist-based, they don’t emphasize beauty as the measure of a good wife, but in her domestic skills.  As is generally agreed upon there, an overtly attractive wife is not put on a pedestal like in the United States because there, they don’t value individual input but absorption into the net of society as a contributor. 

But still, in America and under a capitalist system, women are free to marry anybody they want, and pretty women have power that women not so pretty don’t have, to find a man of great wealth and to use her looks to buy her way into a comfortable life where money comes easily.  Women who are not so attractive have to settle for what gets left over, and that may not seem fair, but it has produced one of the best economies the world has ever seen.  Which then lifts all boats in the process.  Compared to other places in the world, the wealth created by the American economy allows most people to have a much better life, especially people who aren’t very good-looking.  In President Trump’s case, he worked hard to make a lot of money and have all the best cars, homes, golf courses, and attire so that he could have access to the best-looking women.  And attractive women know that if they have good looks, they can avoid marrying some dope-smoking loser who is too lazy to get out of bed.  We all see as a crisis the poor young woman who was pretty in her youth but listened to society and married some slug for “love.”  Only to find out that love doesn’t pay many bills or earn you respect when you walk into a room with your spouse, which everyone hates because they are of poor quality, and everyone knows it. 

The communist idea of not being shallow and marrying people just because they are wealthy is one of the first things that was attempted in the United States to erode the powerful economic engine of capitalism.  To the Marxists, it wasn’t fair that some ugly, comb-over man could marry such beautiful women just by working harder than everyone else.  However, many jobs were created in that process, and society improved significantly based on that one premise.  A hard working man wants to marry and produce children with the most attractive woman he can get.  So he works hard to do so, and in the wake of all that activity, a massive GDP is produced that communist countries can’t compete against.  So, of course, if your goal was global communism, you would have to put a stop to this mating ritual between ugly, hard-working men and the supermodel wives who would not feel guilty at all being the trophy wives and give their husbands all that he was looking for in a mate, respect, domestic tranquility, and a club to beat over the head of all his rivals in social occasions by having such a woman on his arm to remind everyone how much better he is over his peers.  And in a capitalist society, you want that.  You want competition.  You don’t wish for sameness as communists do.  Not everyone can be a trophy wife or a man who can afford one.  However, everyone benefits from the results of such an exchange in terms of better economic activity.  And that is why there is so much hatred toward Trump and his wife, Melania.   She is a nice housewife who is a supermodel and is not embarrassed that she is a trophy of a man who worked his butt off to have a woman like her on his arm when he wants her.  In a world full of arranged marriages for social alignments, the premise in America works great for values over economy and freedom.  A woman has the right and ability to marry anybody she wants to.  And attractive women can significantly elevate their lives if they can use their looks to get a powerful, wealthy man.  This gives the man a reason to work harder and be better than everyone else.  And that is the trait in America that the communists have been attacking.  And how so many people have been suckered into destroying their civilization over the simple premise of fairness that the rest of the world has been choking on since the dawn of the very first city-state. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

“Fat Boy” Bragg and his Communists in New York: Attacking Trump as a symbol of capitalism as terrorists have been doing since 9/11

At least finally, people are starting to talk about the Alvin Bragg case in New York against Trump, along with the Letitia James case and the Fani Willis case in Georgia for what they are: Marxist insurgencies against our system of government meant to topple us just as communists have all over the world.  I’ve been warning people about this trend for several decades and finally, people see what is happening and understand it for what it is.  These are communists; Fat Boy Alvin Bragg in New York shows clearly how the Marxist movement moved into minority communities and recruited people like Bragg to their cause of the overthrow of America.  We’re not talking about a thinly veiled disguise such as what the 1619 Project was and how most sizable corporations became spokespeople for Marxism willingly.  Now we are getting down to the nitty-gritty; there are no attempts to hide what they are.  They don’t care if they shatter legal precedent or wreck people’s trust in our judicial system.  They are going all in, and they don’t care what damage it might do to the country because they intend to destroy it, as planned from the beginning.  And this abuse of power in New York, especially in trying to stick President Trump with a bunch of phony charges just to keep him off the campaign for president because they have no other option, is just showing people that what I have been warning about, is very much a grim reality.  People never wanted to believe that it was possible, but here it is, in all its communist accessories.  There is nothing legitimate in these cases against Trump. In the end, they will only make people more persistent in voting for him because what is on display is proof that we have an out-of-control, abusive government. They have no intention of working within the American system of government but to destroy it.

Fat Boy Bragg deserves no respect; he’s an assassin of hatred that communists have toward capitalist endeavors, and Trump is the perfect spokesman for that anger in that he is the pedestal of capitalism exhibited by American culture.  With his giant towers, supermodel wife, and full bank account, Trump is everything that the communists hate, and to express those sentiments, they are showing their playbook, essentially because they have no other move.  It’s now or never for them.  They have been hiding in the background trying to fit into society behind a mask of racism to conceal their movements.  And they have moved into these district attorney positions, as well as attorney general efforts using skin color to gain sympathy, and once they obtained that power, they were then free to abuse it.  The race riots in America never just happened; they were provoked as communist revolutions around the world have been for most of the previous century.  This was never about slavery, which Democrats were in favor of, and Republicans abolished to free people of color.  This was always about abuse, attack, and military effort.  While loser politicians were making arguments about defending America with a more robust military, they were also allowing these Marxists access to the halls of government, sponsored mainly by George Soros money and other “progressive” activists, into attacking America indirectly, culturally, and economically.  “You keep the tanks, planes, and troops,” they were saying, “we’ll take the college campuses, the Bar Association, and your corporate boards through BlackRock, and we’ll change your culture from the inside out.  No need to conquer you with military force.  We’ll do it through culture.”  And the proof of all that is what Fat Boy Bragg is doing in New York, trying to prosecute Trump for issues involving Stormy Daniels, the porn star, which has already been dealt with beyond the statute of limitations.  People voted for President Trump anyway, and the matter has been settled.

Alvin “Fat Boy” Bragg has been concerned with using the court’s power to target political rivals, which has been going on in every communist country over the last century, so it’s not a surprise in and of itself.  The only surprise is that people assumed that America was free, and everyone looked to the Constitution as their guiding legal foundation.  Of course, these communists want to overthrow those traditions just as they have with race by hiding their actual efforts behind what they show the public.  In this Fat Boy case, Bragg is pretending to use the rule of law to destroy the concept of law and order and erode people’s trust as a gradual outcome.  In the short run, these court proceedings are intended to tie Trump up in court and waste his time, hoping to stick him with criminal proceedings and harm him to the public.  But people see what’s going on, finally.  Any benefit of the doubt that people had been willing to give to efforts like Black Lives Matters is gone now.  The attempts not to be called “racist” by accepting radicalized communists from minority community sleeper cells are no longer on the table.  People have strong opinions about what they see happening, which will carry over into all future elections.  I see a spell being broken for good resulting from all this because the communists have overplayed their hands.  They have gone too far against the American people. 

Of course, the danger always looming in the background is about our elections. Do we have free and fair elections that people can trust?  Going back to the days of the Black Panthers trying to intimidate voters at the polling places in minority neighborhoods to put their communists in power, they are now showing the results people were worried about.  And yes, you can bet your ass, Alvin Braggs “fat ass,” that these same people rigged the 2020 election to keep Trump out of the White House.  Of course, they stole the election under the cover of Covid.  And now, without a global pandemic set loose by the World Health Organization globally, these regional communists fighting for power and control of the American legal system have to turn to another form of election interference.  And that is all Fat Boy’s case in New York is about.  However, since Trump has shown that he is willing to take these losers on directly, it is forcing them to overplay their hand and force strong emotions on the American public, who they know voted for President Trump and will do it again.  It is the best and least violent way that Americans can retake their country away from these radical communists who have embedded themselves at all levels of our government.  Now that we know, and people are willing to admit to the problem since they can see it for themselves, the rule they have had over us is ending.  It might be scary to people who don’t want to admit such truths.  But now that we can see it on such a grand display, people are angry.  They have been suffering needlessly as their financial means have been eroded, the pride in their country destroyed.  And now we have watched rigged elections in America give us the same kind of communist results that have been seen in China, Russia, and Venezuela.  And for the communists, if they can take down a symbol of capitalism in America, like President Trump, then they would have done as the terrorists of the Twin Towers wanted to do with 9/11.  They always wanted to topple capitalism and our way of life and give us communism in all the vile facades that they could ever hope to utilize.  The Alvin “Fat Boy” Bragg case in New York is all about that, and nothing more.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Importance of Musk Buying Twitter: A plot caught in time to save America

I wasn’t sure what it all meant then, but when Elon Musk bought Twitter, the anxiety caused was a bit baffling.  I didn’t really know the story. I had a Twitter account, but when they started banning anybody with the kind of Chinese-style censoring standards that should never be possible in America, I simply stopped using them as a news source or for participating with my input.  I could take or leave them, I was not a Twitter fan.  But, they were a private company, and I figured they could do what they wanted to do.  As a consumer, I could decide whether or not to utilize them.  And those were the ground rules.  But to the Deep State globalists and the communists ruling in the background through finance who were essentially using companies like Twitter to capture American minds into conversion from capitalism to communism with the China model in mind, Twitter was much more than a social media platform.  I never knew the whole story of it until I read the latest Walter Isaacson book on Elon Musk, which spent about a tenth of the book talking about just the “Twitter Deal.”  I had a lot of questions as to why Musk would even waste his time with Twitter, and it started as a kind of gag with Musk putting one foot into the political world out of concern that he was dealing with a Biden administration that had shown its teeth to industrialists like him.  If you didn’t do what “they” told you, you would be ripe for a target of destruction. Twitter’s construction was far worse than what people thought it would be, and the deeper Musk stumbled into it, the worse it got. It was too late, and the truth was realized.

I was perfectly happy to move my attention to other social media platforms, especially Truth Social.  And most of my news these days comes from Gettr.  I interact with Gettr most of the business day and over the weekends.  They have great streaming content and much better news offerings than where you could even hope to get on cable news, or network news.  To have the ability to get information straight from President Trump, Truth Social became his official platform, which I have said will turn out to be the most important aspect of the 2024 election.  It has already doubled his wealth at a time when the Deep State ran straight from the captured asset of a White House has been trying to do one of their famous strategies, and that is to drain people of financial resources through the courts so they could destroy Trump and everything he has built over a lifetime because they can’t beat him at a ballot box.  But Twitter was the social media platform of progressives, which turned out to be just a new name given to hide what they really were, Karl Marx communists.  And it didn’t hurt my feelings at all to not think about Twitter in any way.  If they were run by a bunch of Deep State losers from San Francisco, well, they could choke on it as far as I was concerned.  So when Musk talked about buying Twitter, I thought it was a gimmick at best.  But when the writing was on the wall from other competitors, such as Truth Social, the pressure was squeezing out the previous owners of Twitter, mostly in a desire to keep your enemies close kind of way, to control them, until the whole bottom fell out in the courts and the desire to drain Musk with a failing asset became lucrative, and they forced the sale of Twitter to Musk with the same kind of lawfare we have seen applied to Trump and others recently.  And Twitter was a drag, being subsidized by the Deep State; it was not profitable by itself. 

What Musk inherited was a piece of garbage, a workforce built like most of the World Economic Forum companies were poised to do, progressive workforces, gender neutrality, short work weeks, essentially a company run by government subsidies, where people were paid not to work.  This falls in line with the government’s desire to provide people with a “living wage” not based on merit but statistical suppression, where more money was given to the down and out to incentivize them into power and purpose where a merit base society would otherwise reject lousy behavior and choices.  A government that wanted to topple the “American Spirit” obviously wanted to attack this premise aggressively.  And the headquarters in San Francisco was an example of the worst of American companies falling to open communism with a globalist thrust behind it.  Twitter was a company that was being supported as the typical corporation in America.  Because they existed, other companies felt they had to emulate them with ESG standards and EID values, which led to severe economic and social problems.  Twitter was a snakepit full of vipers oozing with venom. This is precisely why Biden’s administration reacted unfavorably when they heard that Musk would be the new owner.  It is an accident on many fronts that the courts, in their short-sighted efforts, wanting to hang a big loser of a company around Musk’s neck, hoping to destroy him in some way because they don’t really understand what real value is and why he’s rich, to begin with.  It’s the standard court model they use with everyone: bankrupt people into compliance or throw them into jail.  There is entirely too much communism in our courts these days, which is yet another designed strategy. 

“X” under Musk is much better than Twitter ever was.  Musk prioritized free speech for several reasons.  He needed free speech to make humanity an off-planet species.  And the governments of the world who want to cripple that effort actually wanted a Jim Jones kind of communist global community where social media platforms served their needs in editing social content, and it made dependents out of employees until they could no longer think for themselves but could only function in a massively progressive environment like Twitter.  That has been the model of all the Larry Fink radicalism from BlackRock and the World Economic Forum gang, which would then force a universal wage rate and complete communism on a global scale because all companies would be equally wrong and subsidized by governments that the World Economic Forum controlled.  It was a pretty sinister plot that unraveled for many reasons, some of which Elon Musk accidentally stumbled into.  But as history will view it, it was a good accident.  One thing that needed to happen was for Elon Musk to influence the direction of free speech worldwide significantly.  I do like “X” under Musk’s ownership.  I am still heavily “shadow-banned” on most internet interactions, which is tied to many bad guys having too much control over the internet.  But control was why the internet was created in the first place.  So, it’s just a new battlefield in the exchange of ideas.  It’s nothing to cry about or declare unfair because it isn’t.  But it’s better under the ownership of Elon Musk, and what was learned in the wake was that the Deep State had control over our society in genuinely maniacal ways that many didn’t realize until Musk bought Twitter and saw what a designed mess it was.  And in that undoing, a lot was saved that will be realized.  But the depth of that mess was genuinely terrifying and lends weight to the argument of divine providence where an unknown future is undoubtedly leaning more toward self-empowerment and anti-communist sentiment globally. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

When You Build Something, There Are Always Lazy Losers Who Want to Take It: Lessons from Yellowstone and What it Means for America

I haven’t changed my mind on Yellowstone being run by a bunch of liberal Democrats.  But as I have said, until a few weeks ago, I had never seen a single episode.  However, everywhere I go, including in the park, everyone asks me if I dress as I do as part of the “Yellowstone” look inspired by the show.  Of course, the answer is no.  I have dressed the way I do my entire life, well before Yellowstone came along.  But as I said, I always hear references to that popular Paramount Network show thrown in my direction, so I thought I’d finally check it out with my wife.  We enjoy watching shows on various streaming services, but usually, there isn’t much time for that kind of thing.  We travel a lot, and I’m involved with a lot, so there hasn’t been a window to sit down and watch a show like Yellowstone, which is now in its fifth season.  But now we’re all caught up over the last three weeks, and I can say it’s a good show.  I get what they are trying to say, and a couple of themes crucial to the consciousness of America are emerging here that are certainly worth discussing.  The show itself, as written and produced by the actor, Taylor Sheridan is quite a commentary on the role and value of American life.  One of my big hang-ups was Kevin Costner, who starred in the show.  He has been in many good westerns, but he also supported Liz Chenay over Trump, so he kept my interest away from the show until I knew more about how his role would play out.  But Yellowstone, in every way, is good stuff, excellent entertainment.  And I’m not surprised that America has fallen in love with the show as the best entertainment that is currently available, anywhere. 

A few years ago, as the Biden administration was put in place by corrupt globalists intent on the destruction of America, I went out west with my entire family to get away from it for a while.  We traveled to Yellowstone specifically in our convoy of RVs, which was the trip of a lifetime.  Along those lines, we found ourselves in Cody, Wyoming, on a hot night in the summer of rodeo season.  So we all went out to dinner from our very excellent campsite and went into town to experience an authentic rodeo, and it was one of the best nights I had ever had.  My whole family was there with me to experience it, kids, grandkids, and others and I hated Joe Biden and his kind of people so much that a night in Cody, Wyoming, was just the right thing for me, which was a very American flag waving sort of MAGA patriotism.  Leading up to that rodeo, we had all traveled through South Dakota, to Mt. Rushmore and Deadwood, around the areas where the Sturgis Bike Rally always occurs, so we were having a wonderful time rooted deep in the heart of America and the kind of people who most make sense to me.  Additionally, we spent a few days in Yellowstone Park, seeing all the famous sites worldwide.  We were in the exact areas where the show Yellowstone took place.  So much so that everywhere I went, people asked me if I liked the show because it reminded them of John Dutton, the way I dressed and walked.  I didn’t know who that was.  It turned out to be the Kevin Costner character, which wasn’t something I took as a compliment.  I’ve also had many local people refer to me as Rip because of my role in the community.  I didn’t know what that meant.  But I do now, and I get it.  I understand all the references.  But the whole time we were at Yellowstone, the actual place, and people were deep in the show then; I hadn’t yet watched a single episode.  But now that I have, and having been there for an extended period, I think I have had a unique perspective on the whole movement in America that is going on behind the scenes, starting with that region of the world and this television show that has managed to capture that spirit in a bottle for all to enjoy.

There are a couple of significant takeaways from the Yellowstone shows that are specific to our times as America struggles to define itself in the wake of an apparent communist invasion that has taken over our government and financial system.  The first is that hard work is the way to bring morality to any good culture.  That is the constant theme of the show, where characters faltering on their moral compass find redemption through challenging work, which always tends to fix anything.  That is very much a message I support, and I am dazzled to see that a television show meant for mass audiences has been willing to tackle this critical issue.  They used to make television shows like this; Little House on the Prairie comes to mind.  And that this show is being made now says more than what might be assumed from a popular entertainment option.  It has the same values as that night at the rodeo I talked about in Cody, Wyoming.  Good stuff!

But the second thing, which is the whole background of the entire show, is the nature of human beings themselves.  It also centers around the premise of evil and what causes it, which is that when you work hard to build something, there is always some lazy loser nearby who wants to take it from you.  When you work hard, parasites always want to steal your hard work so they can have the benefits of what you have built, because they are too lazy to obtain it for themselves.  That something could be land, a woman, a new cowboy hat.  It could be anything.  But the core of the discussion is that there will always be those who want to take value from those who do create it.  And that if you really want to have a civil society, you must protect those with government who produce value.  Not to use government to protect and empower the parasites, and that is the essence of everything the Yellowstone show is all about.  If I hadn’t been there myself and thought hard about these things, I don’t know if it would be so clear.  I don’t know that the creators of Yellowstone were conscious of those traits.  I think Taylor Sheridon left Hollywood to learn ranching out in the flyover states and fell in love with the lifestyle I talked about in places like Cody, Wyoming, during rodeo season, which goes on every night during the summer.  He and the cast and crew were talented enough to capture some of that magic into a magnificent show.  But more than that, likely not to their liking, it is the essential political platform for the MAGA movement with Trump at its head.  The anti-communist political party doesn’t want takers with government alliances to steal what we worked hard to build: our families, homes, and lives in every way.  Because that is the essence of life in the West, what made Western expansion necessary and even justified?  And why do the progressives of our day, the renamed communists from the global Marxist movement, want so badly to destroy our view of Western life?  I dress the way I do to spit in the face of those Marxist ideas.  And seeing the rest of the world catching up is enjoyable, which I’m very happy to see. 

One of my daughters is a professional photographer, and she was with me when I bought a new hat at Jackson Hole.  And I was doing a bit of a photoshoot at the west end of the square, a spot sacred to me because it’s where Clint Eastwood finished the fight in one of his movies, Any Which Way You Can.  People watching assumed I was part of some entertainment company the way people were gathered around me, and people kept asking me if I was a stunt double for Kevin Costner’s character in Yellowstone, which, of course, I said no.  I had never seen the show.  However, for the people in Jackson that day, it was more about the spirit of the show they were thinking about, what it meant to America, and why they were even in Jackson Hole.  They saw me with my big cowboy hat purchased right there on the square with its giant 4” brim, and they wanted to meet the characters they saw on that show in real life.  Because they wanted to see an America that wasn’t fiction but something they could believe in.  Based on my experiences in that actual region, and now watching that show with an eye toward its cultural significance, I think we are in for a promising future in America, where the communists are going to be beaten back from their European roots in ways they can’t even imagine, currently.  And Yellowstone, the show, is part of that process by way of art and entertainment, followed by actual social expectations.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Secret to Elon Musk’s Success: An obsession with risk and the management of its destructive elements

It’s certainly worth a discussion, although I had been avoiding reading the book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, mainly because it was a Time Magazine view of the world, and I tend not to enjoy books like that very much.  I’ve read other books by Isaacson and enjoyed them enough to learn new things.  In this case, Isaacson was given access to Elon Musk for the last few years to study him and learn all he could.  So, it was worth reading about the daily life and details of a person who is often the wealthiest in the world and runs some of the most successful companies.  But politically, I think of Elon Musk as a Barack Obama fanboy and a global greenie weenie.  But I do admire how he built Tesla.  I’m certainly not a EV fan of electric cars, but Tesla has carved out a nice little niche for themselves that I think is valuable.  SpaceX is an incredible company that is doing wonderful things.  I’m a tremendous fan of the Starship program and what has been done with Falcon 9 and the Dragon program.  I appreciate them for what they are, and I think Musk is just a unique personality to continue healthily pushing society places it needs to go.  I think of him as a great case of “dynamic intellectualism” that I talk about with the Metaphysics of Quality and the philosophy of Robert Persig.  But Elon Musk smoked pot on the Joe Rogan Show and wanted to put fart apps into his very expensive Tesla cars, so he’s not my kind of guy and people like Isaacson tend to get the surface qualities of his subjects, but not the real intellectual gist of their value.  However, after reading Elon Musk by Isaacson, the unavoidable trait of the secret to success did emerge without question, which is why I kept hearing about the book from friends and respected business leaders. 

Since the book came out in the fall of 2023, I have had at least someone once a week asking me if I had read the book since I usually read everything that comes out.  But I typically avoid the trendy stuff and lean more toward big-picture things.  I wasn’t interested in another get-rich book by people fascinated with wealth creation viewed through a popular cultural lens.  But so many people were getting the book and passing it out to their management teams, looking for some secret sauce that Musk obviously has.  So when I was at dinner with some very important people at Son of the Butcher at Liberty Center in Ohio, and under great encouragement from those people indicated that I would love the book, I left that dinner, stopped by the bookstore, and bought it just before Barnes and Noble closed for the night, and I promised them the next time I would see them, I would have read the book and told them what I thought of it.  That was on a Thursday night, so by Monday, when I would see some of them again, I had read the book, it’s a pretty big book with a lot of details in it.  Many people had bought the book, but they hadn’t made it very far through, and they wanted to know my opinion on whether to continue slugging through it.  In truth, it was a good book; Walter did a good job for a Simon and Schuster publication intended for static society audiences.  And I would say it’s one of the most important books of our time, for a lot of reasons, which I’ll spend separate articles covering.  But the secret sauce, yes, it was there and in all its glory.  I understood it, and it’s something I relate to. 

Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but think of President Trump when I think of Elon Musk and how wealth has been projected over time.  Trump’s Art of the Comeback from 1997 was about knowing influential people, supermodels, wives, exotic cars, and tall skyscrapers.  And in the part of the book where Elon Musk went through his period of wealth acquisition, Walter Isaacson seemed to be on comfortable ground.  However, in the cover inserts were exciting value changes for Elon Musk.  The things that Musk thinks are successful and what Trump thought was successful have changed a lot over time.  Musk had exhibitions of massive engineering feats displayed in his book, where Trump featured the building of skyscrapers and the New York skyline.  But while the things that wealth could buy as a value may have changed, getting there had not.  Most wealthy people have some prevalent traits they share in common, which is the concern of Walter’s books, especially with Steve Jobs.  What makes successful people successful?  And everyone talking to me about the book wanted to know this.  “If I read this book, will it make me successful?  Can we pass this book on to our super managers and sales teams and learn something from Elon Musk to help us be more successful?”  The answer is yes.  However, knowing how to be successful doesn’t mean most people have the guts to do so.  You can’t cheat that, even though that is what causes most of the corruption in the world—the desire to take the easy way to wealth to have the benefits without the downside. 

The downside with Musk and Trump, along with many others who have done similar things, even Jeff Bezos, is that they are addicted to risk and obsessed with it.   Elon Musk is a classic riverboat gambler who loves risk.  But has the unique personality to be very intelligent enough to know when and how to mitigate risk.  But yes, he is an obsessive gambler who would play Texas Hold ’em’ by pushing all in for every pot, blowing a lot of money in the process.  But in so doing, he would also get the biggest jackpots.  And that’s clearly how he achieved success at the level he did.  Anybody wanting to succeed would have to learn to bring more risk to their lives to have the success that comes from winning big.  A gambler like that might spend a fortune on betting.  But mathematically speaking, people like Musk and Trump know that eventually, things will swing in your direction.  What separates them from everyone else is how much you can take until you fold up on yourself, broke and destitute.  Musk certainly has a personality that could be homeless and poor beyond any reasonable scale because he is a person obsessed with risk.  I get it; I have many of those same traits.  It’s not the money someone like him is interested in.  But its success in risking and surviving, that is.  And without that risk, there would be no success.  Elon Musk would be just another person with Asperger’s and too much brain power, applying it to a static society that is not interested in risk.  They wanted everything safe and predictable and would push themselves by nature as far from the Elon Musk types as they could, to maintain their safe lives.  That’s what makes Walter’s book so good because it indeed chronicles this risky behavior in ways that the public usually doesn’t get to see in people.  But just buying the book wouldn’t make people successful by itself.  What it could do, though, was let people understand that risk is critical to business and how risk is managed is the key to all successful enterprises, which is my general opinion of the book.  Yes, people should read it.  However, they should learn from it how to put more risk into their lives without becoming destructive.  Because there is no way to cheat risk, you either develop a healthy relationship with risk or get standard, predictable results that stagnate and rot you and your culture from the inside out.  Luckily for us, there are people like Elon Musk out there who are making things exciting.  But, there should be a lot more, and maybe yet, there will be.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Ding Dongs in Columbus: A Review of Governor DeWine’s State of the State speech

Before I get into the obvious homeless guy on 3rd Street in Columbus who was standing on the corner a block south of the Statehouse, completely nude, with his ding dong and buttocks clear for all the world to see, as if he were getting ready to shower at a YMCA, I have to talk about the fantastic book I bought from the Statehouse gift shop that I have had my eye on for several years now, The Art and Artistry of the Ohio Statehouse by Dayna Jalkanen.  Every time I go to the Statehouse, I think about getting it, but time is always short, so I never do.  I love the Statehouse and the intentions of the work that is supposed to be done there, of republic-style representative government, and I had just told a story to similar people about my thoughts on Governor DeWine’s speech where I stood in the rotunda with DeWine giving out pictures with a lunch buffet set up in the middle of the room where senators, representatives, lawyers, lobbyists, cutthroats and even media personalities were at work saving the world from their perspective.  Even the “Rooster” was there dressed in his backpack and poorly attired shorts, deliberately showing disrespect for the process as he runs a government blog checking the antics of the powerful with a kind of Marxist mentality of “bringing them all down.  During this visit, I had a little more time to make it to the bookstore, where I was there with Jennifer Gross, the Ohio Representative from the 47th District, and her son, a brilliant young man.  I explained to many people that DeWine’s speech this year was horrible, worse than usual, and uninspiring.  And there was a thick blanket over the whole State of the State address as Columbus conspiracies were awash in speculation and scandal.  But as I have said before, the Statehouse is there, grand and has deep roots in history.  It intends to inspire people to greatness even if they fall short, as was apparent under this current flock of politicians.  So, I wanted to get the book to remind myself of the worth of it all.

As I checked out the book at the counter and spoke to Jennifer about all the perils of progress during legislative proceedings, I reflected on what I had just said about DeWine’s speech and why it was so bad.  Governor DeWine was clearly in a lame-duck stage of his term.  He was on the outs with the Trump campaign over several controversies.  But the biggest one is that DeWine isn’t a Republican, especially not a Trump Republican.  He’s a product of FDR’s New Deal and some Johnson version of a Great Society where the government was there to do what parents couldn’t or wouldn’t.  And that was the entirety of DeWine’s speech on the State of the State on 4.10.24.  The whole thing was about how the state of Ohio could take care of children in ways their parents would fall short of, and everything he mentioned required more legislation and tax money spent without scrutiny on the next generation without any real expectation of success.  As I had just said in the rotunda, everyone in that room thought they were doing the right things, including DeWine.  They all had the best of intentions.  Nobody thought of themselves as evil.  Yet there was evil everywhere, and why?  It’s a challenging game where you must go to Columbus to work with others to make things happen.  You have to build relationships and get things done.  But in compromising with other people to get things passed, most people find themselves changed forever in the process, and they aren’t the same people who were elected, and they don’t survive the meat grinder of politics intact. 

Whenever I attend a State of the State speech, I always like to sit in the gallery where all the lawyers, aides, and lobbyists sit because I want to hear how they talk to each other.  They all have some specific thing that concerns them most about the government.  It might be renewable energy, social programs, or even Rob Portman’s retirement status, and how many boards he is sitting on for advice.  I was sitting next to one of his former aides who went on and on about how much influence the former senator still had in the business world, which I had to snicker about.  I’ve known Rob Portman for a long time, especially at the beginning of his political career when he was in his 20s.  Rob Portman shouldn’t be advising businesses about anything; he doesn’t have the horsepower to understand the field or how it works.  But in that gallery, I heard many stories about things those people wanted to impress upon each other as they were caught up in the moment.  All dressed up to listen to the Governor give a speech about saving children from their parents.  I explained it later by identifying the problem for what it is: all those people at the speech had the power of government at their fingertips, and they had to decide how to use it to help people.  And that’s where the evil comes in: when people don’t have the right thoughts about things, how can they decide to use government the way it’s supposed to, not how their feeble minds interpret it?  DeWine intended his speech well, as everyone listening did.  But where can they apply government power to the right purposes?  That’s what I wanted to think about as I bought that book and why I took a little extra time talking with Jennifer about those kinds of challenges this time. 

But the answer to that question was at the corner of 3rd Street, just one block south of the Statehouse as I was leaving.  There was security everywhere around the Statehouse because of the governor.  I was leaving the Senate, and there were plenty of police.  But then there was this 6’ 6 man of color standing there with his pants pulled down around his ankles, underwear, and all oblivious to the world around him.  I don’t think he knew his ding dong was hanging out in full view to all the cars and pedestrians moving by him.  I’ve seen homeless people all over the world, and they are caused by too much government destroying the personal initiative of individual people.  And here was this guy, an apparent creation of a nanny state government rotting away in full view of everyone just a block from where all the rules of Ohio were made.  And nobody was doing anything about it.  He was violating public decency standards.  He was probably violating many drug laws.  But he was a person of color, and nobody wanted to be called a racist for pointing out his bad behavior.  So, everyone just ignored him and went about their way.   No doubt, several children that day had their lives ruined by seeing that naked guy on the street corner on a sunny April day in 2024.  With all the grand ideas proposed by many governors over the years, the reality is that the quality of life for people only gets worse the more that the government tries to replace good personal conduct with more laws, which aren’t even enforced a block from where DeWine gave his speech.  And all the people talking about big, fancy ideas in the gallery were already in their cars on their way home, driving past all the problems none had the guts to deal with.  Which is how evil works in those kinds of gatherings.  Well-intended people who use the power of government to do what they lack as people, and it migrated into society to show itself in that homeless guy so disconnected from reality he was nude on a street corner in the capital of Ohio, which should be a showpiece of excellence.  The Statehouse certainly lives up to the lofty expectations.  But the people in it, inhabiting it, don’t.  And they hide their lack of courage behind procedures and fancy speeches.  Yet they always fall short because their minds aren’t up to the task, and they don’t have the guts to increase their intellect where they can help people like that guy instead of making more of them by default. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Puff Daddy and the Rap Music Industry of Marxism and Mayhem: They always intended to destroy American culture

Whatever they call him, Puff Daddy, P Diddy, or whatever it is that the famous rap star is in trouble with, it’s not that the music industry is saturated with sex trafficking and child molesters that is the problem.  Everyone knows what Puff Daddy has been up to, and loose sex with lots of crazy women and underage kids is part of their lifestyle. The record industry has made a lot of money over the years, pandering to the worst of the human race, the typical losers who used to worship Baal in the Bible and sacrifice their firstborn children in trade for sex and glory.  If Puff Daddy is in trouble now, it’s likely because he has fallen out of favor and he’s being offered as a sacrifice to the gods of chaos by a corrupt FBI trying to appear like they are doing their job in an election year where they are trying to divert attention from President Biden, the inserted president, not the elected one.  No, the worst thing about this recent story is the origin of rap music to begin with, as a deliberate attack on American culture by Marxists looking to undermine our culture through the inner cities and to make ground troops out of the discontent with a communist revolution.  Don’t ever forget that Black Lives Matter was a Marxist organization that many corporations openly embraced.   But not before the rap music scene came along to pave the way for that nonsense and guilt people into believing they had to embrace that hate music to prove that they weren’t racists left over from the Civil War.  Also, never forget the Republican Party was created to end racism, and it was the Democrats who fought that effort, a mistake that would hurt them until they tried to use the Civil Rights Movement during the communist 60s to rebrand their image. 

People who are not very well educated in history have let pop music define their political parameters, so they have no context.  But the truth is, rap music was introduced to American music to destroy our culture and usher communism into communities of color to rot us from the inside out.  And Puff Daddy and all his other child-molesting rap buddies, like the dope smoker Snoop Dogg and even the whitewash sucker Eminem and the Beastie Boys, were creations of the music industry meant to be weapons of destruction to rot the minds of the youth and turn them against the culture of their parents for the destruction of America as a nation.  It was just one aspect of the globalist plans to attack America without tanks and troops and instead attack the minds of the youth so they wouldn’t be able to defend their culture from those vile enemies beyond our shores, let in by finance who promoted the effort.  What?  Do you think all those great Motown hits disappeared overnight?  Think of all those great songs that came from Detroit record labels.  Are we to believe they all disappeared during the 1990s only to be replaced by these losers, Puff Daddy and the gangster rappers of hate and destruction daring us to call them out for their blatant racism baited through politics to paralyze judgment and promote a drug-induced society of criminals and cop-hating thugs.  Is anybody surprised that Puff Daddy is in trouble or that the law is being selectively enforced?  Or was he allowed to break the law to get the goods on compromised people attending his parties for extortion rackets later? 

The damage is already obvious, I was at Liberty Center, Ohio a very nice shopping complex recently enjoying a nice day with my family.  And while in the food court was a bunch of thugs obviously raised on rap music using horrendous language and treating each other like gangs from the video game Grand Theft Auto.  And they didn’t care who heard them or what anybody thought of their social conduct.  They were obvious Lakota school students and they looked like they belonged in a music video for Puff Daddy.  I’ve warned everyone if you don’t run these losers out of these shopping complexes, then the same fate that happened to Forest Fair Mall, and Tri-County Mall will happen to Liberty Center.  Nice moms and family people don’t want to share space with these gangster rappers and their bad conduct.  They will just stop going to such places.  They don’t want to hear the bad language and witness the sorry attitudes and they will find alternatives.  Everyone has to understand that those kids were taught to be that way by Marxist elements of our culture.  It has nothing to do with racism.  If it did, then the Republican Party would be the refuge for all such discussions.  Instead, the American way of life has been under attack by the music industry to make such kids weapons of their war against America.  And instead of drafting our children into service to defend our country from the communists, the communists have drafted our kids through music to kill the concept of family.  And in so doing, to destroy the foundation of American life, the youth of tomorrow.  Those young Lakota kids have been radicalized to be weaponized terrorists against good people.  And that was the purpose of Puff Daddy and his FBI, CIA friends who empowered him.  They knew what they were doing all along.  They knew about the young girls, and the sex trafficking.  Heck, they helped facilitate the crimes, until it was to their advantage to cash in their investment and throw Puff Daddy under the bus.

If it was just about making money, the music industry would still be making music like they did with Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, and Prince.  Marxists infiltrated the music industry purposely to weaponize it, and Puff Daddy was one of those weapons.  And they used him until they wanted to close up a loop in their story.  Puff Daddy was a creation of those who hated America, as the entire rap culture was.  It was intended to destroy a whole generation with victimized sentiments and attempt to assign to mainstream America all the sins of the Democrat Party leading up to the Civil War.  And like the mechanisms of evil everywhere, the devil lies to all and twists the words of fate to their advantage to souls entirely too trusting.  And while we accepted this rap culture to erase away sins the Democrats caused, they used that guilt to destroy our nation’s youth with gangster rap that only now people see the proper strategy, entirely too late.  And think of all the poor kids who have had their lives destroyed by Puff Daddy and his friends of malcontents.  Rap music wasn’t created as a free market necessity but as political activism by Marxists looking to steer more losers toward the Democrat Party to keep themselves in power while trying to erase their guilt in the process.  And while kids were distracted by easy sex, drugs, and anti-American culture, the true motives were shaping our political world for the worse.  And Puff Daddy was just one of the losers; the record industry itself was ripe for the corruption it unleashed.  And the weapon of war was guilt; if they could make us feel shame, just like those dumb Lakota kids at Liberty Center, nobody would do anything about it.  And allow them to destroy our culture to prove they weren’t racists.  Meanwhile, massive numbers of underaged kids have had their lives ruined forever by these destructive rap stars and their record producers.  And only now is the whole destruction apparent to see, making it necessary for us to judge once and for all. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Democrats Have a Major Engagement Problem: It’s all catching up to them

How sure am I about President Trump’s strength in this upcoming election?  Well, it’s a simple math problem.  The traditional way of looking at things is in a panic because they know.  And for all those people I have been telling for four years that there was massive election fraud in 2020 and that Biden was illegally put into office, making everything he has touched all this time completely illegal, the proof they have been looking for is about to take place.  Because they know, they know what they did.  And so do many others.  But you don’t have to take it from me.  The facts are the facts, and everyone knows it.  Democrats have an engagement problem, which is one of the many reasons they are scrambling for voters now at the last minute with illegal immigration.  They have lost the inner city vote.  They have lost the panicky suburbanite moms.  They have lost the immigrant vote.  Biden has been so bad. Obama was also horrible during his third term behind Biden that the Democrat brand is now associated with outright communism.  And people don’t want it or like it.  And they aren’t excited about voting for it.  So without massive election fraud, like they had when they took power in 2020 under the ruse of Covid, Democrats know they have significant problems.  The media has been trying to keep it close because they desperately want the ad revenue.  We don’t want everyone getting cocky and not participating in this 2024 election, assuming that everything will be alright.  But if voter engagement stays high, and Trump gets another 75 million votes, which he can easily do, the Democrats won’t be able to keep up in this one.  They are in for a very sharp punch in the stomach, much deserved.

But Trump is only up by 4 to 6 in the Battlegrounds?  You might say.  In some polls, Biden wins by a few.  No, that’s all smoke and mirrors designed to sell political ads and keep the race close so people pump their billions of dollars into the Fox News life stream, the horse race of politics.  If you go out and poll 1500 likely voters, you are expected to get close results.  But we aren’t dealing with potential voters in this presidential race.  This is all about those who usually don’t vote, who are willing to crawl through broken glass naked to vote for President Trump, which I think will be a number closer to 80 million people.  And the Democrats will be hard-pressed to break into the 60 million range.  It’s just math; they don’t have it on their side, even with isolated cheating.  And they won’t be able to duplicate the level of cheating that has kept it close for them this time because of how outrageous it was during the last.  When Obama was running during both terms, he could not break out of the 60 million range, and many of those voters now find themselves to blame for many things in the world.  So, they are not exactly excited to vote.  Biden has been so horrible even The Rock is pulling back his endorsement because this current monstrosity has been horrible for business, the Democrat platform.  Oh, how about those gas prices and those EV mandates?  People are still sick of COVID-19 vaccine mandates imposed by a Biden executive order.  The embarrassment on the world stage.  The projection of weakness.  The corruption of the Biden family in general.  Biden has been horrendous, but that’s what happens when someone cheats to win, gets put on the stage, and nobody remembers voting for him, so they are already critical.  Then, it all starts to add up. 

There are a lot of people who can’t wait to vote for President Trump again, especially after all these court cases.  Democrats have made it personal, and people want to punch them back.  And all these criminals in government should consider themselves very lucky that most Americans are so fair, willing to live within the confines of the Constitution and punch back with a vote rather than violence.  These news shows claim the opposite who are in a total meltdown know better.  They all have it coming because of what they did and conspired to do.  When they get paid back, they deserve it, and then some.  However, many people are ready to vote for Trump to get that vote.  Biden has many people hiding because of their guilt in a string of crimes they assume would never catch up to them.  But it has.  All these years, we have assumed that there was a 50/50 split in America, where both sides were happy about their person running for office and that they would equally show up and vote on election day, making polling somewhat relevant if you could get a statistical sampling of “likely” voters.  But not this time.  This election is all about engagement and which side has more of it.  And because of the way that Democrats have been caught lying, stealing, and cheating in every way that they could, they don’t have much support except for the toxic communists who know this is their chance at revolution.  Everyone else, the idealists, the college kids, the perpetually scared suburbanite housewives who won’t let their kid leave the driveway without a Band-Aid for every scratch, nick, and bruise, are not excited about putting their name next to Joe Biden.  Some might vote anyway, but they aren’t motivated to do so.

That’s usually how it is at sporting events, where all fans enter a stadium excited about how their team might play.  But at the end of the game, when the score is 35 to nothing, people either leave to go back to their cars, happy or sad.  And when your team loses, and you have blown $500 on snacks and souvenirs, you feel terrible.  That is how Democrats are feeling right now, deep in their gut.  They studied these communist revolutions worldwide and saw how they did it, and they have tried it here in the United States.  But too many people were free.  Too many people have guns.  Too many people run their own businesses.  Too many people have access to too much information.  And there has never been someone as self-made as President Trump willing to pledge his fame and fortune to the cause of freedom.  So, the whole house of cards that the Democrats have built for global communism has fallen apart.  And people can’t wait to see it.  They can’t wait to vote against Joe Biden and the third term of the domestic terrorist, Barack Obama.  If the polling does not favor Biden, then it will not get better when actual people vote.  Because there are a lot of elements that polling doesn’t capture that will come into play.  And that is essential engagement; for Republicans, it will be very high.  For Democrats, it is low because they are the losing team, and people are not excited about the brand.  All they have is fear; most people aren’t afraid of them.  So they don’t even have that to drive people to vote.  So, Democrats have a big, massive problem.  And they deserve all the punishment coming to them, and then some.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Kimonos in Japan: If America wants to be Great Again, perhaps we should dress for that greatness

You might have heard about Jimmy Kimmel’s recent trip to Japan, a topic of its own.  But he is right about several things: Japan is clean, and crime is low.  He didn’t understand why, which I’ll break down in a separate article.  However, one thing that is quite clear that I admire about the Japanese people quite a lot is their embrace of their traditional culture and their kimono dress.  I, too, was recently in Japan. I’ve been there a few times during this year, so I am very familiar with some of the unique customs that they have there.  However, during this most recent trip, I saw quite a lot of Kyoto on a Thursday afternoon and for an extended period, and I was surprised by how they dressed.  Most of the people I encountered there were walking around the streets, the temples, and the bamboo forest in full kimonos, both men and women.  And there were rental shops everywhere that kimonos could be rented to wear around town.  It wasn’t a samurai cosplay convention, which was what I thought was going on.  This was how people dressed all the time, and it was very refreshing to see.  It reminded me of something I have been saying all the time, that in America, we need to embrace more of our traditions.  While in Japan, I fully expressed American culture, which they appreciated.  In America, I tend to wear a poncho to my gun competitions and other Second Amendment activities, the kind of Western wear that is very traditional to Western expansion and hard, cold nights on the open ranges next to campfires.   I have several of them, and when I wear them, I always get a lot of strange looks.  But I don’t think they should be considered strange at all.  And when I dressed that way to go out to the store in the middle of the night outside my hotel in Kobe, nobody in Japan thought it was strange at all. 

I had a few ponchos in Japan which I like to put on instead of a jacket, especially in inclement weather.  It’s like having a wrap-around blanket without worrying about it falling off your shoulders, so it frees up your arms underneath.  It’s suitable for short-term warmth without messing around with a cumbersome jacket.  And I like that a poncho hides a lot of what you might not want people to see, such as the many knives and guns that I carry all the time.  With concealed carry across multiple states, it is better to hide the big stuff with very baggy clothing instead of trying to contain the weapons in modern-day America’s conventional dress.  In Japan, their reverence for history, especially in their samurai culture, is unmistakable, and they openly embrace it, which I thought was very classy.  It was nice to see the women dressing up in these classic robes to go shopping and be seen around town.  And the men dressed similarly to accompany them.  Instead of being repealed by the display of my own dress, a few times on this latest trip, as I wore my poncho down to the local store to pick up supplies, people wanted to take a picture next to me in my boots, poncho, and Stetson cowboy hat to show they had met a “real American.”  And they were pleased about it.  As they snapped their pictures with me, I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite quotes from the Dune books: “How else do humans invent the traps that betray us into mediocrity?” 

Mediocrity is what we have adopted in our modern Western cultures, with our associations with communism introduced through our education system.  They have rejected this mediocrity primarily in Japan due to their reverence for traditional values.  But in America, these days, we have associated fashion with an alliance with sportswear.  Nike, Adidas, and other brands seen from college sports programs have largely inspired our public presentation of ourselves.  These days, the idea of proper dress on casual Fridays is a golf shirt that shows we are interested in sports programs.  That is something that they don’t do as much in Japan.  They love sports, especially baseball, but they don’t go out of their way to show reverence for it out of disrespecting their traditional cultures.  But in America, we want to look like the coaches and players of our sports teams, which behind them have all kinds of corporate communism attached to them.  So, our American dress has shifted from individual expressions of a rugged outdoorsman to billboards for corporate influence over our sporting markets.  And the not-so-subtle message there is to accept that individuals are less important than the team’s greater good.  And, of course, behind that is that communism defines the greater good.  So, wearing a cowboy hat in America is quite a statement.  More people are doing it now than they used to, mainly because of the popular Yellowstone television show and the failed politics of the communist left.  People want to make America great again, and like the Japanese, they are turning to traditional dress to convey that trait.  But in America, our dress directly influences our society’s condition. 

I have always worn a cowboy hat.  But over the years, I have been less inclined toward sporting goods fashion trends in favor of my traditional gunslinger apparel.  I’ve been that way for many years.  I remember many late-night encounters in my twenties where I would wear my ponchos everywhere, including the Kenwood Mall in Cincinnati.  It’s one thing to do when you are in your 50s, as I am now.  But when you are in your 20s, many people look at you weird because you are so out of step with mainstream culture.  But it’s always been a visual hedge against mediocrity, which is how I view modern dress codes, and I largely reject the premise.  A culture should strive to stand out from the crowd in everything, individually.  Not to retreat into submission to the mob.  In Japan, particularly Kyoto and even Tokyo, even though the kimonos are uniformly similar in their loose-fitting robes, they are colorful and full of individualized expression.  I thought that seeing that expression was wonderful and was a major contributor to the quality of their society.  I had a chance to eat at a very nice restaurant in Kyoto with some friends.  It was a classic place; most people wore kimonos, and you had to take off your shoes while eating.  It had a spectacular garden to walk in while you waited for your food, and they provided you with slippers to do so.  I stepped into that place, mostly having to duck because the ceiling was low, and the whole place was primarily made of paper and wood.  They gave me a very large locker for my big cowboy boots, which is what they do when you enter to put your shoes in while you eat, but I still wore my cowboy hat.  And they took notice of it.  But it wasn’t in a “you’re not like us” way.  But rather, a respect for the culture that I came from.  And they were proud of their culture.  And what we all shared was a disrespect for sameness as defined by communism and an embrace of versatility as defined by capitalist markets.  They brought us mostly raw fish and vegetables, certainly not chicken nuggets as I might otherwise be used to in the States.  But it was a good look into a culture that embraced their uniqueness and certainly wasn’t shying away from their projection to the rest of the world.  And if America wants to be Great Again.  Perhaps we should start dressing for that greatness instead of playing everything down to some corporate version of casual and accepting sameness as a value rather than uniqueness. 

Rich Hoffman

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Interacting with the Spirit World: How incense provides a vehicle to a world beyond the living

I’ve been thinking about how the spirit world dramatically influences the politics of our lives, as most indicators point to massive manipulation of our politics from the realm best articulated in the traditional Bible.  I found myself in Japan visiting some of the best-known temples in Kyoto with friends and comparing them to what we know about the Temple of Solomon.  Even though there have been over three thousand years of evolution in them, I couldn’t help but see massive similarities and notice how a religious relationship with the politics of a nation has either a positive or negative effect.  The gods worshipped aren’t even the same; in the case of Solomon’s Temple, it was Yahweh.  In the temples of Kyoto, it was Buddha, but as I have been saying for a while now, even including the way that the original Hebrew Bible was written from back to front, right to left, just as Japan writes to this day, it is obvious that the influences along the Silk Road, even in ancient times were a massive culture of uniformity that has its influences even now.  It might be uncomfortable for many people to consider their regional specificity, but there is a common theme that is easily verified when visiting these religious places, and that is the use of incense to establish a relationship with spiritual entities for assistance in the here and now.  Watching people interact with incense in Japan by washing it over themselves and then stepping into the temple to pray to Buddha reminded me almost identically of the tabernacle rituals of Solomon’s Temple and many others worldwide.  However, the same approach to these sacred precincts established by the Jewish people was more than just a coincidence.  There was a science to the approach that worked at some unconscious level, and it had been established long ago and is still in use to this very moment. 

We don’t get to see such a spiritual alignment in the United States because we have allowed ourselves to be suckered into a church versus state argument that discourages public displays of religious value, which the Japanese people have no apprehension over.  As a direct result, you can travel the streets in downtown Tokyo at 2 AM and see nearly no litter and experience very little crime.  People are overwhelmingly respectful of each other, and much of the root of this behavior is their relationship with the spirit world, which they are very open about.  Visiting temples in Kinkakujicho, the Kinna-ji Temple, the magnificent Kiyomizu-dera Temple, and several others, the use of incense smoke to provide a place for the spirit world to manifest in our three-dimensional world is a foundation for establishing a relationship with those characters.  It is common for people to regionally associate their deities of worship with the specificity of their culture and give them names like people name their goldfish.  But in truth, there is much more than just mimicry across multiple cultures over vast periods.  There was a cause and effect that couldn’t be ignored and was at the root of all successful societies.  Much of the Bible deals specifically with the nature of having a relationship with God, as the purpose of the Tabernacle even before the Temple of Solomon was built, was so that God could exist with his people, to manifest upon the Mercy Seat over the outstretched wings of the Ark of the Covenant.  I often think of the Ten Commandments as being the key to a prosperous society, in having rules that work and structure people to work together with shared assumptions.  But even more than that, this relationship with God through incense smoke is unmistakably productive. 

When people stopped worshipping God, as chronicled in the Bible and stepped back into the worship of the high places with human sacrifice to Baal, those societies quickly crumbled into a heap of madness.  And that has been the same story of all cultures who stepped away from God over the many years, the God Yahweh, as the Jewish people came to know him.  As I watched people in Japan interacting with the smoke and washing it over themselves, I kept thinking that the smoke itself was something anybody could produce anywhere, from simple incense burners from Walmart.  There was nothing specifically special about the smoke.  It was only made at a place meant to take the participant’s mind away from the noise of their daily life and have a relationship with the spirit world and whatever Gods might answer.  They have their names for them.  Just as most religions around the world do as well.  But that the intent was the same was more than a coincidence.  If you wanted to see what temple life was like for the Hebrew people in the Near East and understand what a thriving culture looked like, Japan had its finger on it.  Whereas modern Israel is war-torn and under contention, purposely trying to suppress a successful religious experience, much of the world is in conflict over this essential relationship, I would argue.  This is not just for the regional aspects of nation-building but also for the soldiers of the spirit world themselves.  They are at war with each other, and they use the minds of men to corrupt them into conflict by interrupting a positive experience of chaos and maniacal lunacy, such as the church and state arguments. 

By eroding the values of a culture, people allow themselves to be manipulated like pawns in a grand chess game from rivals beyond the world of the living.  And in places in the world where that relationship is positive, they also have a political culture that is functioning correctly.  The best way to destroy a person is to destroy their relationship with the spirit world, no matter what they call their gods, whether those gods are the same character with different names or a pantheon of different characters sometimes called the same name.  It’s the relationship that matters and how it carries over into a political society.  And what about the smoke of incense that carries a relationship with God?  It’s a common theme we can learn from the longest-running, prosperous society of people, the Jewish people because they have been doing it for a long time.  In Japan, as I visited many temples last week in Kyoto, the functionary relationship with the spirit world is alive and well.  And it’s working for them successfully.  Few places on earth today are more successful culturally than what is witnessed in Japan, especially Kyoto, the old capital.  People had a relationship with the more significant aspects of dimensional confinement, and they were happy about it.  The incense smoke appealed to that relationship, which was tangible and precisely like the Tabernacle of the Hebrew people.  When people fell to Baal worship, they turned to appeasement of those gods through the sacrifice of the living.  Whereas to Yahweh, and eventually the Buddha, who came 500 years later, and then the influence of Christ from India, we see an approach that worked along the Silk Road many thousands of miles apart.  It can be shown that a successful relationship with the spirit world creates an opportunity for a prosperous society.  But the temptations to shortcut or abandon that relationship are all too common and involve politics beyond our lives, yet very much at the center of everything we do. 

Rich Hoffman

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