Category: History

Kings Island Goes Cashless: Communist China is leading the world in controlling financial transactions

Communist China is Leading Kings Island into going Cashless

I understand why Kings Island, as a company, would want to go cashless.  Forget about the conspiracy theories for a minute of a global cashless system run by a communist regime.  They have many people under 22 years old that they employ, and cash is messy.  Everywhere there is something to buy at Kings Island, at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, Kings Island must act as a major bank and carry a lot of cash on hand to operate.  It is a tricky problem to put all that money in and out of a safe.  Then there are all the mistakes that the employees make during a typical business day, and they lose a lot of money at each station where goods are purchased.  Then, of course, money is dirty, all kinds of people touch it, it never gets washed, and it becomes a cesspool in the pocket of someone’s dirty, sweaty pants.  For the convenience of Kings Island, one of the biggest amusement parks in America located in Northern Cincinnati, getting away from cash and moving to credit cards makes their job a lot easier.  That is part of the big global plan to push for a cashless system.  Companies like Kings Island have tremendous overhead just in dealing with employees who handle cash on any particular business day, and it’s a real pain, especially if there are options.  I understand why Kings Island wants to be cashless.  I know why global communists wish to be cashless, which we’ll talk about in a minute.  But what nobody was asking is, what do the customers want?”

Well, I can tell you my thoughts, I was infuriated when I was stuck in the Festhaus of Kings Island with all my grandchildren, and my wife couldn’t buy any food because we just had found out while paying for that food in line that they were only taking credit cards.  No cash allowed.  We were all hungry and tired.  We had been swimming, so we didn’t bring anything that might be easy to lose into the park.  We put a hundred bucks in our pockets for food but otherwise kept all our valuables in the car.  Now we couldn’t use that money to pay for food, and we were highly inconvenienced.  The guy at the checkout apologized and explained that Kings Island had made the switch due to Covid restrictions, which infuriated me.  Because I knew it wasn’t Governor DeWine who was pushing a cashless system.  It was Cedar Fair Amusements who were using Covid as an excuse to go cashless.  An advantage to them that I explained above. That’s when we left the park to get food somewhere else, which became a nightmare all its own for similar reasons.  But needless to say, that was the end of our day at Kings Island, and it will likely be my last time going for a while.  Going cashless for me is a breaking point, a take it or leave it a moment, and I’d just soon leave it. 

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The push for a cashless society comes from communist China.  They are already doing much of what Kings Island is working to do, so why not do it.  Why are they doing it? Well, it gives them control over their people.  It allows for the concept of a social score to accept or deny financial transactions.  For instance, if you speak out against the communist government in China on social media or some other traceable way, they can lower your social score, which might prevent you from riding a bus or going to see a movie.  Just think of the censorship of Twitter and YouTube but apply it to things you need to do in life, like go to the grocery store.  If you have a terrible social score, you may not be able to buy food.  That is how China plans to control its population of over a billion people, and it’s why many American corporations are leaning toward a cashless society.  Having that kind of consumer control is very attractive to some of the variability in any financial transaction.  I have seen this cashless thing attempted at several tradeshows and other venues around the country, and so far, it hasn’t been working very well.  There are still many people who still want to use cash, so vendors have to make accommodations.  What it always comes down to is whether or not someone wants a customer.  The consumer desire drives the behavior, not the other way around.  It is for that reason that cash will always be king in America.  Cash is freedom.

I give an example in the video above about me wanting to buy a beer at Kings Island.  Typically, I enjoy going there to look around and think.  If I pay ten bucks for a beer, I pull the money out of my pocket and pay whoever is selling the beer.  The transaction is between the seller and me.  No bank in New York even knows about it.  They might understand that Kings Island sold a beer, but to whom and for how long someone like me took to drink it, nobody knows.  And I like it that way.  So do a lot of other Americans.  Part of drinking the beer is a minor rebellion in it that is specific to American culture.  Just drinking a beer to be drinking one is pretty dull.  Also, using anything but cash means you must trust the system and all the employees who handle the transaction.  While traveling around, it’s happened to me that my wife might go to buy something, and she gets to the counter to pay with a credit card, and the company has shut down the card.  That happened to us while I was traveling in Japan, I had made a suspicious purchase, a tiny one, and the credit card company thought it was a stolen card testing it out on something less risky before making a more significant purchase.  My wife in the states was the one who got stuck without a way of paying until we could resolve the issue with several phone calls and a lot of embarrassment.  Carrying around cash as a secondary or primary way of paying is an obvious solution.  But if we have a cashless society, you must trust the entire system to get everything right, and we all have stories we could tell.  The burden shifts to the consumer while the corporations and governments of the world get the ease of control they so much desire. 

I expected a lot more out of Kings Island, and for them to blame the decision on Covid was just too low of a blow to accept.  I generally love Kings Island and Cedar Fair Amusements.  All I could think of was when they announced that they were not leading in the world but was only copying what the communists in China have already been doing. It diminished them significantly to my mind.  It felt like a betrayal.  My family was out of that park within 10 minutes of that attempted food exchange.  They do have cash conversion machines that can put a value on a card, but then your cash becomes like a gift card, and you must start figuring out how much money you put on it for all your transactions, and the whole thing becomes a significant pain in the neck.  Not that a few hot dogs and a hamburger cost $40, but they were making people stand around and use all these cashless systems was too much.  So, we left, and I can’t say I’ll be going back any time soon.  I go to Kings Island to enjoy myself, not to go to communist China.  Because that’s essentially what it has become—too many rules, too much control, and way too rigid.  And lazy.

Rich Hoffman

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

Covid is the New Excuse to Hide Laziness

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Tea Party Movement is Alive and Well: But there are different ideas about what “good” is

A lot of Old Friends and a Lot of New Friends

There are many talks now about the Tea Party as if the movement ever really went away.  Many are amazed to hear that there are still Tea Parties in various communities.  I can say that I know of many who are still functioning through the Trump years into the present, and they have been thriving.  The most significant difference was that they weren’t being covered in the media the way they had been, so in that way, a lot of people think that they went away.   But I had been to a few Tea Party events with the West Chester Tea Party over the years, so I had known firsthand that they were still functioning.  Including recently when I was invited to come and speak at one of their meetings on Critical Race Theory and how it applied to Lakota Schools.  Now with Trump out of the White House and functioning as a ghost from Florida, the foundations of his presidency are very much alive and well.  The Tea Party movement can once again be heard.  They never went away; it was just that the noise of the world made it hard to listen to them.  Yet when I arrived at a meeting for the invite cast my way, I was even amazed at how many people were there.  It was a packed crowd.   The church where we were meeting in West Chester couldn’t have held more people; it was pretty amazing to see.  I go back in time with the West Chester Tea Party for over a decade, and they were always a big one with great crowds.  But the crowds now were bigger than back then, which says quite a lot.

It was great to see many of the old faces from back then.  But it was even better to see many new faces.  My participation with the Tea Party in West Chester sort of faded out in 2014 when Trump started to look like he was going to run for president.  Then by 2015, it was clear that I made the turn toward Trump while many other Tea Party members supported Rand Paul and his dad Ron Paul along with Ted Cruz.  In those early days of the Trump campaign, nobody was taking him all that seriously.  But for me, I knew that the fight we had to conduct would be unconventional, to say the least, and that Trump was the perfect guy for the job.  My wife and I had several grandchildren by this point, and we often had visits from them on the same days as the meetings.  It wasn’t any particular thing, just really supporting different candidates for the presidential run in 2015 and 2016.  I still returned to the Tea Party for specific meetings on essential topics, but gradually I went from an every meeting attendee to a once or twice year participant. 

However, returning for this little presentation on Critical Race Theory, I couldn’t help but make some additional observations.  Over the years, many of the Tea Party candidates that emerged into public office I had stayed close with.  Many of them are now mainstream candidates and doing great work.  But the elements of the Tea Party itself were very much still in the rock-throwing phase, so the guilt of trust had formed along those lines that were noticeable.   Back in the early days of the Tea Party in West Chester, many officeholders attended every meeting.  Now, not so much.  There were a few here and there, but generally, there was a lack of trust in all elected officeholders that hadn’t been there before.  My position on rock-throwers is that it’s a critical part of any management. That’s how you can determine whether or not ideas hold up or not.  Yet, if you are successful as a rock thrower, you will eventually find that you will win and become the mainstream.  And that is a different animal. That’s the point when you will be the one responsible for making decisions instead of criticizing others for making them, and for many, that is a tough transition. 

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As I said, I maintained several of my relationships with Tea Party candidates who are now very much at the core of the Republican Party, and I’d like to see it stay that way as long as the shelf life of those officeholders holds up.  But there is a perception that just being in the office leads directly to corruption.  That is one of the reasons in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business; I talk so much about playing poker because, in politics, that is often the game we are playing, just by the default mode. I’d love to have a republic with Jesus in all the offices; it would be a great world if that were the case.  But often, and this is one of the reasons that Trump thrived in politics, the people you are dealing with are sleazy and up to no good.  But they can be made to your purposes if you play the game correctly.  From what I could see of the modern Tea Party, many didn’t think that such a game should be played in politics, that the effort to install purity was the ultimate goal for officeholders.  But experience said many of those pure minds would wash out the moment evil touched their sensitive souls, and then you are back to square one with those positions. That’s why I think playing poker is a much more appropriate metaphor for officeholders.  Poker is all about managing deceit for the gains of the pot without losing along the way.  I have always felt that the Tea Party produced many good poker players who do a good job today without losing themselves.  But they needed to be more like Trump and less like the apostles of Jesus who easily fold once vast evils of the political world wash over them in the combat of ideas.  I don’t think it’s a void that can’t be worked out, but it was certainly present in the modern West Chester Tea Party. 

One thing that could not be debated was the intent, and at that West Chester Tea Party meeting, there were plenty of people who intend to bring good management to elected office.  They may disagree about the means, but the intent is clear to everyone, and interest in that intent is as strong as ever, perhaps more so.   The Trump Presidency had shown people that much of the evil they thought was out there indeed was.  If there was ever a question about the kind of corruption Ron Paul always talked about, Trump rooted it out for all to see, and we are better off for it.  Everyone deals with such information differently, but at least now we all know and don’t have illusions about it.  What we do about it now is, of course, the real story that is evolving day by day.  But putting up with a communist and socialist world with the complete take over of our government by foreign attackers, well, that’s just not going to happen.  I could see it clearly in that West Chester Tea Party meeting.  And I know it from my political friends who I’ve known as long if not longer than my start with that same Tea Party over a decade ago.  Accepting evil in politics was not in the cards, but like most things in life, the wins and losses come in how we play them. 

Rich Hoffman

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Rules are Made by the Lazy: Socialism with a mask of safety to hide it

Rules are Made by the Lazy

It’s interesting to see what woke terms are considered “hostile.” The video above talks about a recent posting there, which got me banned for a few days. It’s a quote from The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business that says, “never forget that the cheaters and the lazy made the rules of the world, so to make things easier for themselves, not to serve justice.” Well, it’s an accurate statement that is describing a condition that needs to be fixed.  Yet for the Linkedin crowd, it was too harsh, which came to my mind is an experience I had over a recent weekend, which I’ll talk about later that is a real problem in America in a post-Covid world.  And I say “post” because the coronavirus is over and has been for a long time.  But political exploitation of it for a whole host of reasons isn’t. They’d like it to go on forever for all the reasons we’ll talk about here.  But in truth, I expect to get flagged, especially on social media, a lot.  It has been happening to this blog site increasingly for years, and when it comes to the book, well, I meant it to be as honest as possible, and there are many bad guys out there profiting off dishonesty.  So, of course, they won’t like it.  Yet it doesn’t change the nature of the comment, that the lazy are usually the ones who make all the rules the rest of us are expected to deal with.  You don’t often see the best in a field making many rules because they are good at doing what they do.  The rule-makers are the ones who are looking to handicap the good to give the weak a chance to win. 

In a perfect world, competition would determine who wins and who loses.  The objective would be well defined, and various parties would fight it out to see the best.  Someone would win, someone would lose, or a whole lot of people would lose.  The losers would know if they could practice and get better for the next competition, and in that way, everyone would get better, and the world would be a better place as a result.  However, and it’s certainly out of the bag now for mainstreamers, socialism and a mixed economy have taken their toll on our intellects over the years.  So much so that we no longer know the purpose of competition.  In the quest for equality, we have given rise to a society of rule makers who are always seeking to penalize the winners so that the losers in life can win more often.   Worse yet, the value of winning has been so much attacked that many don’t even want to win anything.  They don’t want to be targeted for various social attacks and the stigmas that come with it.  Granted, these positions are not innate to the human being.  Humans all want to strive for the best they can get in anything. Still, the social pressure to embrace meekness is incredible and has given us a society of lawmakers who enjoy controlling the mass of humanity with equality measures meant to cripple the best to prop up the worst. That has given us many of our modern problems. 

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Of course, the excuse for rules makers to always make more regulations is always the pursuit of safety.  The socialist always looking to conceal their loser tendencies wants desperately to take away opportunities for danger to avoid complex discussions about their timidity.  So rules and regulations in an overly litigious society are the perfect cover.  Under the undeclared socialism of our times, the banner of equality takes precedence over victory in every way, meaning that a safe society preserves human life in one fashion only to destroy them in thousands of other ways.  But for a community of rule makers, the more rules there are, the more value that losers have in the world.  I can think of a few blue pill examples of this kind of thing that most people would understand.  In the video above, I give a few examples of the NFL in how socialism has been generally accepted to make the game appeal to the overall mass audience of the product itself.  In 2003, after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl, there was a change to their invented Cover 2 defense against the Bump and Run rules.  The Buc defense used to be able to manhandle receivers constantly on their routes, but after that year, it was changed to 10 yards of coverage; the hands had to be off.  Now it wasn’t the Bucs who proclaimed this trend to be unfair.  They had just won a Superbowl.  The rest of the NFL was upset that the Bucs had such a dominant defense that caused the rule change.  And as a result, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers didn’t win another Super Bowl until 2021. That’s just one small example out of hundreds of thousands of similar rules tampering quandaries that we all deal with every day.  But in dealing with them with such frequency, we have forgotten what a life with many fewer rules looks like and how much better our society could be without those rules. 

That, of course, brings up the many rules of business and how rules are used to either crush competition or stabilize the best in dominating a market.  Once a company sticks its head up and shows itself as a contender of excellence, it comes to the parasites to either loot off the efforts or penalizes the company with more rules and regulations until they are worn down into complacency. That’s about the time that the management takes up their open collar shirts and deliberately shows the world that they aren’t so great because they hope to get off the radar of the rules and regulations class.  Too many rules inspire people not to play the games of life, and it is in the games that we find the most value for everything.  That, of course, is the point I make in the book, but on a professional site like Linkedin, you’d think that they would value such talk.  But then again, that’s what wokeness is all about.  Wokeness is about destroying the good and the best to make way for the average and the complacent.  It is just another byproduct of socialism, the quest for sameness, not perfection and dominance in a particular field.  Rules are sold to us through safety, but they intend to eliminate risk, which drives the world’s economies.  And once those who have acquired great wealth and no longer want to be challenged, they can then hire the rules makers of governments to prevent that competition from knocking them off their pedestal.  That is when rules and regulations are used to preserve the best and to allow them to become complacent because nobody is allowed to compete with them.  And that in itself is sheer evil that is allowed to be brewed right under our noses. 

Well, I’m OK with getting banned on all these various platforms. I’m going to do what I do, and the message does get out.  Maybe not to the extent that would be possible without all the rules and regulations tampering.  But the honesty of competition cannot be ignored.  When everyone wonders why the world has many of the problems that it does have, look no further than the impact that rules and regulations have on society as a whole, and you will find the beginning to your answer.   The way to fix any society is not with the burden of more regulators but with more competition.  Not in sameness but in uniqueness.   And once that idea is embraced, we will all see vast improvements in our social discourse.  The skinny jeans tech geeks who flag all these postings aren’t the arbiters of quality and performance.   Winning is. That’s how all societies grow and prosper, is in winning despite all the rules. 

Rich Hoffman

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What January 6th Was Really About: People are sick and tired of being lied to

Government Has Lied to Us One Too Many Times

It continues to be a talking point, this desire of Democrats, and some Republicans, to abuse their positions of power to hide outright crimes committed within the Beltway culture of Washington D.C.  That is what the January 6th Commission is all about.  It’s just another witch hunt meant to hide the crimes that politicians have committed, in their alliance with China as a hostile foreign nation, their part in committing election fraud, in the active coup of a sitting American president.  Of their knowledge of the Covid origins as a man-made virus unleashed upon the world to create a “change state” socialist economy for which the political class would rule over.  The desire to distract from those crimes is why they have picked January 6th as a hill to die on.  And in the end, that’s just what will metaphorically happen to them. I’ve said it in other places; think of the IRS abuse with Lois Lerner, think of Benghazi, the Hillary Clinton emails.  Think of the FBI working with Democrats to destroy Donald Trump before he ever got to the office.  Think of all that, then take away the hope of justice from another Trump term, and yes, you have some outraged people out there.  But instead of dealing with that, the criminals in our government have sought to dig their hole even deeper, pissing people off even more.  It is the finest example of arrogance that can be displayed for public view on a mass scale.  And that, in essence, is what all the drama is all about.  The criminals need a cover story from the judgment of the good.

The truth of the matter is, some people, enough people, are waking up.   Being woke isn’t so much about editorializing people and their free speech as much as it is the realization that we had a nightmare of compliance that everyone had been functioning from for many hundreds of years.  Suddenly through the miracles of options created in the free culture of America, it has exposed these kinds of crimes so that they are apparent.  Where Nancy Pelosi hopes that the emperor has no clothes apply to her and her friends, the evidence has shown that people can see her naked and aren’t willing to go along with the gag any longer.  Some people are, but many are not, enough to make things rough for the future of Democrats and RINO Republicans who just wanted to play along with the game enough to enrich themselves.  The old rules of the Beltway are being challenged.  People are tired of the games and in paying for them.  And the start of the fissure started on January 6th when the old rules were put to the test and what scared the politicians was that the public wasn’t willing to go back to sleep only to be consumed with that same old nightmare over and over again.  This time they were awake for good. 

I know it’s scary to see how bad some of these people are and witness how many of them are so devoid of character that they would participate in the destruction of America over just making a few dollars.  This temps many to rationalize that money is the root of all evil, but as I say in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, money reveals this kind of behavior which is great.  Money shows us all what people will do to get it, even if it’s committing crimes.  Otherwise, how would we know the difference between a criminal and a hard worker?  Money brings people their values to see, so there is value in seeing the truth from behavior.  Just as in Trump, his presidency was valuable because the pressure of him wanting to do a good job, in wanting to drain the swamp, has shown us just how nasty that swamp was.  I think a lot of us suspected it.  Every year, we would talk about it around the Thanksgiving table with our families before the football games started.  But so long as we were somewhat left alone in our lives, we were generally unwilling to do anything about the criminals in government who were getting away with murder, literally in many cases. 

But now we know, and we have seen a lot over the last decade, really going back to the start of the Tea Party movement.  I remember how scared the politicians were of the Tea Party. This education organization was formed without a leader to evoke reform in government and get the nation back to constitutional ideas.  I remember how stunned the bad guys were when Glenn Beck filled the Mall over a Labor Day weekend speech he made in 2009, a year after Barack Obama was president.  We remembered that Bill Ayers, the American terrorist, had launched Obama’s campaign in his living room.  And now we had a socialist in the White House, and we weren’t happy about it.  Tea Party members would peaceably gather, and they were made fun of, belittled everywhere, and ostracized to no end for just wanting goodness out of our government.  Trump was born out of that movement.  Trump did not create the movement.  None of the government criminals is willing to consider that admission; it would be the end of them.  Trump was put in place to finish what the Tea Party started.  And when that criminal government took Trump away, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

January 6th was just the start.  The Mike Lindell symposium that he is about to unleash over the election results, the continued Trump rallies, and many thousands of blogs and podcasters have only become angrier over what was witnessed over 2020 and into 2021.  There are too many of them to change their mind, and they are not willing to be as serene as they were in the early days of the Tea Party because now, unlike then, we know better.  The bad guys have been revealed.  They have been hostile.  And they have worked with foreign powers to undo our nation.  Sure, the internet, which our governments and their corporate sponsors control, will try to remove my ability to say what I am saying here, but it doesn’t matter because we are all thinking it.  And they can’t remove thoughts as much as they’d like to.  People don’t like the government.  People don’t trust the government.  And now that the government has taken away their happiness, with mask mandates, threats to put their daughters in a draft, threats to make kids go to school with drag queens, CRT in those public schools that are too expensive for the worth of free babysitting service, people who otherwise wouldn’t have been politically activated are now active.  They tried to do the right thing and solve these matters with a vote, but the government criminals took that away from them too.  So the result is anger and lots of it.  Anger that won’t go away quickly.  It won’t send people back to complaining about the government at Thanksgiving dinners before football games.  Now it’s carried over into everyday life.  When people cannot enjoy their life, they will turn against the government that gets in the way of that happiness.  And that is the consideration that nobody on that criminal side figured out before they dug this deep grave for themselves.  And why they will be so surprised as we start filling that grave in with metaphorical dirt.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Of Course, Biden Was Never In Charge: The Deep State is warning us for next time

The Deep State is Letting You Know They Are In Charge by Showing How Stupid Biden Is

Wait, don’t tell me you thought Joe Biden was in charge?  No, you couldn’t have thought that; you’re too smart.  But obviously, the people who put Joe Biden in the White House for 2021 think you are that stupid.  They are showing off a concept that was spelled out clearly in Carroll Quigley’s book Tragedy and Hope.  We don’t have free and open elections; we don’t actually pick our representatives.  The world and at least the American government are run by a cabal of bankers who play all the world’s governments like puppets on a marionette as children’s entertainment.  The idea that free people would vote and self-govern to them is laughable.  At least, that’s what they think, and they are showing off by picking Biden, a guy who can barely string together two sentences and stay awake for longer than 12 hours at a time.  It’s not a cognitive problem that we are seeing. It’s the self-proclaimed elite that wants to show off just how much in charge they actually are by putting a brain-dead caricature-like Biden in the White House right in front of our faces and get away with it. It’s the criminals going back to the scene of the crime to show off how they pulled off the heist that we are seeing.   But Biden being in charge, no, nobody ever thought that he was making any decisions. 

Now, of course, I am not accepting that reality.  It may be the view of people like Quigley, who is very much in abundance of Beltway culture.  They would like the world to be that way, but it’s not theirs to take.  It’s one of the reasons that I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  The same rules that make a company great can be applied to a country.  It’s all management, and the same kind of tyrannies that Tragedy and Hope talked about can be seen in most companies.  There isn’t some magical boon that these people know that the rest of us don’t.

How It Works in the World

The difference is that they are just more pretentious about it.  Naturally, they are below-the-line thinkers who look toward collectivism to hide their insecurities, which is the essence of why globalists think the way they do.  They want to believe that through the acquisition of power and collective reflection that they can mask their frailties from the eyes of judgment.  So for them, to pull the levers of power to get Biden elected, through rules, through finance, through public manipulation, they seek to mask their lack of management skill.  But as I always say, you can’t hide the good from the bad, and so long as we don’t hide our goodness, they will forever choke on it.  The answer to these problems is not scary, not once you understand what you are dealing with.  No matter how many Joe Bidens are put in power for corporate controllers to maintain, they still are no match for a self-determined being armed with their ability to defend themselves.  The gunfighter proved that the power players of the world did not run anything.  They sat back like leeches and waited for the brave and the strong to pave the way for prosperity for them.  Then once they thought it safe, they would claim jump and attempt to kill off the gunfighters and steal what was captured. That’s kind of the world we are living in.

And you can tell if you look at where investments have been made why a corporate alliance to manipulate politics is so desired.   When corporations invest so heavily in foreign countries, of course, they will want to steer the direction of those countries that protect those investments.  This danger of corporate control over politics has been around since the beginning of America, since the Andrew Jackson administration. His laissez-faire economics from that administration may have created an open book for risk-taking and significant economic growth. Still, it also gave rise to the corporation’s rise, as best exhibited by Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Now I’m a big fan of Cornelius.  Not so much his kids, but the Commodore was a great mind who built great wealth in America.  Many of those characters who hung around with Quigley when writing his book would have done much bootlicking to be near such a power.  But Vanderbilt, the elder, was a great capitalist, and America would do well to have more people like him.  But as I report in many different ways in my book, the world of politics is built by looters and other parasites who claim jump off bold efforts then lay claim to the riches.  And to protect that theft, they seek, as do those modern globalists, to use that stolen wealth to control politics and the justice system so that they never find themselves prosecuted for their antics. 

Eventually, they get cocky, as they have in the 2020 election.  They couldn’t stand that we elected Trump, a very Cornelius Vanderbilt type of character, a very American creation.  They thought they contained the danger in 2016, but Trump was elected anyway.  So in 2020, they had their hands in all kinds of ways to provide safety to the system of politics they built to keep it from happening again—everything from election fraud on a mass scale to creating a Covid conspiracy to mask the political antics.  Notice how Bill Gates is no longer being talked about.  The Gates family conveniently had a divorce which took them off the stage.  Are we to believe that suddenly Bill and Melinda Gates, who was on the news almost every day talking about Covid and saving the world from global warming, couldn’t live with each other under a marriage?  That the divorce gave them cover for not going on air for a while as the Wuhan conspiracy with China became unraveled by the unwashed masses who could smell the rat rotting behind a decaying wall of media cover.  Remember, it was Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci who walked into Trump’s White House office in an election year where it was a no-win situation for the President and told him he had to shut down the economy otherwise, millions of deaths would be on his hands.  Trump learned pretty quickly that Gates and Fauci had overstated the danger by a lot, and he tried to open the economy back up by Easter of 2020.  But by then, Mike Pence was deep into managing Covid and Fauci, and the media had their torpedo to kill the red hot economy of Trump so that the President would get the blame for the election.  And if you go and watch the short-selling behavior, many of the world’s most affluent and influential moved their money to reflect gains that could be made off the tragedy.  When they say the rich get richer and the poor poorer, we’re not talking about capitalism.  We are talking about managed government economies where a corporate alliance does these kinds of manipulations then makes wealth off the tragedy.  Such as what is happening now with the vaccines.  Big pharma is making a killing of the government mandates, and they love it.  Because ultimately, they are in charge anyway.  They can get Biden to say anything they want him to say.  And they get rich doing it.

But don’t think for a second that Biden was ever supposed to appear in charge.  He was always going to be a stark warning to the rest of us what would happen if we dared to ever vote for a Donald Trump type again.  Yes, they are that audacious.  However, to my way of thinking, they can be easily beaten.  But before you can beat them, you have to see them.  And never have they made themselves more evident than they have now, with Biden looking like a puppet, obviously not in charge, and a slap in the face to the rest of us.  If ever you were to doubt a deep state of corporate conspirators, the evidence is now well-known due to the audaciousness of the Joe Biden presidency. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How America Defeats China: ‘The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business’ shows you the way

How To Defeat China

As I said in the video above, the strategy guide I just wrote, which is released on August 28th to everyone else, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, can and will stop China’s aggression in its tracks and send it tumbling the other way.  I wrote the book as a very anti-Marx answer to the incredibly audacious Marxism that has been brewing worldwide for more than a century now.  In America, the cycle goes something like this, Democrats were defeated in the Civil War, and slaves were freed.  Democrats took reconstruction as a personal assault and repositioned themselves for revenge by adopting European progressivism, and a means to undo the Republic for which defeated them in the war.  30 to 40 years later, they partnered with various mobsters, most notably Saul Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals, to strategically destroy the Christian purity of America with gradually more audacious progressive policies.  During the Cold War, the Soviet KGB infiltrated the Democrat party with open doors and many American institutions with outright communism to destroy their primary rival from within.  In the 1990s, after Russia went bankrupt, China became the next global carrier for collapsing America with communism which they have stated openly they wish to do by 2035.  Even the Biden administration has warned that this is the intention of the Chinese as he has shown to have an open arms policy with them to help them with their cause.  That leaves the rest of us with this long history to sort out and defeat for the continuation of our Republic.  And there aren’t many friends in the publishing industry, print media, or on the networks who aren’t in on the flip from a capitalist country into a communist one.  Many have already placed their bets on the American collapse and want to see it happen.  Yet, to me, it’s straightforward.  Not that it won’t take work from us to perform, but I would offer that the collapse of the entire Chinese communist push and global commitment to it could be destroyed by the contents of my new book.  Most specifically, by the very definition of one word…………………..gunfighter. 

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Gunfighters were a new invention in the world created in America under American ideas.  The very notion that any individual could grab a gun and carve out space for themselves for their interests divorced from the rules of the rest of the world was completely new when Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill were carving out a name for themselves during the late period of western expansion.  The romantic notions of a lone sheriff like Wyatt Earp standing alone against a band of desperados with a gun on their hip and against all odds became the very nature of American character that the rest of the world wanted to follow.  It also posed the greatest threat to the global communists that anybody could imagine.  Immediately as America found itself united with the Buffalo Bill Wild West show up until the turn of the century, liberals had discovered their means to erode at it with their pick of the American Indian to use as their Asian counterpart, their means to begin the guilt trip that would go on for the next 100 years.  Communists wanting to spread the works of Karl Marx in Europe were concerned that if America wasn’t brought down, the rest of the world would never catch up.  So they pointed their sharp tongues at American media and avoided the guns of the gunslingers, and attempted to fight on that front.  They avoided a direct conflict of deadly duals that had been settled many times over on dusty streets in the now mythical Wild West because they knew they couldn’t win that way.

But the little secret that nobody has been talking about is that the rest of the world, especially communists, fear the American gunfighter’s notion.  In much the same way that when we think of Japan, we think of the samurai sword.  When the world thinks of Americans, they think of the cowboy, the gunfighter, and the myths and legends of rugged individuals who braved the unknown without a government to tell them what to do.  This concept is the terrifying one in the world to them and is the greatest weapon that our free society could wield in our own defense.  So what I have done in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is to take readers back to the way of thinking that occurred before the rise of progressivism in America to the gunfighters seeking fame and fortune as free people after Republicans freed the slaves in the Civil War.  The period that followed showed the greatness of American industry off the backs of the gunfighters who paved the way for the rise of the greatest economy ever.  And the divorce from Europe that made it possible was by the gunsmoke of gun ownership empowering individuals to govern themselves. 

The great weakness of Marxism that nobody wants to talk about is that it collapses when aligned to the choices of individuals.  And even those below-the-line thinkers who vote for liberal causes and Democrats generally have individual desires.  What they do in their private lives undoes Marxism at its core, which is why communism always fails.  It’s falling in China presently.  Yet, the deep roots of liberal society have sought to cover up those failures by propping up the Chinese communists falsely, and the clock is running out on them as we speak.  Their desperation knows it, which is why they are so desperate now to make their global push toward a one-world communist government, with China leading all the nations from the United Nations.  That added pressure has caused them to make lots of mistakes that are poised to be exploited.  And the way to pour salt in that wound is to remind them that the American Gunfighter is alive and well.  We will not have a dual in the streets with the Chinese and fight them to the death with guns. Instead, the symbol of individualism that comes with gun ownership and the desire to self-govern as armed citizens is enough to undo all their plans.  As scary as things look, they are more terrified than you are, dear reader.  Which I also address in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  As I talk about in that book, I often tell poker stories, and we have a good hand.  A winning hand.  The river card will confirm it soon.  All we have to do is keep pushing up the bets because the Chinese communists are bluffing.  They don’t have what they need to win.  And for them, the reminder that Americans are ultimately not what their government shows the world but are more like those old gunfighters than anybody dared to admit.  At our core, we are still like those individuals who traveled west with our guns and ambitions to live unburdened by any means.  That realization to the communists of the world, whether they are the Marxists attempting to infiltrate America or the honey pots of the Chinese spy network looking to extort people like Eric Swalwell and Nancy Pelosi at the source of corruption.  Americans are not defined by leaders but by their rights and desires protected by private gun ownership.  And that reality is how China can and will be undone, and the script will be flipped, and the American Gunfighter will be the symbol of Truth, Justice, and the American Way well into the future by free people of all colors and sexes.  But first, Marxism must be defeated everywhere. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Sometimes Doing the Right Thing is to Break All the Rules: The answer to Mark Levin’s ‘American Marxism’ question

Sometimes Doing the Right Things Means You Have to Break the Rules

One of my favorite lines from my new book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is that it “is the losers of the world who make up the rules of life.” There are many lines like that in what I’m calling a conservative book on strategy, but that one is more relevant to me due to the nature of our current politics and wokeness in our corporate structures. I’ve read many hundreds of books from conservatives and liberals over the years. It’s always been frustrating to see liberals putting out books like Rules for Radicals and The Coming Insurrection while we have failed to answer. In contrast, on the conservative side of things, the books come out as warnings about what’s coming rather than giving people a means of dealing with them.  Liberals have been audacious in assuming they were important enough to steer the entire human race in the direction of their choosing, making up rules that we as conservatives always follow to the letter.  The essence of all our outstanding literary achievements and countless hours of talk radio has been to work within those rules and be good people by pointing out the evils of liberalism.  All the while, the rules were made by radicals and losers from the beginning to doom us all, and we have been following those rules right over a cliff to our peril.   I love books, all books, by all people, even by the other side politically.  If it’s a book with binding on it, I likely love it.  Because even books by those I disagree with teach me something.  And as I said, I have read a lot of them and have been waiting for someone on the conservative side to come up with some book on conservative strategy.  But it never came, and now with things the way they are now, I figured I would just sit down and do it myself, resulting in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.   The publisher sent me a few advanced copies ahead of the August 28th release date, where the book will be available wherever books are sold.  Yet, I did take a moment to enjoy holding the book and going through it due to the long journey it took to produce it.  Finally, a book on conservative strategy was here.  I didn’t care if I wrote it or if somebody else had.  I was just happy to have it in my hands.

Its been the most frustrating thing to watch, liberals creating rules we all live by, then as we were killing ourselves with terrible thinking, such as Critical Race Theory, a lack of defense about capitalism, a lack of defense of our family structures, our religions, our president, our businesses—everything, the liberals who have been writing these books on strategy for years were rolling in the mud like pigs after a feeding frenzy.  How could we help facilitate so much evil in the world just by following the rules?  Well, that has been their trick, the liberals, and they figured that out about us many years ago among the gangsters of Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde.  The gangster era was what was left of the old gunslingers of the Wild West. It was a direct result of progressivism that crept into American society at the end of western expansion.  Instead of facing down our enemies on a dusty street in a duel to the death in the pursuit of justice, our criminals hid in the shadows and functioned outside of our Christian sentiments.  Once Democrats in Chicago observed the Midwest antics of Capone’s mob and the elusiveness of Bonnie and Clyde all up and down the Mississippi River, they had their game plan, which they use aggressively to this day.  The book was Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, and the top people of the Democrat Party used it to create the kind of world we are dealing with now.  They made the rules because they had been losing as a progressive movement that desperately wanted to take over America from Europe. We followed those rules to our present circumstances. 

I read the books, especially Rules for Radicals and The Coming Insurrection, and was thinking, “these aren’t very good books.  Why are they so popular?” They looked to be self-published, poorly written monstrosities that I wouldn’t think would survive the book reviewer critics of liberalism.  Yet they made it through, picked up some big endorsements, such as Hillary Clinton, who was obsessed with Saul Alinsky for many years, those works made it to the top of the Democrat platform at the national and international level.  Meanwhile, as I said in the video above, this isn’t negative toward Mark Levin’s new book selling like hotcakes in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, American Marxism—conservatives read and write books pointing out the problem. Still, we never are pretentious enough to write our strategy guides to answer those problems once we see them.   I think Mark’s new book is excellent.  It points out the history of Marxism as it has infiltrated America for years. I’ve been pointing that out on this blog for decades too, but what are we supposed to do about it?  American Marxism says we need a movement to stand up to Marxism.  But how do we do it?  Well, that’s when I decided to sit down and write a counterpoint to one of my favorite books of all time, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which is 2500 years old.  I thought it was time the human race has an update and one from an American perspective.  Something that would answer the question that Mark Levin and Sean Hannity have framed for us.  But a means to achieve success at all the levels of our lives in a way that hasn’t been done before. 

So if I was you, dear reader, which I have been, the question on your mind is why did I write the book and not some genius war general or former president of the United States?  What makes me qualified?  I tell quite a story of my background, which you can find on the sidebar of this website that will offer insight into that very question.  But honestly, I think many of us could have written The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  Most of us already know the answers, but we are too nice and too good to do often what needs to be done.  We need to understand why breaking many of the conventional rules that have been imprisoning us morally is the correct action.  And of those rules that have been holding us back is this notion of pretention.  That any of us should never assume that we have the answers to save humanity, well, I would say, why not?  Why not you?  Why not me?  Why should we surrender to a hostile political left full of hate and evil?  Because the rules of our life tell us too?  Well, that’s why one of my favorite lines from the book states that the losers often make the rules of our life because they have to find some way to cripple the good and just so that they can have a shot at winning the future.  And we have generally accepted this sabotage gleefully because our value judgments were in being good people who follow the rules.  But when the bad guys made the rules, then what?  Well, that’s what The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is all about, and I’m very proud that it’s coming out to offer options where many of us just haven’t had them before.  Sometimes, to do the right thing, you have to break the rules.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote For Vanessa Wells to Lakota’s School Board: Elgin Card is just the beginning of the problem

Vote For Vanessa Wells to Lakota’s School Board

Vanessa Wells, shown in the video above, didn’t foresee herself running for school board at Lakota a few years ago.  She was a mom, just like everyone else sending their kids to school.  She and her husband moved to the Lakota district specifically because the school had a good reputation. Many thousands of similar parents could tell about their experience and reasoning for moving to the Lakota school district.  And that dream was alive and well up until the point in time that a politically immune resident’s son threatened to kill her daughter while in school at Lakota, and nobody wanted to deal with the problem.  At that point, Vanessa considered her options.  First, she decided to pull her child out of danger, out of class, and homeschool her.  That solved the immediate problem of the threat in the classroom and Lakota’s school board having no stomach to do anything about it.  As I say all the time, the kind of liberalism that grows in all public schools emphasizes the institution, not the essence of the individual child.  Of course, the Lakota school board wasn’t going to deal with a foreign agent and all the political attachments to the case by defending the rights of one individual child. That’s not the political climate of any school board or school system—to protect individual rights unless those rights advance a progressive cause, such as gay rights or race-baiting.  Threatening to kill another student when it’s a young white lady born of traditional white parents is grounds for dismissing the issue altogether.  After all, the radicals of the political left are threatening to eliminate white people all the time, and this was just one more of them.

Yet, for Vanessa, that wasn’t good enough.  She loves her kid the way all parents do; she has to defend at least her right to exist.  Hiding at home homeschooling was a retreat away from a system that our tax money is paying for, which has been openly hostile to the type of targets that Critical Race Theory seeks to attack. That’s what was being taught at Lakota schools under various masks they use to deter public outcry.  But the school system’s mission could never have been made more evident. They were committed to the progressive implementation of political goals aligned with the teacher’s union, and anybody who got in the way of that would be run over. Vanessa’s family was just the latest in a long list over the years who have found themselves chewed up and spit out by a government institution that is more committed to creating a real-life Brave New World rather than a bright-eyed child entering adulthood ready to meet the challenges of life. That’s when Vanessa decided to run for the school board and directly fight the corrosive elements that were making school life dangerous for kids like hers. To target Critical Race Theory at its source, the school board created the position of Elgin Card, and that was the feature of Vanessa’s presentation.

You can hear Vanessa explain her personal story and her experiences dealing with the school board in the videos contained here.  She also presented the kind of radicalism in Lakota school’s hallways advocated directly by the six-figure school employee, Elgin Card, which should concern everyone.  Additionally, Elgin Card’s social media screen captures further display the evidence of Critical Race Theory being taught directly in class.  In the videos here, it is evident that Vanessa isn’t alone in this concern.  Many people showed up at a local church to learn what they could do to stop CRT teaching at Lakota.  I was surprised by the showing because I knew many threats made by the usual teacher union surrogates on the same scale as what we see on the national level in politics attached to the Black Lives Matter Marxism movement.  It’s very much happening in all our school districts, specifically Lakota. It’s a big target, one of the most prominent schools in the state of Ohio in an affluent neighborhood.  So, by attacking Lakota, the Marxists behind the Black Lives Matters movement see an opportunity, and the harassment of any resistance to their plans was deep on their minds.  There were plenty of threats made to discourage people from coming to this filmed event.

Vanessa Wells talks CRT at Lakota Schools

But as you can see for yourself, a lot of people came anyway.  I was expecting a crowd of 25 or so concerned parents.  Even with all the threats leading up to it, those who showed up were visible from the footage.  That’s precisely why there aren’t more Vanessa Wells parents out there because when they stick their heads up, the radicals in the school district immediately move to cut them down.  Any way possible.  And they pride themselves in their ability in much the way that blue state governors have become obsessed with Covid mandates to boss around their populations.  The same thing is going on at Lakota.  When parents complain, the school board appeases them with a gently worded email, almost like patting a dog on the head to make them happy and stop barking.  But then they turn around and hire expensive radicals like Elgin Card at Lakota to implement BLM political Marxist strategies, essentially with an openly hostile approach to most of the Lakota student population.  Lakota isn’t seeking to teach diversity and fairness, as they claim.  They are seeking outright Marxism from Black Lives Matters which is evident by the screen captures of Elgin Card himself. That’s why it’s such a great benefit that Vanessa has decided to run for the school board at Lakota and offered to bring leadership to these matters where it is needed.  It would be great if more parents joined her, but she’s a great start. 

It wasn’t easy for Vanessa; I can tell you that.  But she’s a fighter; it’s in her nature. She’s also brilliant.  While it might make sense to just homeschool her child, turning away from a vast evil in her backyard didn’t make sense for her, so she’s working to improve the situation precisely what we should all be doing.  The clear answer to these problems is to replace the management that allowed them to happen, which is 4 out of 5 school board members.  Many people don’t know it, but up until this year Lakota, led by Brad Lovell, was planning to ask for even more money on a tax increase just so the board could hire more people like Elgin Card at more than $100,000 each to bring this level of radicalism to our community school.  Because of Covid and the election year theatrics, they backed off it for now.  But they indeed plan to as soon as they can.  After all, they have to pay for the teacher contract that they just voted for, and they can only pay for those raises with a tax increase which they are now committed to.  And think how many radical teachers are just like Elgin Card waiting to be activated.  Before this new diversity position that the school board created for Elgin, he was the principal at Lakota West.  So, there are more like him waiting for a chance to bring more radicalism to the children of Lakota.  At this point, the only legal means we have to defeat this attack is to replace the school board, starting with Vanessa Wells, and the courage she managed to muster to face an onslaught of evil intent to destroy us all, one child at a time.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Experts in Plato’s Cave: Fear of learning the truth

Plato’s Cave Wall

When things start getting disjointed and the pressure starts blurring reality, I always turn to books for clarity—the process of reading books levels out the mind in very productive ways.  I don’t care if it’s a comic book; reading anything helps solve many thought problems.  And that is certainly the case in the news these days, where various Covid variants are scaring people into looking at everything but the fundamental issues of politics.  I told everyone what was coming when we started learning about Dr. Fauci and his connection to China, how China has long ago declared war on America. Still, we have not matched that aggression, and then there are election fraud problems from the 2020 elections.  There are some big topics out there that could topple our government in a very negative way.  There is some bad stuff going on that is now well out of control, so the perspective is needed. That’s when I turn to books to solve problems, and it always works.  Doing extensive reading brought my mind back to an old topic, the Cave Analogy from Plato’s Republic, a favorite.   In the video above, I explain it and how it applies to the politics of our times.  The problem we all have is that we know what is making the shadows on the cave wall. Still, we have an expert class that insists on staying in control of what we see and hear, even though their information is entirely irrelevant for 2021 sensibilities.

If you haven’t heard it before, this problem of experts attempting to shape reality based on their limited perspective is not a new problem.  It goes back several thousand years to around 375 BC to the times of the Greeks when they were trying to figure out how to operate a Republic as a form of government.  The assumption is that we are all chained to a pole looking at a cave wall and behind us in a cave is a fire burning.  Behind us are people walking around, for which we have never seen.  All we know of them is the shadows they cast on the cave wall.  Other people chained with us to a pole facing in the same direction have learned to predict the movements of the shadows on the cave wall depending on what time of day it was.  Again, not knowing that the shadows are caused by people moving about out of our sight.  Well, one person eventually manages to get loose and turn around and see for themselves the source of the shadows.  Breaking free, they attempt to tell the others tied to the poles what can be seen, but the experts don’t want people to pay attention.  So, the freed person goes by themselves into the world beyond the fire into the people moving about, talking with them, and learning who they are.  Eventually, the person finds themselves moving out of the cave altogether, and outside they see the sun and the more significant evidence of civilization.    

This evidence of reality provokes excitement, so the freed person returns to their colleagues tied to the pole and tells them what was seen outside the cave.  This causes anger from the experts because the threat to them is genuine.  Their entire value in existence has been to predict when the shadows will appear on the cave wall and determine their movements.  Obtaining a higher knowledge of what makes the shadows destroys everything that gives power to their lives, and they find it threatening.  They would much prefer to keep the public ignorant to be important by predicting the shadows on the cave wall.  Learning what makes the shadows for such people is the worst thing in the world.  Well, that pretty much spells out the problems of our modern times.  We have a lot of people in politics who make good livings predicting what the shadows will do.  But we live in a time where information is abundant, and we don’t need experts to tell us what things mean.  We have decentralization of information, and if one expert class attempts to keep us facing a direction we don’t want to be facing, we have the choice to look somewhere else anyway.  If we’re going to know what causes the shadows, we can look for ourselves.  That is the tension of our current political world.

Literature is such a good method of resolving problems because, as in the Allegory of the Cave, Plato had the same issues then as we do now.  There is nothing new about what we see out of the behavior of humanity.  There might be some modern tapestries to what we see, but the essence is always the same.  But what we should expect is to learn from history so that we don’t keep repeating it.  I think we can feel sympathy for those experts who only see the value of their lives in predicting where the shadows come from.  Or we can hate them for their attempt to control us.  Dr. Fauci comes to mind, a government expert who has spent his whole life predicting shadows and trying to scare us into behavior the government desired.  For him, we long ago untied ourselves and could see what was causing the shadows, even as the government has insisted that we not look behind us to where the fire cast its shadows.  Notice how we are talking about a Covid variant, but we never talk about a natural solution such as hydroxychloroquine. That’s when you know the expert class doesn’t care about you; all they do care about is their retention of power, their ability to scare you into behaving the way they want you to do, and they use the shadows to do it.  Once you know what causes the shadows, the experts lose all their power.

We have the same problem with the election fraud deniers, who want to look at the cave wall and let the experts translate what we see.  The election fraud of 2020 happened in the world beyond the fire, so the shadows of their existence don’t even show up on the cave wall.  Yet it happened all the same.  It just occurred beyond the vision of what we are looking at.  If we get up and away from our pole and look, we’ll see the evidence in the corner of the cave just beyond the firelight.  It’s not that the evidence isn’t there, but the experts expect to hide it from us by keeping our perspective from turning around and seeing it.  Because if we do get up and see for ourselves, the experts lose their power, which is terrifying.  Then what will happen to them once we realize how much we have been lied to.  For all those reasons and more, I love time with my books.  They are not connected to the internet.  Nobody is tracking what I’m reading by keystrokes.  It’s just me and my book in my reading chair.  If all the power in the world went out, I would still be fine and able to read history and reflect upon it.  And that is very empowering, especially in times like this.  But knowing something is only half the battle.  The trick is in making history different based on what we’ve learned.  And that is what our next step will be. 

Rich Hoffman

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