Category: Keel

The World Bet Against America: What Edward Abilene and other socialists never figured out

The World Bet Against America, Bad Decision

Another reason I felt I had to write The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is because many people consider America a great place, but they don’t understand why.  I thought I had always understood its essence, but how its evolution played out on the world stage leading up to some of the monstrosities we see in our current events, people didn’t have the proper context to grasp what was happening.  To write the book, I needed to visit some places to confirm my thoughts, and one of them was the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.  I was after the essence as to what made America tick, and to get there; I needed to step back to before the progressive era and into the end of the reign of Queen Victoria to put my finger on it.  I would say that I discovered what I needed to, not just at the Buffalo Bill Center. Still, I visited along the way in many places, including the area where Wild Bill Hickok was shot in Deadwood and exploring the reasons for the murder, which is compelling.  For me, these events told the story of today, how we got here and what was wrong with it.  These discoveries certainly made it into my book, a unique collection of thoughts about American business and why they so quickly outwork other industries in the world.  And why there is so much global jealousy toward America.  It’s not something we did, but instead, it’s that we left the world behind, and like a jealous lover, they can’t get over it.  Well, I can say that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West gets it, and I honestly think that all youth in America should go there and study.  It would do them a whole lot more good than in going to their first year of college.  The same holds for all Americans and people worldwide who make the pilgrimage to that Center to touch the essence of Americana as Buffalo Bill showed it to the world at the turn of the last century. 

I always warn my kids about Liberal Springs (Yellow Springs, Ohio) because Antioch College is such a liberal institution that attracts all the dope-smoking hippies and other progressive degenerates.  It’s one of the most liberal areas in all of Ohio, made that way by the college that has been there for so long.  Most Americans have been made to feel guilty for passing judgment on a place of higher education, that is until recently.  But in the case of Yellow Springs, they would have saved themselves a lot of pain if they had been willing to call bad, bad from the beginning.  One of my daughters and her husband wanted to go up to Clifton Gorge to hike, and to get there; they stopped by Yellow Springs to get a Coke.  Because my daughter wasn’t wearing a Covid compliance mask, the server there refused to serve her and wanted her to leave.  After some dispute, my daughter went to McDonald’s next door to get her Coke, and they proceeded to hike at the Gorge.  While there, resting on a rock along the trail, a mall cop type of park ranger wanted to give them a citation for getting off the path by a few feet.  After more debate, they were told to leave.  The area of Yellow Springs had heard the Biden dog whistle and was moving toward full authoritarian, the kind of world liberals want for all of us.  Instead, my kids left the area, returned home, and went to a place much more conducive to their personalities, Premier Shooting in West Chester.  They spent the rest of the day there shooting and enjoying themselves with like-minded people who had not become corrupted by liberalism. 

The reason for that little story and the tie back to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is that Edward Abilene had toured America with the daughter of Karl Marx in the late 1800s to measure the temperature the new nation would have for socialism.  Abilene had a strange attraction to Buffalo Bill in trying to understand Americans, which is why that Center was critical to understanding how Europe saw America.  At that time, Americans weren’t considered a threat, so England appeased the Buffalo Bill show the way a parent might indulge a child putting on a magic show for the first time, with a pat on the head and some upper lip encouragement.  But what they saw was a raw example of masculinity and weapons work that had conquered the wild frontier that had a new kind of art and culture to display, industry, endurance, tenacity, and courage.  The men of English society were more than a little threatened when English women were clamoring for these Buffalo Bill types, just as England as an empire was well on the decline.  They thought that America had no art, no history, no culture, and Europe was far superior.  They convinced many Americans to chase after the European standard and copy their religions, their colleges for higher learning, and other aspects of culture.  That is how the liberal was created in America.  Many other Americans like those in the Buffalo Bill show were new and mysterious in the world. They were not just attractive; they might become the most dominant organization of people on the face of the planet.  That was a threat to Europe and the old powers, and they have been anxious about it ever since. 

Liberals in America started creating colleges in the United States, like the one in Yellow Springs, to bring European culture to the new country.  Not so much to help America but to slow down its growth and ambitions.  During his tour of America and his relationship with Buffalo Bill, Abilene realized that Americans were looking for recognition from the old world the way a child seeks the approval of a parent.  So the plan to bring socialism to America was through such a process of shared art and culture.  Since then, America has had a restrictor plate applied to it, slowing it down to Europe’s liking.  It has also created a kind of subclass of European in the American liberal that is all the cause of conflict to this very day.  Such as the waitress in Yellow Springs who refused to serve my daughter a Coke or the overly zealous park officer at Clifton Gorge.  Americans have been made to feel guilty for all their ambitions and lack of culture, which Europe provided in exchange for a limiting relationship that has hindered America’s growth.  Now that all the cards are on the table and true feelings about each other have been revealed since Trump became president, it’s time to review all these relationships and decide how to move forward.  I would propose to leave the world behind and to force them to catch up if they want by adopting capitalism.  That would solve many of the problems in the world.  No government can provide that solution; it has to come from individuals who set the bar high and force the world to live up to it.  It might be a nightmare for Europe and Asia, but it is the way of the future, and for anybody curious about it, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West tells the story in ways that no place else does.   The world has bet on liberalism.  But what America created is what everyone wants, so that bet toward China will fall short because it’s not the best. 

Investors like Ray Dalio and companies like Walt Disney may have invested everything assuming that the world would turn back to the old and that hierarchical power would resume its work globally.  For them, they picked China and have hedged themselves behind that decision.  But, they should have read my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  It would have saved them billions and trillions of dollars in lost revenue, which they will experience over the next decade.  I can understand their anxiety, but it’s their fault for not understanding what America was and thinking they could change it through academic means.  The Buffalo Bill Wild West show led to a yearning for freedom that created the country despite the world’s governments, and those forces are still at play.  Peer pressure isn’t going to return Americans to the grip of the old world. Instead, the entire government of America could be stripped away, including those compliant losers in Yellow Springs, yet Americans would still have an incredibly high GDP.  It was always a mystery to Edward Abilene and other Marxists who wanted to take over America and still do.  But they won’t be successful.  To understand why the Buffalo Bill Center of the West shows it.  Or, you can read my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Lynda O’Connor Stands Up to Mask Mandates at Lakota: Pushing back against peer pressure to do the right thing

Whether or not anybody likes it, wearing masks in public or private to fight a viral outbreak is a Democrat thing that Republicans resent.  Masks show stupidity and a backward approach to science that thoughtful people find objectionable.  To put all your trust into experts in a field only to discover they are corrupt, stupid, superstitious, or worse—truly up to no good is a party-line thing that has stoked the fires of division, and that’s only going to get worse over time.  People’s unity under governor-driven executive orders under emergency conditions was a cry wolf moment that will never come back.  And that has left public schools since they are government institutions on the front line to do what they always do, hide behind children to evoke some progressive cause.  This is precisely what happened to Lakota, the school district in my neighborhood.  They have been one of the first to implement a mask mandate in the schools, which has angered parents. I’ve gone to school board meetings for years, and I’ve never seen one as contentious as this one, shown in the video included.  Of the five school board members, only one has done what the area Republicans expected. That is to refuse to wear the mask during public meetings. That has caused the union labor socialists to isolate her to direct their anger.  I have known Lynda O’Conner for several years, and she represents most of the people who reside within Lakota.  At the meeting, I intended to speak about how much I appreciate that Lynda was not wearing a mask and showed that someone on the board hadn’t been suckered into the mask mandate nonsense.  But after the parade of angry parents took turns criticizing the school board, it was clear I didn’t need to say anything.  Finally, in Lakota, other people were willing to do that, which was good to see.  If anything good came out of the mask mandates, it was that it had brought these divisions to the surface so that we can finally have these arguments.

Lakota School Board Meeting September 13th 2021

I could talk all day about how wrong masks are from an individual point of view. I’ve traveled to Asia, and I saw the mask-wearing that went on well before Covid ever hit.  In eastern cultures, they are compliance masks because the intent was to make the wearers superstitious to the mysteries of science and place the government ahead of all spirituality to become like a religion.  I figured while traveling that some bone-headed idiot in government would try to implement mask-wearing in the United States, which I was sure would be a problem.  There are always submissive types, too lazy, too stupid, too scared to think for themselves, who will do what a government says and put on a mask to fight a viral outbreak.  But in an area like the Lakota school district, many people are pretty smart Republicans and can think critically who think such an approach is one of the dumbest things anybody could do.  There are treatments for Covid, in hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, that are science and should be used to treat any outbreak.  But it’s evident that there is politics behind the virus, and not everyone is willing to play along.  Masks have become a symbol of submission to a sickness that Republicans find inconceivably stupid because scientific treatments could have ended Covid a year ago.  Instead, Democrats are using Covid to drive progressive needs, which has exposed school boards all over the country into playing along and forcing children to put on masks to get an education.

At the beginning of the Lakota school board meeting, you can hear it in their voices; the members had been planning to explain away all their problems with Covid to the local and state health department.  The ridiculous quarantine periods for anybody coming down with Covid or being near someone with the virus were missing many days of school. It was impossible to plan for teachers who would be out or bus drivers and other staff members.  So to appease the government, Lakota instituted a mask mandate for students, teachers, and staff, and magically the quarantine periods were minimized.  Because the health departments got what they wanted, the schools implemented a superstitious mask policy based on no science.  In effect, it was a bunch of Democrats who could suddenly boss around a bunch of Republicans and making them submissive to the party line.  When it comes to electing people to run things on our behalf, we elected the school board, and we expected them to put up more resistance on our behalf.  We didn’t elect the health department people who had no power to do anything, not even decide the quarantine period.  No legislation will hold up in court backing a health directive on quarantine periods, mask mandates, or mandatory vaccines.  Only stupid, lazy people would fall for such a thing, so the parents that night at the school board had a right to be angry, and that anger isn’t going to go away.  People pay a lot of money in taxes to Lakota, so for it to turn toward the Democrat superstitions of virus management is something most Republicans aren’t willing to do.  And of the school board members, only Lynda O’Conner stood firm and represented the people of the district adequately. 

At the end of the meeting, Lynda spoke about the pressure she was feeling by not wearing a mask on the board as one parent had attempted to get her in trouble over her position.  The mask shaming is a problem that Democrats brought on themselves.  The attempt to use peer pressure to invoke actual policy has not forced compliance; it has instead brought out intense anger.  When people wonder why we are so divided as a nation, Democrats have attempted to drag Republicans into socialism and communism.  And they have tried to hide those attempts behind health directives.  Most health officials could easily be working in communist China because their ideology is aligned with such dictatorships.  I admired Lynda for being the only member not to wear a mask.  Sure, I understand peer pressure.  I feel it too, but I’m always the only one of the first to do things in my life.  If there is a room full of a million people with masks on and I’m the only one not wearing one, I wouldn’t feel a moment’s pressure to put one on to conform.  Conformity to peer pressure is a largely Democrat thing.   Republicans tend to think on their own, so as long as Democrats try to shove Republicans into some blind compliance, there will be a fight or many fights.  A school board like Lakota should know better and strive to represent the community they are functioning in.  But most of the board and their employees are progressive types, so they quickly adopted the mask mandates to drive the social narrative.  And now they have been caught on it and are on the hook with the rage of the community.   No matter their personal feelings, they should have known better and respected the community they were operating in and pushed back against the health departments as our elected representatives.  Instead, they caved quickly and forced compliance on the rest of us, which is what the anger showed at that meeting was all about.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Biden Was Created to Represent America’s Demise in the World: China’s master plan

Biden is Just the Mask

Hey, I’ve been talking about this for a long time.  Many who have read here and have known me for the last twenty to thirty years, even longer, know that I am seldom, if ever, wrong.  Eventually, the things I say end up happening exactly as I said they would, and I’ve been doing it long enough to have a vast track record.  So, when I tell you that Afghanistan was a phony war meant to empower terrorists, to justify a global shift in power structures, you’ll understand that there is some merit to the statement.  As I said in the video above, you could fit the whole Taliban army into an American football stadium for the NFL.  Why didn’t we win the war?  Well, we weren’t allowed to, starting from the top.  Who is the top? Well, I’ve told you that too. It’s the people talked about in the book Tragedy & Hope, from Carroll Quigley.  They exist beyond the governments of our nations, they pour the money into building those governments, and they consider themselves beyond Constitutional laws, or any laws so far made by any legislative body, anywhere. It’s the precise reason people like George Soros are left to roam free instead of thrown in jail for all the tampering with the operation of the American republic that he has conducted.  In the end, his money runs our government and the media that acts as its mask against reality.  These forces built the Taliban to appear ominous, to scare us into accepting a global reality. Still, in truth, they are just a small group of people who could easily be beaten if anybody wanted to. 

When Joe Biden gave the speech when the Americans were killed at the Kabul airport by suicide bombers, he put his head in his hands, giving a picture that would show the world that the American Empire was falling, it looked to be a little too staged.  Old Biden was doing what “they” told him to, just as they had practiced it.  After all, like his wife, Dr. Biden, Joe cares about how the world will remember him, and he wanted to go down in history as an American President.  He would have done anything to get that title, including selling out himself ultimately to get it.  He was just the pick for China, which it will be revealed controlled the election process of 2020.  The set-up was years in the making, including setting up the dejected Russians to be the future fall guys.  By the time the actual election fraud would take place, people would be tired of the topic. They would ignore the power move China made with electronic voting machines to allow massive tampering and a coup of an American president.  China created and unleashed Covid to create a smokescreen of election fraud during 2020 and torpedo the American economy while China tried to repair itself after the Trump tariffs.  And they picked Joe Biden out of all the Democrats because he was an old broken man who represented the America that had been.  China and the rest of the Davos crowd meant to put Biden in power, remove Trump, and sell America’s decline to the rest of the world.  And that’s how Biden ended up with his head in his hands the day those Americans died in Kabul.  It was a staged event from the start, and Biden was playing his part. 

That’s the thing that everyone is having a hard time with getting their minds around.  We have a corrupt government in America that became that way because we trusted all the wrong people too much.  The vaccine mandates likely have a more menacing future as planned, but for the present, it’s all about Big Pharma buying government to push their products the way they always intended Obamacare to do.  The chaos of the news cycles is meant to hide from our minds the criminal conduct of governments across the world into trying to unite all power under communist China. They’ve said as much themselves; it was our fault that we didn’t listen.  And they showed that power off by sabotaging our election and watching us act like fools crying about the Constitution while our country was burning to the ground looking for some lawmaker somewhere to sweep in like Superman and save the day.  Only this was real life, we’d have to do it ourselves, but China bet everything that we wouldn’t.  They put in place the weakest of all the presidential candidates in Biden, a feeble old man that represented America to the world.  Old, a fading memory, bumbling, falling, a mockery of disrespect.  And they showed that they could push out a real tough guy in Trump and that the American vote didn’t matter in the least.  It was all part of the plan.  Biden was put in power by foreign interests; the evidence was on the Hunter Biden laptop.  People have seen that evidence, but the people who saw it were attacked rather than be allowed to expose it.  We are dealing with unimaginable evil here, which is beyond the capacity of most people.  Yet, it’s right in front of our faces.  Biden was made, and he’s sold to the world to represent the end of a dying country.  Once that is established, China will be free to make its power move and rule the world.  They intend to use Biden to start that process. 

Just remember, the whole trouble with the Taliban and all the military equipment left there in haste to arm them, just as we did with ISIS in the Middle East, was to fuel destabilization where another world power could fill the vacuum.  China plans to be that force, and Biden did precisely what they told him to do.  Oh, it wasn’t China directly, but it was the communists who are so in love with Mao in the Biden administration who took the next page of Mao’s Little Red Book and wrote the next Biden speech.  Of course, Biden was too stupid to ask questions. That’s another reason they picked him.  While everyone thinks that Biden is the leader of the free world, China knows better.  So do the communists in the Biden administration, like Susan Rice and Jim Comey working from the shadows as an influence leader in the intelligence community.  Of course, they didn’t like Trump; he was working on our behalf to stop all these plans.  But they wanted more than anything to show us that they were in charge and were going to stay that way.  They wanted us to feel hopeless and to give up.  To rob us of our belief in self-government.

Meanwhile, they have been pouring tragedy after tragedy on us, hoping to overload us into just tapping out forever and to surrender our republic to the forces of the world that have always been jealous of it.  It wasn’t like 70,000 Taliban would have been easy to beat if we fought all these things directly; we have more than enough freedom fighters to take back our country.  But because we remain caged and obedient, arguing about wearing a mask and threatening to kill pushers of the mandatory vaccine, the real villains work in the world unencumbered.  And as long as they enjoy that freedom, the world will continue to burn.  It won’t be enough to re-elect Trump to office.  No, we’ll have to help this time, and we’ll have to be involved in the fight.  Just remember, I told you so.  The sooner we act, the better it will go.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Alliance Between Big Pharma and Government: Covid is all about using you to promise market saturation

Government Creating Market Stabilization for Big Pharma

With Covid, you can smell the rat easily.  Sure, some people like to be scared; they want to go to haunted houses, ride roller coasters at amusement parks to get a thrill and watch scary movies.  And the nightly news produces almost exclusively scary stories because that causes people to tune in, partly for the thrill and partly for the comfort that bad things are happening to other people and not themselves.  In all of that is how we were scammed with Covid and the ridiculous protocols from the CDC.  Some people don’t want to see it because of their human desire to be scared.  But also, they don’t want to deal with it because they are too lazy to think.  However, if you’re going to see a big government scam, all you have to do is follow the money.  Ultimately, we can say that Covid has been a lot of conspiracies, and I’d say there is truth in most of them. It’s a form of control by the government over mass populations to see if they can get away with it. It’s been a chance to shape politics by steering mass society into virtual pens of control in experimental ways.  It’s been a way to commit voter fraud, which most of the Democrat party plans to use always to stay in power.  Just consider why they want open borders with illegal immigration. So they can overload votes with new voters who might be dumb enough to vote for Democrats who play Santa Claus every day, giving away things that aren’t theirs to give.  But mostly, what Covid has been, is a guaranteed market for the pharmaceutical companies to land their products. Politicians have had to pave the way for them because of their constant need for campaign donations.  By doing big pharma a massive favor by guaranteeing market saturation for big pharma products, the government plays the role through the legislative process as market mall cop in ensuring that everyone does exactly what big pharma needs them to do.

Sure, it’s happened many times before, so many times that many of us have just come to expect it.  The auto insurance industry essentially did the same thing when I was younger.  These days we all accept it as logical, but when I learned to drive a car, insurance while driving was an option.  If you had a wreck while going and it was your fault, then you had considerable trouble.  But you had a choice.  That led big auto insurance companies to lobby the politics of their state to offer relief from the many lawsuits that were not being collected from those who could never pay for the damages they committed while driving cars.  So, states like Ohio passed laws where every driver on the road would have to maintain insurance and show proof of it when called upon.  It was never a question of if a driver had insurance; it was just showing it when a cop pulled you over.  There are many other examples of this kind of thing where the government wrote laws that ultimately helped various businesses. Still, the insurance industry is one of the most obvious.  When politicians and insurance companies saw how the American people accepted these impositions against their freedoms so quickly, they were inspired to do it on other things.  Pretty soon, seat belts were made legal.

You had to click it or get a ticket.  Of course, insurance companies pushed this because they wanted to close up their payout margins.  They were given by the government a stable slice of the pie. The insurance industry didn’t have to drop their prices to earn a customer; the government handed it to them on a silver platter.  Now the insurance carrier wanted to make sure that their payouts were less, not more.  It was better for them to have a driver live in car accidents because dying was too expensive.  It is better to keep the driver alive, even if permanently maimed for life, rather than to lose that driver to a death payout if it could be avoided.  Seat Belts were the kind of law that paved the way for what is currently being debated, vaccine passports.  People accepted the logic, and the government made laws that benefited the insurance companies, and everyone was somewhat happy. 

But that’s not what happens; is that everyone stays happy.  Instead, once the government and the insurance industry saw how easily people would give up their freedoms for so-called “good reasons,” such as “safety,” who doesn’t want to live in a “safe” world, then, of course, they wanted to do the same kind of thing with every industry. That’s where the idea of insurance being a socialist right came about.  People accepted that mandatory insurance to drive a car was acceptable, so why not mandate that everyone have health insurance?  And then, of course, the government would maintain that insurance, which is the concept behind Obamacare.  Once Obamacare got involved, and the government stuck its nose into the 5th largest market in the American economy, trouble arrived for growth.  We heard less about stem cells and regenerative growth as medical innovations moved from new ideas to ensure insurance companies got paid.  And of course, competition in the medical industry stagnated as health providers could essentially charge whatever they wanted, including the big pharma companies.  Now they had guaranteed customers given to them by the government.  All they had to do was give some donations to critical politicians in their states, and they’d be on easy street.  It worked, people put up with it, and that’s the mess we find ourselves in today. 

Now you can see why the government mandates for vaccinations come into play over Covid.  For the first time, we have allowed the government to interfere with the natural immune system of human beings and have put the government in charge of maintaining health.  In all other times, people would get sick with the common cold or with some variation of SARS, Covid, or whatever.  People would take a few days off work to get better or not contaminate their co-workers, and life would go on.  But with Covid, something that turned out for most people to be a common cold with mild symptoms, the government got involved in managing the virus ultimately.  From social distancing, altering economic activity in very destructive ways, and the voodoo science of wearing a mask instead of using actual science, such as Regeneron cocktails and Hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus off.  This time, the government, with its partners in crime, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, moved to control information to create demand for a vaccine where they wanted every single person in the world to get it, no matter what the effect was.  For the first time in history, the world’s governments working together wanted to provide a guaranteed market for the big pharma vaccines for all kinds of mysterious reasons, many that we will learn about in the years to come.  We know that the government is attempting to tamper with markets for the advantage of the pharmaceutical companies.  Essentially for the promise that campaign donations will flow their way and everyone will be happy, just as they were when auto insurance was made mandatory.  We have all shown these dangerous liaisons that we will gladly put up with being pushed around, so why would they think otherwise? That is how innovation is killed when we allow politics to distribute money without merit to undeserving markets.  That is precisely what is going on with Covid, the masks, and the offered solutions to a made-up problem, vaccine mandates for all.   It’s not to save lives.  It’s all about control and making it easier for pharmaceuticals to maintain their markets for products without the worry of competition.  They suddenly don’t have to earn your dollars; the government is giving it to them unearned. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Yes, Harsh Language Was Just the Right Tone: The Freedom Rally at Big Bul Roadhouse

Freedom at the Big Bul Roadhouse

I know it’s scary out there.  The news is one constant outpouring of crises every day.  With the debacle of Afghanistan, the threats from China, the power of our out-of-control government going complete tyrannical rule over mask mandates and vaccines, it looks pretty hopeless. But when you unplug from the television and go to places like the Freedom Rally we had in Butler County, Ohio at The Big Bul Roadhouse and listen to Sheriff Jones and Corey Lewandowski speak along with some good music, cold beer, and lots of American flags, you will find that our country is still there.  It’s just that the rest of the world doesn’t see it because our media won’t show it on TV.  But it’s there, and I saw it for myself.  I include above and below videos of the event to share.  I have many people from other countries who read here daily, so this is meant for them.  Especially in Taiwan, where there is some genuine terror that America will fall and not be there for them, China will gobble them up because that is what the media propaganda is saying there as we withdraw from Afghanistan.  For those in the United States, I’m sure you can find a similar Freedom Rally like this in your neighborhood.  Although Butler County, Ohio, is a special place, there are similar events all over the country.  But those in other countries like Serbia and the Netherlands, where I have several readers every day who turn to this site for hope and encouragement, I’m happy and proud to share how life is in Butler County, Ohio, where freedom and liberty are still very much alive. 

A night at Big Bul’s Roadhouse in Ross, Ohio

It’s always great to have our Sheriff Jones speak at these kinds of things.  He was hilarious.  I only filmed a portion of his comments, mainly because I was right up front with the camera, and I didn’t want to ruin his speech with a constant recording.  Sometimes with these kinds of things, you want to let the intimate setting between the speaker and the audience have its way, and Sheriff Jones was off the chain funny.  Even more so after I turned off the camera.  But in the clips here, you get the point.  And should he be talking like that, you might ask?  After all, he’s in his fifth term as Sheriff, and he has no plans to retire.  Well, yes, he should talk like that.  He is the last line of defense between the people of Butler County and the kind of tyranny that comes out of the federal and state governments.  Sheriff Jones, over the years, has earned my respect the way he stands up to governors and presidents, reminding them often before anybody else in the country that power flows from the counties up to the federal level, not the other way around.  In many ways, your local Sheriff is the most powerful office holding job in the country, even more so than the President of the United States.  We aren’t taught that in school, but in reality, that’s how it is.  And we certainly have a good one in Butler County, Ohio.  I am very proud to have him on my team!  He can say whatever he wants as far as I’m concerned because the situation warrants it.  We can’t play pattycake with the enemies of America.

Sheriff Jones of Butler County

Many of us who live in Butler County, Ohio, think of it as a small town, a northern suburb of Cincinnati that is off the national radar.  But in truth, it is the epicenter of conservative politics. I’ve been to most of the states this year, traveling extensively, and I can report that no place else is the politics and organization of the Republican Party better and more passionate.  Other cities have pockets of conservativism.  I am thinking of Cody, Wyoming, where I don’t think there is a Democrat anywhere.  They were very solid there, but in Butler County, there are over 400,000 residents, and things could be much more complicated.  Yet, it’s all pretty simple.  We have great office holders because we maintain them well in Butler County.  We have events like this freedom rally where officeholders and the people who put them in power can talk to each other and have fun. It’s a relationship that feeds both the politics and the community healthily and unusually.  And it’s always refreshing to experience.  Sheriff Jones is the perfect embodiment of all those needs, and he plays that role to the best of his abilities, which shows.

Sheriff Jones making fun of the Biden Administration

That’s how a prominent national figure like Corey Lewandowski from the Trump campaign found himself speaking that night at the Big Bul.  If there was Trump country anywhere in the world, Butler County was it.  And he probably needed to talk to us as much as we needed to hear from him.  Everything coming out of the news was negative these days for America, and we all needed to remind each other why we were still honoring our flag.  Because Woke politics was in full bloom, and everything has been attacked.  It was good to listen to good country music and gather in the heat to recalibrate our sentiments to the fight ahead.  And Corey showing up to tell stories about working with Trump was just the right thing at the right time.  He was the closest thing we had to Trump at a time when we were hungry for solutions.  I had been dragging my wife to many political events lately, all of them good and essential.  But she was looking for a night off.   When I told her Corey Lewandowski would speak at this Big Bul event, she was eager to go.  And there were a lot of people there who came for the same reasons.  Corey Lewandowski was a door to Trump, and people were looking for a rallying point to grab on to.  While he was on stage, they had found it.  Corey was great.  Again, the language was a bit harsh, but then, so are the circumstances.  People want to fight back against the wokeness, and Corey understood that and gave the crowd just what they were looking for.

Corey Lewandowski talks to Butler County

As I said in the video above, many diverse people were there; the Bikers for Trump were there in force.  There were big donor millionaires there, and at the same tables, people could barely wipe together two nickels to get a quart of oil to change in their cars.  Such people would never associate with each other equally anywhere globally, but they do in Butler County, Ohio, and certainly that night at the Big Bul.  Everyone agreed that they loved America; they love Trump because he’s willing to defend America, not attack it like most of our politics wanted to.  And we were wargaming for future elections where Trump types of Republicans would take office seats, and we would fight back against this invasion starting in our communities, then our states, then at the federal level.  We would put Trump back in the White House, and the world can’t see that yet.  But at the Big Bul in Ross, Ohio, deep within Butler County, it was apparent.  The words were strong, the applause even louder.  The beer was cold.  And the path forward is quite clear.  America wouldn’t lose this war; we would return even more significantly now that we see the cards on the table.  And we’re playing to win this time, not just trying to get along.

Corey Lewandowski tells stories about Trump

Rich Hoffman

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

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

A Good Guy, J.D. Vance

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

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

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

J.D. Vance on the Warroom

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

The Lakota School Board trying to vote on Mask Mandates

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote For Mark Welch: Shooting guns, solving problems and making the world a better place

Vote for Mark Welch

If West Chester wasn’t one of the best places in the world which demonstrates what small government looks like and how much prosperity can occur when proper management at the level of government is applied, I can’t imagine what it would be.  West Chester, Ohio, has the population density to make it a city, but over the years, it has stayed small, where just Trustees run the community’s needs, and it has flourished.  What started as a kind of Tea Party dream, with two members getting elected to the Board of Trustees and applying fiscal responsibility and limited government concepts to the day-to-day business, George Lang and Mark Welch, West Chester has been proof of what good government looks like.  Even during the government-induced pandemic over coronavirus.  Even as many businesses struggled to stay open all across the country or find employees to fill their vacancies, West Chester has managed to see astonishing growth in some ways.  Much of that points back at the policy set by the conservative trustees who have been running things in West Chester for over a decade.  Lowering the cost of doing business, reducing bureaucracy so that things can happen, West Chester would be, for me, the example of what good governments everywhere in the world should look like.  When we debate about government so much, we could always offer West Chester an example of where the government goes right.   

A lot of that credit goes to Mark Welch, who has been with the trustees in West Chester for a while now, a few terms. He’s been that critical second vote when George Lang set the stage for much of West Chester’s success.  Then as George moved on to a position in the Senate, Mark carried the torch for the next generation and continued the policies that made West Chester wonderful.  Mark has been great at the significant and minor issues, so much so that often you never even hear about the things he is doing.  I often say, especially in management positions, that if you are good people won’t even know you are there doing a good job.  Its when managers in government make themselves part of the story that things start going wrong.  Then, the more people you add to a process, the worse it gets.  And thus, that’s how you get a bad government.  The federal government that we are always talking about is just such an example.  It’s big, nobody takes responsibility for anything, and they always make themselves part of the story on everything.  Their goals are usually to make themselves known by looting off the efforts of others, while Mark has always been a facilitator of other people’s dreams and needs.  He doesn’t get in the way of some big project that wants to come into West Chester.  Instead, he finds a way to get rid of the obstacles so that something new could be born.  Whether the project is a significant new company or a hot new entertainment venue, West Chester has thrived because Mark and other conservatives have created an environment where productive output wasn’t penalized but rather encouraged. I’ve been all over the United States, and you’d be hard-pressed anywhere to see four highway exits that are better than the ones in West Chester with a diversity of options, per capita income, and future opportunities.

Shooting with Mark Welch

Mark Welch is up for re-election this year, which he should have no problem with.  But for many of the new residents of West Chester who don’t hear much drama from their trustees, especially with a community with such a high population density, they wouldn’t know about it because the government isn’t in their face about every little thing.  Yet I think it would only be wise to pull back the curtain a bit and share with everyone what I know of Mark Welch, a guy who goes shooting with me often at Premier in West Chester, a great gun range at Port Union off RT 747.  Included here are a few video clips of our last trip just to let people be a bit of a fly on the wall.  I go to Premier often to shoot various guns and to blow off some steam.  I enjoy almost everything in West Chester, from the steaks at Jags to the fine dining and shopping options at Voice of America.  And I love Voice of America Park, another great story that we could write books about.  But commercially, I spend most of my time at Premier, and often Mark is there too where we manage stress at the gun range and often contemplate the origin of the universe.  The other day, it occurred to me that people don’t get to see that side of Mark, and they should because it’s what makes him unique in government. 

When Premier Shooting first opened, Mark and I were there for the grand tour, which was very special.  To have a classy gun range in such an elegant town with so many business and residential options was such a treat, and we’ve enjoyed it now for several years.  They have added a nice walking trail around the big fishing lake and turned the whole property into a country club setting that is great for escaping from business during a lunch break. That’s how I use Premier Shooting as a place of stress management.  And now, primarily because of the policies Mark has nurtured and a small government approach, Harley Davidson is building a new superstore next to Premier.  Adding this business to the rest of the options in that area is an incredible achievement. It is just another example of what can be done when the government doesn’t make itself the story but gets out of the way.  Mark likes to see new things being built as much as I do, but he’s as far away from the type of intrusive politician who always wants to stick their nose in everyone’s business.  That is precisely why Harley Davidson is building such a large store that will be a great gift to the community. 

Shooting the Colt .45

Talking to Mark the other day while we were up at Premier shooting the guns in the videos shown here, we talked about the new Harley Davidson store as we watched an excavation team work machinery leveling the site for a foundation.  Mark was like a kid brimming with excitement at what such a place would mean, and I sort of thought for a moment how unusual it was for a politician to have that kind of attitude. I’ve been around many politicians over the years who would look at a situation like that and find some way to insert themselves into the story and try to take credit for all Harley Davidson’s efforts.  But not Mark.  In an actual small government, conservative fashion, he likes seeing things happen.  If he can help them along, he’s happy to do it.  Yet, it never crosses his mind to loot off the efforts of others.  He wants to help make things happen, which is one of the premier ways in which West Chester has remained one of the best places to live in the world, even as economic downturns have hurt communities elsewhere.  West Chester is lucky to have Mark Welch.  But to Mark’s mind, he truly wants what is best for West Chester in the ways good management always does, by getting out of the way of those who make things happen in the world.

Rich Hoffman

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

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. 

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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. 

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business