Category: Literature

The Ohio Jim and Joe Show: For governor, in the May 2022 primary it’s all about Trump

Jim Renacci picks Joe Knopp as a Running Mate in Ohio

I didn’t know much about Joe Knopp when I attended the special press conference of Jim Renacci on Thursday, December 2nd, 2021.  I knew I liked Jim Renacci and supported him emphatically to run for governor of Ohio.  The current governor, Mike DeWine, had not shown that he was a conservative during his first term, and his Covid response was a disaster against the Constitution.  He was the first governor in all of the nation to attempt to alter election laws and shut down our economy, and we have all seen enough.  He had to go, and Jim was the best replacement.  But this particular event was a bit of a surprise.  Jim was going to announce his Lt. Governor.  Naturally, I was thinking of the apparent picks; it would have to be a conservative woman of some kind because that’s what everyone does these days.  But no, instead, Jim was thinking outside the box when he announced that he was putting Joe Knopp on the ticket, another privately successful person.  The more I thought about it and got a chance to meet Joe, the more I liked him.  He was, after all, the producer of the Trump movie, The Trump I Know.    

About halfway through the Joe Knopp introduction, I started putting everything together.  Joe was the guy who produced the movie showing all the great Trump women who came out right before the election in 2020.  It told the story that nobody covered about Trump, all the little things he does behind the scenes that made him such a great president, and how he treated women in his campaign and organizations.  It all came to an excellent little focus during the press conference, especially during the question and answer session where reporters asked what Renacci planned to do about Ohio being the number 1 state in all of America for corruption.  Sometimes we all start accepting dysfunction to such an extent that we think of it as reality.  But the reason the media hated Trump, as the Swamp itself does, was because of these independent business guys, people like Trump, and his friend Jim Renacci.  Joe Knopp wanted to eliminate the dark money cookies that all the Swamp creatures get to eat off of.  Columbus, Ohio was every bit as much of a swamp as Washington D.C., Just on a different scale, and essentially, Governor DeWine is like the Joe Biden in the executive branch.  A deeply compromised person who has become rich off dark money hated people who challenged that structure.  From the media to the politicians, it was all an addiction to dark money that they considered such a threat.  So much so that they would have destroyed President Trump if they could.  But the Trump women that Joe Knopp captured in his film so beautifully told the absolute truth, which is what voters saw.  And in Ohio, we were going to get to make the same kind of decision in favor of the Jim and Joe Show. 

This is a different kind of race for the governor.  As Renacci will say, he’s not running against Mike DeWine; he’s running for Ohio.  But this is a primary race that would generally be protected from challengers because they are typically low turnout elections. The people who show up are usually inspired by dark money. That’s how people like Mike DeWine get power and keep it.  And it’s everything that’s wrong with Ohio.  So to run against Mike DeWine is running for Ohio.  But we’re talking about swamp creatures who are the only benefactors.  We need in Ohio essentially what Trump was able to do at the federal level, and it takes people who are independent of that dark money to make it happen.  Playing a conventional game of politics that sets up a specific media narrative would not make Ohio any less corrupt.  It’s essentially the media that is in on it all, they set the parameters of the dark money game, and they all feed off each other.  No, what we want in Ohio is freedom from those kinds of people.  Jim Renacci is independently successful and is personal friends with President Trump.  And so is Jim’s pick for Lt. Governor. 

Of course, the media narrative of the Joe Knopp announcement was that he was a Christian filmmaker, which is true.  But that doesn’t begin to tell the whole story of who Joe Knopp is.  It’s like saying that Steven Spielberg is a liberal film director.  That may be an aspect of who Steven Spielberg is, but it can’t be argued that Spielberg films generally reach out to all audiences.  And that was certainly the case with Joe’s movie, The Trump I Know.  The media doesn’t like people who make Christian movies that are every bit as good as Academy Award-winning films made in Hollywood.  Joe is very much a product of Hollywood and a realization that the political left has, which makes them very uncomfortable, that they don’t control the entire movie-making industry.  So to emphasize that Joe is a Christian for them is an attempt to limit his reach not only in the primary but also in the general election.  Yet, all this conventional thinking forgets is that for the first time in the history of America, especially under the DeWine administration, churches were closed while abortion clinics were open.  And DeWine put the abortion activist Amy Acton on his staff to essentially run Ohio for an entire year.  Voters have had some cold water thrown in their faces, where the government interrupted their religion and showed the fangs of the state’s power.  Ohio voters are primed to vote for an honest Christian crusader who loves President Trump and pledges to attack corruption without becoming consumed himself.  Yes, picking Joe Knopp was an intelligent move for Jim Renacci.  It’s not business as usual, and that’s the point. 

I left the Renacci event happy.  Finally, we would have a positive choice in Ohio by a few really good people who were independently successful and beyond the corruption of dark money.  And to have a chance to remove DeWine and replace him with Renacci with such staff, people like Joe Knopp start to repair what has been broken in Ohio after the Covid shutdowns by DeWine.  The best justice for all the bad things DeWine did would be to replace his place in the Swamp with the drain of Renacci and Knopp.  These are people that real conservatives in Ohio can truly cheer for and feel good about voting for.  Many of the years in the past when the voter turnout has been low, partly because the candidates are always swamp creatures like DeWine, which nobody gets excited about, options like these didn’t seem possible.  But Renacci and Knopp, well, there’s something that people can get excited about.  It’s great to have a choice finally, and in meeting Knopp, I can only say that he is one of the nicest people I have met this year.  Such a good person, and such a nice family.  To have people like that to vote for in an election is truly a treasure, and I think Ohio will enjoy the option.  True, the dark money monster is out there, but I think these guys have a good chance of getting new voter turnout activated.  And for that to be an option is a huge opportunity that will make 2022 a year of justice to remember.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Legality of Fake Vaccination Cards: People want freedom from any administrative state

Freedom from an Administrative State

When people say they want “freedom,” this next story represents the reason.  Freedom is more than a cliché; it’s a desire not to be limited to the restrictions of an administrative state that, through history, has shown time and time again to be corrosive to innovation, joy, and advancing society.  The less of any administrative state you have, the better a society and its people.  An administrative state only benefits the people running it, who are always in the extreme minority. It forces people to live within the limits of the weakest links in such a society.  So when people say they want freedom, they mean they don’t want an administrative state of losers running their life.  And that was never more obvious than in a story about Antonio Brown, a wide receiver for my favorite football team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  Over the last week or so, one of his private cooks and a girlfriend of some kind leaked information that the fully vaccinated NFL football player was using a fake card to prove it and that he had bought it for $500.  Since that accusation, Brown and the Buccaneer staff had stood by his vaccination status; when Brown got the shot, a team member was with him to witness it.  The Buccaneers had complied by reviewing the vaccine cards to the NFL, which was doing the bidding of the Biden administration like nice little servents.  So there weren’t many teeth to the story to go anywhere, but it does bring up a whole host of problems that I had been thinking about myself.  Even if Antonio Brown did provide a fake card proving his vaccine status, so what?  What law did he break?  And why was it such a big deal causing the media to attempt to shame him into compliance with quite a lot of news generated?

I have personally witnessed hundreds of people getting the shot and the card at this point, so I’ve had some of these questions from the beginning of the process.  First, I have watched many people get the shot who immediately had terrible side effects from it.  They tell you when you get the shot to stay near the administrator for 10 minutes in case you pass out.  So getting this shot, even under forced government coercion, is the grounds for many, many lawsuits.  Watching the process over these many months, I would say it’s one of the cruelest things I’ve ever seen a government attempt to do to its people.  It’s terrible stuff because the government knows the vaccine is dangerous.  When they gave Joe Biden the shot on television, I do not believe that they really gave him the shot because it would have knocked him out for days, perhaps even killed him at his age.  I would not blame a professional athlete one bit for not wanting to get a vaccine shot and looking to get a fake vaccine card to prove it, to avoid the painful aftereffects of the vaccines that might ruin the season for them.  Professional athletes cannot afford to have their bodies shut down the way this vaccine does to people.  So my first thought about Antonia Brown’s actions for me was, “so what.” While the media made it sound like he had just murdered people with his “dishonesty.” 

Then again, watching all those people get the shots, then have some administrator pick up a card off a tall stack of little cardboard vaccine cards and scribble some dates, and the site of the administration as the proof of the event was shaky from day one.  That tiny, unextraordinary card was what the big deal was?  The first thought I had was that massive amounts of counterfeit cards would be shown as proof that they received the vaccine.  There was no traceability to the cards, and given the stakes, where it meant that some people wouldn’t be able to have their jobs if they didn’t have a card showing they had a vaccine, well, of course, they were going to cheat with a fake card filled out with some chicken scratch.  The Buccaneers as an organization said precisely what I had been thinking for months when they were pressed on the matter.  They reviewed Antonio Brown’s card and didn’t see any errors in it.  What were they supposed to check, a proper signature, the correct dates?  It wasn’t the Buccaneers responsibility to check the validity of the cards themselves, just that people had them.  So the government, in all its administrative wisdom, issued this massive mandate with considerable costs to people in their health and livelihoods. Yet, they had no way to know if people had received vaccines or not, based on a stupid, standard piece of cardboard that a child could copy and fill out as proof.  Yet, that was precisely the case. 

I remember how hard it was to get a fake ID when I was younger, showing that people were over 21 when they were only 18 or 19.  Back then, it was perfectly justified to make a fake ID because all the hot girls were looking for older guys who could take them to places 21 and over.  So as a guy, you had to have a fake ID to play the game; the government didn’t know what it was doing when it changed the drinking age from 18 to 21 as I was coming to those ages, so people had to survive like every culture where there is an overly administrative state, a black-market forms.  China has a big one, as do all totalitarian governments, because people want the freedom to do what they need to do in life and when governments come up with too many rules based on their own personal limitations, law-breaking will become a dominant recreational activity.  I knew some sharp cookies who made fake IDs, and they made good livings providing them.  These vaccine cards were not even close to being as challenging to make.  Anybody could make a proof of vaccine card, so given the political climate, there was no question to my mind that there was going to be massive fraud in providing the cards. 

Yet even worse, the government obviously hadn’t thought about any of that as they clamped down on people with Executive Orders and tried to scare everyone into compliance.  Nothing about the vaccine mandates was constitutional, the government got caught breaking the law themselves by implementing such a thing, and the Buccaneers knew it as an organization.   They played along with the made-up rules, but it wasn’t their job to investigate whether Antonio Brown got the shot as the card showed he did on the dates they showed he received them.  It was their job to collect the cards and demonstrate compliance to an out-of-control government and the woke NFL that wanted to bend the knee to an administrative state so they could stay in business.  There were so many things wrong with the whole process that the path of least resistance always has the answer, come up with a fake card and shut everyone up.  There was no legal authority. The government could not enforce any breaking of the rules because they made up the rules like some playground kid making them up as the game was being played, and that’s what the government gets for its gross overreach.  When they force people to comply with their dumb rules, people will find a way to break those rules so they can live life.  And that is the kind of freedom that we all talk about in these kinds of circumstances.  People want to be free of being bothered by this kind of administrative state overreach.  The more rules people have to live under, the more rules they will have to break to live life, and that is the reality that the administrative state of any kind has never admitted to itself. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I Support Josh Mandel for the Ohio Senate: It’s all about making elevator rides uncomfortable

I Support Josh Mandel for Ohio Senate

The upcoming senate race for Ohio to replace the Rob Portman seat is coming up fast.  There were some good elections in 2021, but that’s all behind us now.  It’s time to go or get off the pot for endorsing someone for the Ohio Senate Race of 2022.  I like many of the candidates; I think they all have some great attributes.  The key to something like this, which still has many months of campaigning, is to pick the person who will best serve that seat a few years from now, not necessarily where politics is presently.  And I think, especially after reading The Nixon Conspiracy by Geoff Shepard and The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that the political world of tomorrow will be much different than what it has been over the past decade.  Picking candidates for the climate we are coming into is essential because the political terrain will be robust with political stunts, media hype, and the ability to shame candidates on the senate floor and still ride the elevator back to the parking garage after.  It’s not going to be for the political lite but rather those who can most withstand betrayal and scandal and support the Trump America First Agenda without hesitation. And my pick to be that guy is Josh Mandel. 

I like Jane Timken a lot, but after meeting with her a few times and watching her campaigning now for several months, she’s too conventional. She’s a bridge-builder, and we’re talking about a senate that needs to get rid of people like Mitch McConnell in the leadership and who will instantly harass Chuck Schumer right out of the gate.  Even sitting in the bathroom stall, they need to shame all the comfortable senate members like Lindsey Graham.  Retaking the Senate as a Republican majority is a war, including even the RINOs who are there now who have not been protecting the American Constitution the way they need to.  Jane talks about herself being a fighter, and I think she is, perhaps for some time in the past or the future.  But not for the 2022 race extending past 2025. She’s just too nice for that environment, for what has to be done.  I have nothing against her, she has done an excellent job with the Republican Party in Ohio, and I think she can work the Trump endorsement that she no doubt would get once the primary is over. Still, she’s just too conventional to excite people into action.  

The other guy I had been rooting for whom I was happy to meet is J.D. Vance.  His problem is that he was a Never Trumper, and in a Trump-heavy election, that is coming back to bite him.  He has a lot of money pouring in to support him, a lot of the big conventional money would rather have a Trump hater than a Trump copy, so J.D. Vance is raising a lot of money and has a shot to keep things close.  But what it comes down to is he’s too nice of a guy.  Like Jane, he might make a great senator in a different time when people played nicely together, and a legislative agenda was more important.  But these are not those times; what matters is America First and nothing else, and the ability to fight with peers on the senate floor the way Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in the House.  Radicals have overtaken the Democrat Party, I would say for the last 40 or 50 years. 

The masks of communism are off now, but the radicalism is deep in their culture, especially as it extends into the media and global investment brokers.  To undo all that, it will take a lot of political theater and members on the Hill who will write legislation endorsed by the Trump White House and fight for it on the floor, perhaps even physically.  It’s not what you see on TV that anybody must worry about; it’s what happens in the halls, the offices, and during the commute that requires aggression and boisterousness.  The Democrats are the enemy, and the fight has to be taken to them.  J.D. Vance is a nice guy who does pretty well on Tucker Carlson and can come up with some one-liners.  But when it comes to fighting, he’s not the guy for the battlefield.  Like I said, maybe during a different time.    

The rest of them in the field, such as Mike Gibbons, are to the left of J.D. and Jane, and I don’t consider them relevant in this race.  They may make some noise, but they don’t have what it takes for this Senate seat that essentially needs to pressure Sharrod Brown’s supporters to fall off the earth.  None of this hand-holding that Rob Portman has started with the Brown camp is what Ohio voters have been wanting.  Democrat progressives need to be destroyed.  There were three things that Josh Mandel did that solidified my opinion about him.  He worked with Darby Boddi at Lakota in gaining the support of the growing number of angry moms there, and he did a fantastic job on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas to talk about it. I personally spoke to Josh at a Republican event privately and on stage in front of a really big audience with big-time Republican members in the audience such as Jim Jordan and Frank LaRose, about his commitment to the election fraud that robbed Trump of the Executive Branch in 2020.  And the third thing was an event at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe where he had the Tea Party religious right showing great support.  He appeared on stage with Jena Ellis from the Trump legal team and was very evangelical.  Now, that particular assemblage of the electorate is only about 30% of the total conservative vote, but they are passionate, and when they are winning, they are contagious.  When Trump gives out endorsements in the summer of 2022 after this primary race is over, it’s going to be Trump for Renacci for governor and Mandel for Senate, and these people will be the ground troops who fill the crowds. 

When people wonder if Josh Mandel can win the general election, as he obviously can win the primary, the answer to that will be yes.  Even though he will come across as weak and vulnerable in a general election to Democrats and media members, the people who actually vote will put everything on the table for a hard-core Trump supporter, especially as Trump does many campaign stops in Ohio during that election season.  Any scandal that follows Josh Mandel around, as he is a little on the wild side, won’t matter just as it hasn’t for Trump.  Mandel will have the evangelicals, and they will be his foot soldiers to success.  People in Ohio will vote for someone attached to Trump’s hip, and none of the candidates in this race has more openly embraced Trump than Josh Mandel by sticking to the election fraud issue more.  Trump will reward Josh with an open endorsement as he will be campaigning for Renacci anyway.  At that point in the race, the other candidates would be nowhere near as exciting to Ohio voters as someone who isn’t afraid of political stunts and sticking to them when the pressure is most significant.  And when it comes to taking the fight to the Senate floor in Washington D.C. I asked Josh the same thing. I asked the other candidates how prepared they were for the battle to come.  Only Josh Mandel gave me the correct answer about actually showing light in his eyes when the talk of fighting liberals personally and directly came up.  And I’m convinced that with Josh Mandel, there will be many uncomfortable elevator rides for the opposition in the years to come.     

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Liberals Only Want to Boss People Around: The mental illness of the Democrat Party

People Who are Obsessed with Bossing You Around Tend to be Democrats

Without question, especially after Thanksgiving dinner with family members, some that you may only see a few times a year, politics is always that unsatisfied topic that burns in the back of all our minds.  We have been taught that we shouldn’t talk about politics or religion even though both dominate our lives and thoughts almost exclusively.  And the losers who spread that bad advice to us were liberals who encouraged us to avoid a conflict at the dinner table or living rooms of our homes from people who may be liberal in our lives.  So in the same fashion that we see prosecutorial misconduct among liberal prosecutors or religious ideologies, like “climate change” coming at us with blinding speed, we are not supposed to engage it or talk about it. Instead, we are supposed to talk about Blue Pill stuff like sports or Black Friday sales and hope to avoid talking about supply chain problems caused by an illegal president Biden with a big-government approach that has crippled our economy and put China on a pedestal for world domination.  So in that way, we never talk about the solution to the world’s real problems; we just learn to put up with it, which has empowered them into all sorts of destructive behavior.  Yet, there is a reason we are uncomfortable with these political rules of our day because the rules themselves mask something we all know and feel about the matter, which demands a resolution.  And it all points back to what I always say about liberalism; it’s a mental illness that needs a psychological fix, not an understanding of fairness on the battlefield of ideas.  Liberalism, because of its severe disfunction in nature, shouldn’t even be on the battlefield. 

One thing that all liberals have in common is that they like to boss people around.  We obviously have seen this with Covid and the government’s reaction to it.  Blue state governors have been the worst, and those who want to tell people what to do have heard the dog whistle.  They have acted like that big brother who is babysitting all of us and wants to essentially be the parent out of control with power telling us where to go, when to wash our hands, when to go to bed, when to eat, change clothes, even what to watch on television.  They are obsessed with telling us what to do about everything.  And now that they have captured through all types of political theater, they have the congress, the senate, and the White House at the federal level; they are out of control.  It’s not that the power went to their heads; it’s that they needed power so much that they were willing to do anything to get it.

Another thing I say all the time is that the number one thing that people are most concerned with in life is their status on the pecking order with their peers.  Adults, more than anything, want to climb the social ladder of power and prestige among their peers more to satisfy their insecurities about their meaning of life-based on how it was taught to them as children. You’re born, you do what your parents tell you, what society tells you, and you gain power so that you can acquire the ability to do that eventually to other members of society.  If you work hard, you might become a powerful politician or CEO of some company, and people will respect you and do what you tell them.  Really, when it comes down to it, liberalism, in varying degrees, is one of the most destructive elements of any society, and it can be measured based on how much people want to boss you around.  The more conservative a person truly is, the less they like to tell other people what to do.  The more liberal, the more they want to boss people around. 

But it doesn’t stop in politics such as “elected office.” Still, it extends into every aspect of our lives, such as the nosy neighbor who is always calling the neighborhood association about some flag you might be flying that might bring down property values.  Or the slow person in the fast lane on the highway who travels under the speed limit because they intend to slow you down for what they perceive as safe conduct.  We see it with the mask police now in stores.  We see it in the places we work where some ladder climber boss is always there to tell us when to use the restroom or take a break.   It’s not enough to call someone who thinks they are conservative a RINO if they claim to be Republicans but have the psychological problem of always wanting to tell people what to do all the time.  We have to identify the mental illness for what it is, some form of liberalism that has migrated in name to the current state of severe mental dysfunction. 

The real quandary for many of these people and why their psychological disorder is so destructive to the world around them is that the essence of their behavior is that they must live off the efforts of others.  That is why they want to boss people around because they actually need the efforts of others to survive. After all, deep inside, they lack the courage to do things on their own.  So they make themselves part of the world around them as a figure of authority to mask their own timidity.  And if they appear to be in charge of the pecking orders of our existence, they can hide their most profound insecurities.  So when we find ourselves at some social gathering and there are always these micromanagement types who start telling us we have to take our shoes off to enter a room, or to tell us where to sit, what to eat, how to dress, and so on, avoiding talking about politics only makes the problem worse.  It allows these loser people to live free of judgment while abusing the world with their psychological disorders.  By avoiding discussion about their ailment, it never gets fixed, which isn’t good for anybody.  One of the reasons I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business was to help people deal with the tyrants in their lives.  It may not be Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi who are the worst; it might be some nosy aunt or peeping neighbor going through your trash.  It might be a boss who goes out of their way to harass you so they can remind you that they are your means to a living, and you have to do what they say.  It might be the little Cartman mall cop or the latest local health department newly empowered by the CDC to ruin our lives in their effort to tell more people what to do.  But what it all amounts to is that the desire to boss people around is an illness of the mind, not something that should be respected or even dealt with as a legitimate manner of public conduct.  We don’t need to treat liberals with equality and understanding.  We need to get them help in insane asylums because that’s where they belong.  Not believing they are equal or above us on some invisible pecking order.  They are not our “betters.” They are malcontents and damaged people who need treatment, not a pass of the gravy and a tight lip uttered under sports scores. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vigilante Justice is Better than No Justice: If the government fails to do its job, order can’t be the casualty

Justice is Valuable

The word so far is that the Milwaukee County district attorney John Chisolm had set the bail for the Waukesha mass murderer, James Brooks, artificially low—at only $1000, because of financial contributions from George Soros.  Soros has been doing a lot of that, spending money on district attorneys to shape law enforcement policy toward his goal of destroying the United States through internal turmoil.  No need to send troops to the border to fight invaders like in the movie Red Dawn.  The new villains of the world are billionaires who have had their money go to their heads and drive them to world domination.  They seek to undermine our system of law and order to overthrow our nation and rule us all in place of the values of our republic. It’s a fast-moving story, and if you add that incursion onto the millions of dollars other billionaires have used to buy off the media, it’s not an accident that in the wake of the tragedy of Brooks driving his car through a Christmas parade, killing children and adults alike, that we didn’t see a vigil for all the names of the dead.  They did have a vigil, just not the usual wall-to-wall media coverage that usually happens in tragedies like this one.  Unlike a mass school shooting that drives a political narrative, the political left put Brooks on the streets to commit this crime.  It was part of their strategy, and they wanted nothing more than to move on from the story and get back to talking about how they felt about the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict that freed him in his self-defense case.  These attackers from the political left, from international criminals like George Soros to the Milwaukee rapper James Brooks all want the same thing, the destruction of America and all of us who make the nation great.  And they’ll do anything to make it happen, frequently breaking the law as they do it.  And they don’t care. 

This has brought up the concept of vigilante justice in the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse case, where the political left felt the young man should have gone to jail for murder for the rest of his life for defending Kenosha from thugs, scum bags, and thieves with a rifle.  Yet, they support the bail and release of known criminals like James Brooks totally based on skin color and social status. It’s a concept based on insanity, which is a symptom of the Democrat party as a whole.  Liberalism is an insane concept that should be psychologically treated, not supported by philosophic debate for its own value.  I happen to have some extensive experience in vigilante justice; I wrote a book on it called The Symposium of Justice way back in 2004, which was based on experience I had with mayors, law enforcement, and the FBI over drugs that were being sold across the street from my home.  I wasn’t about to put up with that kind of thing, drugs were always something I fought against, and I couldn’t have them sold across the street by a bunch of punk kids.  But the police were in on it, and so were the many levels of government I turned to for exposure and justice.  In the end, if there weren’t vigilante justice, there wouldn’t have been any justice, and I will say all the time that vigilante justice is always better than no justice. 

But it’s no justice that the political left is after in this modern invasion of our country.  George Soros is just one of the many billionaires who have global intentions and see America as in the way of his plans.  So he is willing to throw vast sums of money to bring us all no justice, frustration, and an eventual collapse of our legal system for their tactical objectives.  But one thing they can’t stand is when people insist on justice anyway and take to the streets as Kyle Rittenhouse did with his Second Amendment rights fully intact.  Kyle wasn’t a vigilante; he was a young kid who wanted nothing more in the world than to be a cop.  But, if you are someone like George Soros, getting rid of cops is the goal, just as in my old case of the drug dealers; getting them hooked on the extra income made them less effective.  In whatever case, the goal is to erode law and order in favor of chaos and overthrow.  The political left wants people like Kyle Rittenhouse locked up while criminals like James Brooks are free on the streets to rape, pillage, and destroy American society.  The thugs of society are the army of the elite, as they see themselves, and they expect us to put up with it. 

I learned a lot from my vigilante days, and I don’t mind saying it.  The FBI knows all about it, but they let it happen, so there isn’t much they can do about any of it.  They broke the law by allowing it all to happen.  But I will say this, the wisdom of age is a much better tool than the antics of vigilante justice.  When I was younger, nobody wanted to listen to a young kid.  But as an older person now, I have quite a lot of influential people who listen carefully and value the input. I will always say that the best thing to do is try to make the system work by putting yourself in the middle of it.  You may not always get what you want, but you will find that your action will make it better.  Debate is the way to keep the kind of corruption I mentioned in my case in check.  If someone had been there to debate the mayors involved, the city council people, and many others, corruption could have been reduced.  The head of police who couldn’t pay his cops what they thought they were worth allowed for this side activity openly.  If someone had been there to debate with them, they might not have gone along with so much crime.  And in the case of John Chisolm, someone should have been going to lunch with this radical progressive.  Maybe then he wouldn’t have been so tempted by George Soros’s money if he had a few more friends.  The best way to have justice is to be part of the system, take responsibility for asking the hard questions, and work to make it as fair as possible.  Sitting around waiting for a crime to happen is the worst idea, but you don’t necessarily need to roam the streets as Batman.  I might suggest doing that if you are in your 20s and 30s, but the better way is to develop intelligence and reputation so you can fix it before it becomes a problem.  Corruption happens when good people are not part of the process. 

When Justice by Government Fails

Yet, for anybody to assume that vigilante justice won’t happen due to some liberal rule, they are smoking crack.  By nature, all humans seek justice, and if their society lets them down, they don’t have much recourse otherwise.  Demanding that people put up with bad government performance is simply unrealistic, and the Soros plan counts on that very concept.  People have a sense of justice, right and wrong, and if the government fails to uphold that standard, people will turn to vigilante justice. It’s the correct and moral thing to do.  But it is all of our responsibility to make sure the government doesn’t fail because we are the government.  These days I know lots of judges, lots of politicians, I know lots of law enforcement.   I would say that I have a pretty cut and dry sense of law and order, and they all know that.  And it helps them have a reference point just through relationship building.  We should all try to be more involved before we turn to vigilante justice.  But if all else fails, then we must have justice of some kind.  Putting up with criminal conduct and the media that has prostituted itself to billionaire money meant to attack us all should not be a hindrance.  In the end, no matter what method it is obtained, we will have justice, and we will have justice for all. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Dr. Fauci Learned Too Late: Americans will never accept the limits of an administrative state

The Limits of an Administrative State

In a lot of ways, I’m grateful for this mass chaos that we are seeing today.  I have been warning about it for so many years. Finally, there is context to the warnings.  Now people who don’t think about these kinds of government problems very much can see the cost of what a bad government can bring them.  I wish it weren’t so costly, but I think people needed to see it in a way that impacted them.  In their busy lives of paying the bills and picking their kids up from soccer practice, most people don’t have time to think very deeply about the things that impact them most.  And in many ways, the pressure put upon Dr. Fauci under the coronavirus management has been a fantastic exhibition of why the concept of the Administrative State is a perpetual failure every time it was tried.  But too often, these failures have been hidden behind successes that happen by accident.  Because President Trump left the White House and Biden came behind him, it left Dr. Fauci exposed.  As soon as we took away the positive sales talk of Trump, Covid-19 and its perpetrators were left open to their commitment to administrative failure. I’ve been talking about the Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward because it was the formation essentially of big government at the start of the Progressive era, from the perspective of 1888.  And its stupidity in assuming that creating an all-powerful administrative state would be the cure-all for corruption and door for all future progress was misplaced from the start.  Many have always known this, but not enough could see it clear enough to act on that knowledge, that is, until now. 

From the Sunday Morning interview with the defender of the progressive administrative state, Ted Koppel, Dr. Fauci was exposed.  It’s clear that during all the lead-up to the pandemic crises role-playing that had been done at events like Event 201 in New York during October of 2019, that the American constitution was not discussed as a limiting factor to crises management on a global scale.  No matter what role Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci had in creating the Wuhan virus through gain of function research in partnership with China, it is quite evident that they did not understand how Americans would react to their protocols.  At first, people gave Dr. Fauci the benefit of the doubt.  They allowed lockdowns.  They allowed for masks, social distancing, and all kinds of crazy ideas created by the administrative state Edward Bellamy and Karl Marx had always dreamed of.  One world functioning under the rules and regulations of medical professionals to essentially nationalize all industry under a Covid emergency.  But Americans expect a plan to solve a problem.  They were never going to accept a perpetual change state where the medical industry that we count on to keep us healthy would become some parental government figure telling us what to do all the time, over everything.  And that ultimately is what Dr. Fauci didn’t understand at the beginning, which he is learning about now. 

Do I think Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates are the intentional embodiment of evil?  No, I think they are typical bureaucrats who create evil by injecting themselves into a process as an administrative impediment to innovation, which is typical in all bureaucratic management bodies.  From their perspective, they were doing the right thing.  But see, that’s the problem.  The definition of the “right thing” is always determined based on the limited understanding of the characters involved. The administrative state that manages all that activity, as Edward Bellamy fantasized about, and progressives for the last 150 years have been trying to implement through our education system, was always going to be determined by the weakest links, which is something Americans ran from in Europe.  It was the cause of westward expansion.   Whatever anybody thinks about the destruction of the Indian nations, or the battles to free people from slavery, the revolutions, the piracy in the Caribbean, it all came from people wanting to be free of the administrative state, not chained to it more.  People like Dr. Fauci followed rugged Americans to their homes and now, through the media, were in every part of their lives.  So when there was no plan for getting rid of Covid, it would only be natural that people would grow to hate Dr. Fauci, as they hate all people who constantly intrude on their lives.  It’s clear now that Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates never understood how Americans think or why, among others, in the administrative state. 

To indicate that Americans have a misplaced belief about individual rights over the demands of a public health crisis is not to understand the essence of our country.  Progressives like the billionaires attacking America like Bill Gates, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and many others have shown why we all want freedom from an overarching administrative state.  Whenever a thought process is siloed, as it is in the case of a heavily bureaucratic government where someone like Dr. Fauci sets a policy that everyone else must follow, then you are limited in your life to the limits of such people.  If they are not the smartest in the world or even the best, people will get frustrated and get stuck behind them.  For instance, I say this often, but when people tell you to stay in your lane, what they mean is that they expect you to stay behind some big truck on a highway that is only going 40 mph up a big hill, and they don’t want you to pass them.  They want you to follow the rules and to lower your own speed limit and expectations to the weakest link on the highway.  But Americans like to travel at their own speed, and if they come upon such a slow-moving vehicle, they expect to pass.  When the administrative state says they cannot give them room to pass, there will be angry people.  And Dr. Fauci obviously never planned for that reaction, which he should have considered from the outset. 

Before this debacle of the Biden administration and Dr. Fauci’s massive failures, by sticking himself into all our lives so recklessly, people tended to forget about the slow-moving trucks once they could pass.  By the time they got where they were going, their tempers lowered considerably, and life went on.  But now, because people have been restricted for so long, and there are no plans for a fix, people are getting justifiably angry.  America was founded as a solution to the administrative state.  We left the world to start our own life in North America.  We did it to be free of people like Dr. Fauci.  Not to become more managed by them.  Free people will give them the benefit of the doubt until it goes on too long and they get tired of being stuck behind the slow-moving truck. “They will not stay in their lane forever.” It’s a lesson Dr. Fauci and the rest of them learned too late.  No matter how good the intentions were, the rule in America is that administration state incompetency will not be tolerated, whereas it’s generally accepted in the rest of the world.   They accept it in other countries because they have learned to.  But in America, the nature of the people who make up the country and have a constitution that limits the powers of government on purpose, the concept of yielding to infinite authority isn’t in the cards.  Eventually, people will pass the administrators, and if their goals were to slow down society with their slow-moving truck, they would always end up disappointed.  The hatred of Dr. Fauci and the political division that has erupted over Covid is healthy, and it’s good for people to see it this way instead of through actual violence.  Perhaps this lesson will sink in and make us a better society.  But it won’t change America into an administrative state. Instead, maybe now people will listen better when we warn about it in the future. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Darrell Brooks, the BLM Rapper MathBoi Fly: The killer of Waukesha is in custody

The race war that the political left has created against traditional America has left more misery upon the innocent prior to the Holidays in Wisconsin. Read the most recent information about the killer’s identity here:

Watch it while you can

https://www.the-sun.com/news/4116875/who-is-darrell-brooks/

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Nature of Corruption: Uncovering history at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West

The Nature of Corruption

I can’t say it enough, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, turned out to be a treasure trove of philosophy that was just what America needed at just the right moment, at least for me, so that I could explain it to other people.  It was interesting; my family was mad at me for the breakneck pace of a big trip we were all on together.  We had just spent the day before seeing all the big sites in Yellowstone.  Every day, we had been getting up early and doing more in a day than most people do in a week of vacation.  Not only were my two daughters with me and their spouses but all my grandchildren as well.  I was on a mission; I was uncovering rocks putting together the essence of what was happening to our country.  The election year of 2020 had presented us all with lots of unusual problems, and I was looking for answers in 2021.  In June of that year, my family was deep in the rugged buttes of Wyoming several miles from the East entrance to the park outside Cody, Wyoming, which convinced me they needed a break from all the adventuring.  So, we agreed on a compromise; we’d take a day off our adventure and go to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in town and take it easy to let everyone catch their breath.  It was their idea, actually, but I didn’t tell them that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was one of the places I had on my list that was always at the top, and I wanted to go there badly.  So quite unexpectedly, I found myself there with my entire immediate family, and it turned out to be one of the great highlights of my life.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of those wonderful days with my family that intersected with questions I had been asking all my life, and suddenly there were answers. 

My concern was in asking the nature of corruption; we had just seen the removal of President Trump by a rigged election and hostile Democrats hell-bent on socialism and communism.  They had seen how well Bernie Sanders, the socialist, polled among young people during the presidential election the year prior, so now they were pulling off the masks and showing themselves to be the socialist they always were.  They were behaving the way I always said were their true intentions, and for many Americans, they were shocked by it.  At that time, I was also working on my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which I had finished on the road that year and was in the editing process.  At the center of that book was an understanding of the nature of corruption.  My point was that some of the best years of American life that was least corrupt were the one where the modern socialists were declaring to be one of the most, the Victorian age, the end of the Gilded era, and the start of the Progressive.  For me, it was the other way around, so I was very interested in why the Buffalo Bill Wild West show was so popular among Americans for the closing decades of the 1800s and how Trump was an interesting call-back to that Make America Great Again sentiment that also was there with the Buffalo Bill Wild West show.

I have an interesting relationship with Buffalo Bill, each year in Ohio; I participate in the Annie Oakley Festival in Darke County during the last weekend of July. I have done that for most of my adult life.  It’s always been a throwback to the Buffalo Bill show which Annie Oakley was the trick shooting act.  When I was a kid, the Clint Eastwood film Bronco Billy touched me deeply, and I wanted to be a part of that life, so the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio, gave me that chance, which I have always seen as the essence of American life.  I used those experiences to paint my book’s unique point of view to what America was, especially from business life.  So a lot was culminating there at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West that the average visitor wouldn’t have experienced.  But the museum didn’t disappoint.  It was top class, one of the best of its kind in the world, and I brought back from there a real treasure of books and art that I would spend the rest of the year studying, which is the usual way I do things.  I visit places; then I learn all I can about those places long after I’ve gone.  In that way, my visits last a long time, but I get to know a place months and years after the initial visit.  And it was in this exploration that I ran across the Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward and discovered precisely what I had been looking for, the link to many of our modern problems.  That book had been trendy during the time of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and it held the answer to the long question of why that show had been so popular with people, even in this modern day.  It even explained why Trump was such a good president and why so many people on the socialist left wanted to see him utterly destroyed. 

Bellemy’s biggest mistake in his book Looking Backward was that he assumed that an administrative state of the central government could regulate corruption out of existence.  This idea of a socialist utopia was very attractive to some people, and they became progressives that would shape the Democrat party we see today early in the 1900s. Ironically, many Americans, without realizing it, understood that the life of Buffalo Bill and his show had touched on the essence of America, and they wanted to see more of it before it vanished as progressives had been promising.  There was honor and invention in the Wild West that Buffalo Bill showed in his displays.  America was remarkably uncorrupted for a few years of western expansion until corruption took over on the heels of Progressives and the work of Karl Marx sought to sabotage it right out of the gate, which is a battle that is still being waged to this day.  As it turned out, and it’s evident at the Buffalo Bill gun museum on the Center of the West campus, gun ownership in America had punched a window into the long history of corruption in the world. Buffalo Bill represented the best to have come from that philosophic period.  This bit of history was so remarkable that Plato and Aristotle would have never conceived of such a thing. Still, there it was in the American west, the defeat of corruption before the world’s governments could taint it with their looting presence.  And the left never figured it out. It’s an easy answer “Looking Backward” at how childlike Bellamy was in his assumptions within his book.  The socialist utopia that Karl Marx wanted and the Bellamyites who followed him for years after that book instead made corruption worse through the administrative state.  We were all a lot better off when the world was, as Buffalo Bill showed it.  And people understood that when they went to see his show. 

The nature of corruption comes from any organization of people who are put in power over other people. The other people have no means to check the power inflicted upon them.  The magic of America that no other society in the world had figured out is that with Americans having gun ownership, they could control the influence of corruption as it grows within any centralized authority. That centralized authority might be our corporations or our local, state, and federal governments.  Corruption was always going to happen, but the ownership of guns kept it checked in healthy ways that worked best before the works of Karl Marx infected American academic circles with a completely foreign concept from Europe that fed corruption rather than controlling it.  And that was something new for me to think about.  I think it’s normal to have thoughts about something where you know it’s right or wrong, but we often don’t understand why.  Well, at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, they had recorded “why,” and it was just the right thing I had been looking for.  It’s not enough to say that something doesn’t work for emotional reasons.  But in the context of history, we have preserved facts that we can study and apply to our modern-day.  And within that study, we have our answer on the nature of corruption and what we can do to control it.  It’s in the minds of all societies to have corruption.  For the liberal, they think they can educate it out of people.  But in the process, they make much more of it.  Yet, in the proven history of western expansion, we did control corruption for a healthy period, and the world was much better for it.  History proves it so.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Perhaps Its Time to Bring Back Dueling: After Kenosha, the prosecution showed themselves to be the enemy

In Pursuit of Justice

I’m one who thought the Kyle Rittenhouse case in Kenosha, Wisconsin, should have never gone to trial.  If you have to shoot someone in self-defense, it’s a simple constitutional issue for me. The essential protection of private property starts with the self and expands to the assets that might be possessed.   A person’s life is their most important possession.  The riots in the streets that night in Kenosha looked to overthrow the town, destroy property and terrorize the people who lived there to make a political point. I’m all for debate with people who don’t think the way you might. I’m all for settling disputes with a vote.  But once campaign signs are stolen, or mobs are formed, it becomes a private property case, and the way to defend that property is with deadly force, whatever it may be.  Yet the Rittenhouse trial was an interesting one to watch.  That poor kid should have never had to suffer through it to get to a “not guilty” verdict in the end.  Thankfully there was a good judge on the case, and the jury was respectable.  But the kid should have never had to go through all that to satisfy the overly progressive prosecutor in the case who represented the state in more ways than just this specific murder case.  The prosecutors in the Rittenhouse case were disgraceful.  How many liberals are there in these roles?  I know the prosecutors in my community of Butler County, and I know many judges, and they are what I would consider “normal people.” They think and act like regular people, and they have a basic understanding of the value of our constitutions, state and federal.  Where did all these liberals come from in these district attorney positions who put on these cases?  That is the bigger problem, and it set my mind to consider what I proposed in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, dueling as a solution to the legal problems of our times.

I see it as a mistake what we did at the end of the Victorian era and the start of the Progressive era. I’ve been spending a lot of time discussing those mistakes recently as I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last several years.  When President Jackson was in many duels, or even Alexander Hamilton was, it is obvious we have lost something in our culture to turn over the responsibility for the conflict to pin-headed lawyers to fight on our behalf.  After all, that was what the Kyle Rittenhouse trial was; it was a duel between a young person who killed rioters and a state that wanted to make a case for the abolition of private property.  In the prosecution’s assertion was the concept that the people had a right to destroy personal property and terrorize people into collective belief and that Kyle had an obligation to appease the mob.  That is a standard position of the communist loving left. I conclude that nobody who thinks from a leftist point of view can co-exist with constitutionally minded people in America.  The left wants to erase the constitution; the right wants to live by the ground rules.  Those are opposing forces that will never get along, so why fake it?  The way to obtain respect for two such unmoveable forces is to blame the actors themselves instead of punting them to a third-party legal system to do it for them. 

I recently read a magnificent book that I bought at The Hole in the Wall bookstore at Wall, Drug in South Dakota.  It was called Outlaws of South Dakota and was all about legal cases where the people breaking the law either ended up hung or shot dead in most cases covering the gold rush period up until the time of the gangsters in the 1920s and 30s.  When the public just shot criminals dead, or as a group themselves, hung people for their crimes, things worked much better in society instead of catching a criminal and holding them for a trial that might not happen for months.  The presumption of fairness wasn’t worth the trouble if you take the cases in their totality.  Jack McCall, for instance, the killer who shot Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood right in front of everyone, should have been engaged and shot right on the spot.  Instead, they captured him, had a phony trial, then let him go, only to be caught later on another charge and eventually killed.  As it appears, the town of Deadwood did not want any law and order, so they wanted McCall to kill Wild Bill so the criminal element could continue to make money the way they had been.  As I read that book, I visited the actual sites where Wild Bill was shot and resided and considered these legal issues.  For me, it’s a perfect comparison to what the Swamp did to President Trump when we elected him to clean things up.  The Swamp didn’t want to be clean, so they got rid of those who threatened their criminal enterprises.  It costs a lot more to allow people like that to reside in the shadows than to confront them directly with a deadly duel in a lonely street when honor meant something because it was personal. 

Because of Covid vaccine mandates and other Biden administration matters, I have had to talk to more lawyers than I usually do. I have been astonished at how stupid they are; they are a lot dumber than they used to be. What’s worse, it’s the quality level of the Bar Association itself.   The standards of law have depleted over the years.  Lawyers and human resource departments are not suitable replacements for two people fighting out a problem among themselves.  The transition from dueling to court trials has not been a successful one.  The Rittenhouse case was a hit from the state against an individual for purposes of the state to erode the concept of private property.  Personal integrity is not a consideration of modern law, and because of it, the premise of all legal cases is flawed before they ever get started.  Kenosha was intended to be destroyed to advance a progressive concept of eradicating the police so that personal property could not be protected in society.

Therefore, all people would have to submit to the mobs of leftism.  If we allowed dueling to continue, as it had in the past, none of this legal assumption would have even established itself in our culture.  But because we have punted personal resolution to the courts, now the courts have abused their power and become the bullies themselves.  The thugs and losers who were shot in Kenosha obviously should have never been on the street if our court system had worked properly, and it would be people like Kyle Rittenhouse putting them in jail.  But the prosecution in the Rittenhouse case wanted the opposite; they wanted Kyle in prison and the thugs on the streets just as the town of Deadwood wanted Jack McCall to roam free to murder law and order so that crime could flourish.  And that is what we have in Washington D.C., a society of crime that advances while the innocent suffer under legal restraints meant to cripple them, not to empower them.  With all that in mind, we were a better society when we settled our matters not with lawyers but with guns.  It forced a much more honorable society and personal responsibility for the morality of our people, and it worked a whole lot better than what we see in examples like the Rittenhouse trial.  It should never have happened.  The night that Kyle shot those thugs, he should have been back home with his mother enjoying milk and cookies for a rough night on the town—not incarcerated for prosecution by a state that wanted to destroy him for even worse reasons than the killings occurred. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Root Cause of Failed Liberalism: ‘Looking Backward’ to where the problem started

The Root Cause of Failed Liberalism

Not to brag, but as a statement of fact, I know many people are wondering why I have not been canceled out of existence.  Many bad people have certainly tried, and the shadow banning of me is just flat-out ridiculous.  But the truth of it is that my phone never stops ringing, even though I don’t make any attempts to broadcast what the political left considers toxic masculinity as a gun-wielding conservative, way to the political right of John Wayne.  I consider him a long-haired hippie compared to the way I think of politics.  But I do work extensively with people of all kinds of political affiliations and religious beliefs.  I get along with everybody until they do me wrong.  Yet if I answered all the calls and emails, I would never have time to do anything else, so I have to be very selective with my time.  It’s such a problem that I spent a whole chapter of my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business explaining why selective management of time is so important.  You might want to spend all kinds of time with people, but spending infinite amounts of time with them has a cost, usually a big one.  That leads to the answer to the question as to why this modern attack vector has not canceled me out by the liberal’s global progressive mindset.  Well, it’s because I have something the world really wants, a unique skill and that people are willing to put up with some conservative eccentricities so they can get some of what I have.  And that skill is a very keen sense of root cause analysis. 

For more than 30 years now, I have been an expert in Lean Manufacturing; I’ve been through all the reiterations and have advised many on it over the years.  I know it backward and forward.  But, I am not at all in love with it.  I see it strictly as an eastern spin to Japan’s lessons from Deming after World War II.  They were smart; they took one of the American manufacturing consultants into their arms after it was American manufacturing that essentially won that war, and they set out to beat us at our own game.  They turned what they learned into Lean and then sold it back to us, which now has much of the world thinking that they can copy Lean into their own cultures, only to find that it doesn’t work so well in the West.  I have never been all that impressed with Deming or the people who worship him as a manufacturing god. Those in the Lean movement with martial art terms that they think sound cool when selling eastern ideas to the West thinking it will help make companies better and more profitable.  If anything, it has only contributed to the spread of communism as we assumed that they knew something in the east that we didn’t know in the West, which essentially started this push toward global communism.  I have a saying that many who know me often hear, “get rid of the Black Belt and embrace the gunbelt.” I wrote my own book about this way of thinking after many years of experience and my root cause analysis of the state of the world, which needs some fresh insight. 

However, I’m not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  One of the Lean tools that are most commonly used in the world to determine root cause analysis is the “five whys.” Now here, my gunfighter analogy would say that I shoot from the hip on those kinds of things because I have great experience and troubleshooting ability.  I can usually arrive at a root cause analysis by walking into a room.  But to use a more traditional tool to bring other people into the knowledge, they need to see a process like the “five whys” to work out the problem.  And that’s precisely what I did when it came to asking the questions about why liberalism so often fails, why the Biden administration sucked so much.  Why do so many people hate Donald Trump?  And essentially, why the state of the world was so bad when liberals did their work in it.  Those weren’t political statements; they were observations based on reality.  I had my shoot from the hip understanding of it, which long-time readers here understand I usually peg things months, years, or decades ahead of when trends hit. That’s why my phone never stops ringing, and it never will.  Much of the time, I’d love the phone to stop ringing.  But there is a cost to everything.  But to prove my thoughts to people, I needed a more traditional root cause analysis.  So I found myself way out West with my family at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which gave me what I had been looking for. I’ve been to museums all over the world, some of the best that there are.  And the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was, and is, something extraordinary. 

It was at that museum that I learned to what extent Edward Bellamy had played a role in shaping socialism in America during that little vacuum of history when the Buffalo Bill Wild West show was the most popular form of entertainment in the world, from around 1880 to 1910. Bellamy’s book Looking Backward came out in 1888. It was a continuation of Karl Marx that essentially started quite a movement in America toward socialism that seamlessly merged with progressivism around 1910, during the Teddy Roosevelt years.  In the Bellamyites, much of modern liberalism was formed, which populates our nightly news cycles. Specifically, the nationalization of all means of production.  It has loomed in the background for the last 150 years, and they have constantly made gains for their movement over that entire time.  But to see the root cause of the problem of liberalism, you must go back to that period before the Progressive Era and at the end of the romantic Gilded Era, what I think of as the age of the gunfighters.  Many believe in gunfighting as a barbarous age of aggression and violence; I see it as much better than the concepts of Bellamy and his followers of the modern-day progressives in the Democrat Party. 

Like any root cause analysis, when trying to solve a problem, it’s not acceptable to put up with something causing you a defect, whether in manufacturing, psychology, or global politics.  If a bad idea is causing trouble, then you have to get rid of it.  And liberalism was a bad idea from the moment it was released with the work of Karl Marx.  What Edward Bellamy did with it was infect America with a disaster of thought that we see fully on the stage today.  But to see it correctly, you have to go back to a time before the problem gained support, which Edward Bellamy did for the work of Karl Marx during the period of massive westward expansion in America.  In my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, the basic premise is designed to help put a business back on track or a country; however the thought exercises are wished to be used by the reader.  But accepting the failure of a thought is not acceptable. That’s not to say that in the past, they had everything right.  There are always ways for “continuous improvement.” But a continuation of a bad idea which liberalism is is not the path to success for anything.  And to deal with it effectively, we must as a culture accept that premise as a fact and not make concessions with failure just to avoid hurting anybody’s feelings.  That frankness is why the phone never stops ringing; there are so many people stuck in the world between a problem and broken feelings on how to have a proper solution.  Usually, the problem is easy to fix, but the people involved make it difficult.  But the fix is the fix, and for America to be right again, we must solve the sickness at its source, to the world before Edward Bellamy and his destructive book Looking Backward.  

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business