Category: Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

The Success of Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium: The failure nobody wants to talk about

The Cost of Election Fraud

The number one question I have been asked over the last week hasn’t been about Afghanistan, but instead, it was about Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium held in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  My answer is that I felt it was successful and a great benefit to the process.  I also think Mike Lindell was likely disappointed because he, like many, is looking for a cleaner, more Hollywood-like result where everything gets wrapped up in a bow at the end.  The Supreme Court suddenly gets a backbone and does the right thing, where the media has their ah-ha moment and suddenly becomes one of the good guys.  I don’t think those things will ever happen because that’s not how humans are doing things. They might write stories and make movies showing that kind of reality, but that’s part of the fun of fiction, is that you can have things the way you want them.  The real world is wrapped up with many other emotions dispersed over time and space much more harshly.  And that is precisely where things stand after Mike Lindell’s Symposium.  Yes, election fraud happened, there are vast amounts of proof of it, and the people involved should all be going to jail.  Only there aren’t enough jails in the country to hold everyone involved.  The election fraud of 2020 was just the final, desperate attempt by a corrupt society to end the presidency of Donald Trump for a lot of reasons.  Based on their behavior before the election fraud and after, in the world of the Wikipedia types who had the future all mapped out toward a progressive horizon, what happened with Trump and his voters was a massive rejection of their way of life.  And that is something that they can’t hide any longer, even from themselves.

There is zero chance that America will unite behind Joe Biden or the current government swamp.  We have learned too much about how the Deep State works and that our present elected representatives have not worked on our behalf.   They rejected Trump as the disrupter and mistakenly thought that people would forget about all this stuff regarding self-government if he were removed.  They thought that mask mandates, vaccinations, election tampering, and economic terrorism sold by compliant and lazy media would be the name of the game in 2021.  The mistake from the start was believing that it was caused by Donald Trump, not in the desire of people to have a character like Donald Trump in the White House.  Trump had been doing such a good job that many of these antagonistic forces, whether they came from within our country or outside of it, thought they could still rule through authority.  Such as the intentions of China to schmooze their way to our complete conquest forcing them to reveal their intentions in aggressive ways they never even planned to admit to themselves.   So as bad as things look today, I only see hope in tomorrow because, at least now, all our interactions are honest.  We know now how much people like Mitch McConnell hate traditional America.  He has dirtied himself up in politics for so long that there is no turning back for him.  That is the case for many political people who have traded a nice and easy life for ethics and justice.  The worst of it was that they thought so little of us that they didn’t think we’d see them lying to us.  But they aren’t very smart themselves, so of course, they wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to see what was happening.  They thought they could conceal their actions with a media censorship that China has already and that we’d accept that in America.  Which, of course, was never going to work.   We ended up with a corrupt society in government who moved toward the global control of everything, leaving behind half the nation they expected to follow them.  And now it’s clear that they will never follow.  So what happens next?

Fast Draw

The success of the Cyber Symposium wasn’t in the revelation; it’s more in the reality of coming to terms with what happened.  Whether or not Mike Lindell had the Cyber Symposium, or whether all methods of investigating election fraud were censored from public debate, people would still question the reality of the election.  They would always doubt the results.  The difference between America and other places in the world is that we can gather and ask questions.  Even if the authorities deny that election fraud happened, in America, we can question those authorities.  We can assemble and have something like the Cyber Symposium.  And so long as those things can happen, there will never be a complete takeover of society in countries where election fraud occurs but don’t say anything about it because they fear being killed.  Those same kinds of intimidation tactics have been attempted here in America.

Mike Lindell has undoubtedly felt that sting.  But in actuality, whenever one side has to resort to threats to get you to accept a truth, they have already lost the case on merits.  They might force you to keep your mouth shut, but they can’t change what you believe, which is the case here.  With all the effort to conceal election fraud and intimidate people into believing some state-sponsored results driven by social media doing that state’s work, all the people who were going to believe in the election results have done so.  From here, conspiracies like those of Rosewell and the JFK assassination will result for centuries.  But the country will not unite.  They smell a rat and will always work to undermine that rat for the rest of their lives. 

For me, much of what we see, I think, is better because it has forced all the bad guys to show their playbook.  Many had hoped to pull those plays out of their communist playbook much later after Americans had been made more compliant.  I don’t think that would ever happen because it’s never happened anywhere else in the world.  Why would it happen in America, but let’s entertain the hypothetical quandary, people could be intimidated into complete submission, the way people are in China, for instance.  In my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I argue that the Chinese never recovered from the conquest of the Mongals or the Han Dynasty. Even today, they are easy to defeat as a people by a communist government.  America is a much different place, it was founded by people leaving behind authority rules, and the world ran out of real estate.  There is nowhere else to run.  They aren’t going to accept authoritarian rule.  They complied with the masks because they were gullible and believed the government was somewhat trustworthy in a crisis, even if it was invented.  But the Kotter change state wasn’t ever going to stick, and society would be switched over to communism.  And if only Trump were out of the White House, the tyrants of the world would live happily ever after.  We learned from the Symposium that people would never accept cheating and lying from a government with blind compliance.  This is the best the Biden administration can ever hope to get.   Life will only get worse from here and all the people who propped him up as well.  And that’s what happens when you cheat; you don’t get the White House honorably, the government will fall apart, which is occurring now. It’s the Humpty Dumpty story all over again, and the pieces will never go back together.  The authorities should have known better before they ever tried, but now we all know, and nothing will change our minds at this point.  The coup’s failure is there for everyone to see, and most people see it clearly and will continue to, well into the future.     

Rich Hoffman

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

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

A Good Guy, J.D. Vance

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

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

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

J.D. Vance on the Warroom

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

The Lakota School Board trying to vote on Mask Mandates

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

My Thoughts on Afghanistan: Facing down evil once more

Its Time to Face Down Evil

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

This is Where We Are

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

This is what Leadership looks like

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

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

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

 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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There is Nothing Worse than Saying Something Cannot be Done: Managing unknowns for victory

Sometimes the Answers are Where Nobody Looks

For perspective, I feel like I say it 1000 times in a week; limits are meant to be overcome, not yielded to.  When I hear someone say, I can’t do this because of this, or I can’t do that, I immediately hear laziness in the terminology. It’s a lazy approach to life because skills are often needed to be developed to achieve a task.  And when people tell you that something can’t be done, it’s because they are too lazy to do it, plain and simple.  I understand limits, but as I talk about constantly in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, perceptions of what is achievable today will be shattered tomorrow with lots of practice.  That is certainly the case with various fast draw competitions that go on all over the country that are less known to most of the world because they exist in pockets of Americana.  We seem to understand these kinds of things in sports, where rookies improve with experience, and that few people expect a newly drafted football player to go straight to the NFL and be a superstar.   It takes time and development to become great.  And that is true too in how we make all our livings.  When I hear someone tell me that it takes this much time to do this kind of thing, that is never a fixed value.  But is only a point of reference that should always be pushed for and achieved.  That is why I suggest that all business people stop thinking in controlled statistical ways and always look for innovation opportunities to explore what can be done, not what lazy people tell you can be.

Bullwhip Speed and Accuracy

Every year that I do the Annie Oakley Wild West Show in Darke County during the last weekend of July each year, I go through this process.  It’s always one of the fun weekends that I give myself to keep the world in focus.  I love Darke County, Ohio.  It reminds me of many towns out west and brings the heart of America close, so it’s easy to see.  And this year was no different.  We have the bullwhip competitions that I always participate in, where many of these ideas about business have matured over the years and eventually evolved into the themes of this book.  Now that I am one of the elderly participants, the competitions have become a period of self-reflection for me rather than a nervous do-or-die thing with legacy performers from years past.  As I also talk about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, young people need more than anything a reputation to launch them into life.  Well, I have my reputation well intact, and nobody can ever take that from me, even if the thing we are doing is relatively tiny in the scheme of things.  The bullwhip competitions of Annie Oakley for me were always a big deal because the people who do them are unique.  The activity is out of the box, and you develop a genuine respect for the people who share that space with you.  And the competition pushes you always to get better.  And once you push yourself to get better and have success, you realize that the same holds with just about everything in life, including decisions that cost millions of dollars either way if success or failure is utilized.  That may be the life I’m in now, but over the years, my grounding in these cowboy arts always kept things authentic to me and gave me perspectives that nobody else was considering, even though they probably should have. 

The two videos I’ve included in this article are from two bullwhip competitions from this latest 2021 Annie Oakley show.  I always do pretty well in those, but the value in winning has diminished a lot over time.  What matters most to me, what has become an obsession of sorts, is managing all the competition variables in these kinds of things.   In both competitions, the goal is to cut as many cups off the target stands at the fastest rate that you can.  One competition, the Speed Switch, requires you to do so with both hands.  The other, Speed and Accuracy, is all one hand and in sequence.  If you miss a cup, it’s a 5-second penalty.  You get two attempts at each cup.  You have to stand six feet from the target and not cross the line with your feet.  The time starts on your first crack.  Those are the rules.  That is the way participants interact with the competition.  Like in all things in life, that is how we plan to achieve success, cutting as many targets as possible in the fastest time you can.  What fascinates me is all the variables that come up in pressured events that can wreck those plans.  The people who usually win at these things, whether they are in bullwhip competitions or big business deals, can manage those variables. 

Bullwhip Speed Switch

Many talented people are good at the exhibitions in the bullwhip world, but not so good at the competitions.  Without the pressure of time, where they can show off the skills that they’ve practiced for hundreds of hours, they are magnificent world record holders, and it looks great for an audience.  But when they apply the same methods to a timed competition, things go bad and don’t look so good.  It has always fascinated me how the difference between the two is so applicable to life in general.  People who study and practice a lot in life can put on a great show.  But when the pressure is on, they usually choke.  That choke is what people tell me thousands of times a week and expect me to accept because that has become fashionable in the world, to accept failure. Instead, my thing is to get comfortable with pressure and danger and learn to manage the variables.  Not to yield to them.

I have done those contests for many decades now every year at the Annie Oakley event, and not a single one has ever been the same.  Sometimes the popper blasts off the end of my whip.  Sometimes the whip gets caught on the target stand, as happened this year.  Sometimes we perform on grass, sometimes on smoothed concrete where the whip slowly slides all over the place. Sometimes the wind kicks up and throws off your aim.  Sometimes, a speedy guy will have luck catching most of the targets on their first run, forcing you to go faster than you are comfortable with.  All those variables are what make the good from the bad.  It’s not the skill; everyone who competes has talent.  But it’s in how you manage the variables that matter most.  

Its all in fun, but is it……………………..?

Ultimately, that is one of the big takeaways from The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I’ve been a professional in the industry for more than three decades, and I work with people who also have a lot of experience.  Everyone has lots of experience; they go to college, get trained and try to do the best they can.  My point is that little things like these extra little competitions I do, such as bullwhip competitions force you to adapt to all the things they don’t teach you in an orthodox society.  How can you use your skills to accommodate all the things that happen that you don’t control?  Can you still win then?  Well, of course, you can.  But what makes me madder than a hornet that some kid has stuck a stick into its nest is when someone tells me something can’t be done because they have not learned themselves how to manage variables in their life.  That they accept that anything outside of their skill level is a mystery that they automatically yield to.  To me, that is just the kind of thing they should all be training for, in having the skill to do the job, but in honing those skills so that they can adapt to the variables that come up along the way.  That they can successfully manage the situation when it’s never optimal and still succeed. 

Rich Hoffman

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

How To Lie With Statistics: Bill Gates and his big secret

Bill Gates and the Way to Lie with Statistics

I’ve been watching all the press for Vivek Ramaswamy’s new book Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam and Mark Livin’s American Marxism, and it has been frustrating.  They are poking around the rim to a much deeper problem, and that’s a baked-in ingredient to the original scam.  And that scam is very much a part of all our lives, a recent invention that touches us at every possible level.  For that very reason, I set the conditions of my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, at a time before the progressive era.  We need real answers to these problems, not just asking the questions. That’s not to say Woke Inc or Mark’s American Marxism are not good books.   They are great books, and everyone should read them.  But they are short on solutions.  We all know that first you have to ask the questions, but like most things in our modern world, the answers are never entirely within reach, and many people spend their whole lives looking for their fulfillment.  But they can’t get it because of a bit of scam that started at the start of the academic age where technology passed over the airwaves and into people’s living rooms.  Where television and advertising attacked people’s intellect in ways they had no previous intellectual defense mechanism.  And an age was created where billionaires and corporations could function in ways that no king of England ever could, through subversion of all national sovereignty hiding behind a façade of free-market capitalism when in fact, the villains are among the worst dictators the world has ever known.  Bill Gates comes to mind.  Gates is a guy who gained a lot of wealth early in his life.  So he replaced the ambitions that typically occupy paying off mortgages and raising children with climate change and vaccination obsessions. Over time, it has warped his mind into a villain for all liberty lovers everywhere. 

I guess I had read it before.  The book was so old that I read it first years ago.  But I didn’t know until recently that Bill Gates had put his blurb of approval on the front cover when the book was released to the public in 1993, at the height of Microsoft’s rise to power.  The book How to Lie with Statistics was initially published in 1954, and much of it reflects a time long forgotten when the average income for most American homes was much lower than it is today.  Seeing one of these modern versions of these books with Bill Gates’ name on it, after all the Covid mess, the election discrepancies, the push for a Green New Deal, the multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, it was to me like a Batman villain leaving behind some hint that the source of the crime was within reach, but that the villain knew people were not smart enough to figure it out.  It was as if Bill Gates was saying, “the answer is right in front of you fools, but you do not have the minds to see it.” His endorsement of this old book by Darrell Huff is pretty much mockery if you look at it in reverse, from the comfort of hindsight.  What Vivek and Mark and many other modern political pundits and writers missed when analyzing contemporary events was that the villains of our day were using the methods of this little obscure book.  Well known among the billionaire activists of the world are books like this, to commit open crimes right in front of our faces.  Rules for Radicals come to mind, as well as The Communist Manifesto.  They have positioned themselves as the most intelligent people on earth who have the most money, so naturally, we assume they know what they are talking about.  But what they want is revenge for being geeks or domination of the world, such as George Soros has always been after.  If there is any law we need in this world if we are not going to have honest elections and put our billionaire in the White House, then we need to eliminate certain kinds of donors whom we know use their money for evil to undo our Constitution.  George Soros certainly falls under that category, but then again, so does Bill Gates. 

Bill Gates little Secret

Lying with statistics didn’t start with those modern terrorists.  Human beings worldwide never really figured out how to filter media such as radio and television once our private time went from fixing tractors to suddenly watching I Love Lucy on tv each week and the ads that accompanied them.  Suddenly, we were inundated with statistics of every kind because statistics told a story, such as how many people like to ride school buses and how much meat men and women eat on Tuesdays.  We never solved the validity of statistics in any society on earth and who tells the story.  What happened to us was that honest people continued to earn honest livings on farms and factories, coming home to their families each day as dutiful Americans. Still, the scum bags, the shysters, and scam artists of every kind and the activists who wanted to rule the world found a new game in town, the art of manipulation through mass media and the ability to lie with statistics so that social movements could be moved toward those who wanted power.  Bill Gates knew what he wanted to do with his life.  He was already rich and could have anything he wanted in the world.  But what his money couldn’t buy was public sentiment for his religion of global warming.  But he could use his money to influence opinion with all kinds of statistics, and that is how it started with him and where we find ourselves to this very day. 

How the scam works

All the villainy we have seen involving Covid-19 is described in the book How to Lie With Statistics.  Without question, Bill Gates endorsed this reprint of the book as a kind of hint, a game he was playing with the world, a catch me if you can sort of thing.  He did it again in 2015 when he put the book on his summer reading list with other books about vaccines and other troubling issues.  It’s an easy book to read; it’s certainly not complicated.  Other books like it have been written since, yet Bill Gates picked this one to endorse personally.  Not exactly the book of a modern genius. Instead, it’s like the Rosebud from Citizen Kane, where Gates would destroy the world to save it from human beings and their statistical improbabilities of climate change, only to leave everyone confused as to how it all happened.  But Gates can laugh and look in the mirror, declaring that he initially gave us all the hints.  But we were too stupid to see it, so in that way, he can then transform all his guilt onto us.  After all, he was the honest patron who told us how evil he was and what he planned to do.  It was our fault that we let him do it.  Do you see how that works?

All the math on Covid was wrong, purposely misleading just as they say to do in How To Lie With Statistics.  When colds used to be counted by deaths, this new method measured everything in cases.  Like the example in the picture of the farms that increased over a five-year period, it wasn’t farmed property that changed.  It was just that the rules were changed to give more properties the qualification of being a farm.  What governments worldwide did following Bill Gates and his money began to measure things differently regarding colds.  They did it because they wanted Bill Gates funding, something that Gates had the money to give away even though he could care less about any of it.  Money could buy for Bill Gates love or homes.  But what he wanted was influence over power-hungry people who didn’t care what statistics Bill Gates gave them.  For a fee, they’d take it and run with it, and in so doing, people like Gates were able to purchase up most of the media culture.  And people never noticed faulty statistics from honest ones because everything was hidden behind a common assumption in all media, that other people more intelligent than we were made all the statistics we heard about.  But what the gag and crime were always meant to hide was that the people making the statistics weren’t so smart.  They were vicious and evil.  But to mask it from themselves, they even gave us the method they planned to use against us, to our doom.  But they knew we would not even look at it and would fall for their scams anyway.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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