Category: Mystery

Sheriff Jones Endorses the Governor of the Most Corrupt State in America: A solution to the stupidity of Mike DeWine

Another Reason Corruption is Good to See

This is precisely why I value the measurement of corruption, which I talk about extensively in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. For the last several weeks, people around me have been asking, “what is going on with our great Sheriff Jones” the Butler County figure that is internationally known for his support of President Trump. Suddenly he has thrown his support to Governor Mike DeWine and made a whole lot of other flip flop decisions that seem ultimately at odds with the MAGA movement. So there is a bit of a panic on the matter, which I have explained as a form of corruption that must be accounted for to understand the decision-making process of Sheriff Jones. Corruption isn’t always just about money, but in the case of Jones and DeWine, without a Trump in the White House, many in the Republican Party are drifting back into the cave of power for the sake of it, and that is why we are seeing rifts forming ahead of the Ohio primary coming up in May of 2022. Unless we have a way of understanding the nature of corruption, we would otherwise have no other means of comprehending these strange behaviors. Trump has at least three more years before he’ll have a chance to be back in the White House. Naturally, Jones must align himself to the world between now and then. Yes, he is perfectly willing to adjust his beliefs to the power void that has formed in Trump’s wake, and from his point of view, the smart money points at the current governor of Ohio, the most corrupt state in all of the United States, Mike DeWine. 

As all this is going on, the challenging governor and my pick for the upcoming primary, Jim Renacci, is up 8 points over the incumbent DeWine. I had the opportunity to listen to Mike DeWine on many conference calls during the Covid mishap that his administration unleashed on Ohio. I have seen behind the veil just what an idiot DeWine was. I voted for him in the last election because he called himself a Republican. What I heard during the government-imposed shutdowns was a complete fool out of touch with reality. One moment in particular that impacted me was when I had to listen to Cedar Fair Amusements in May of 2020 try to explain their problem to DeWine about the trouble with not knowing when they could open their amusement parks because they had to hire, prepare their parks, and take all kinds of measures to get ready for a summer season that government had destroyed, and couldn’t give any guidance going forward. As a right-to-life governor, DeWine had put the pro-abortion Obama activist Amy Acton as head of his Health Department. She was running the state the way a stringy-haired pot-smoking hippie would run it, which was costing the business community billions of dollars during a lockdown over Covid that nobody could see the end of, especially Cedar Fair Amusements who ran a seasonal operation in two Ohio locations. It was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and DeWine wouldn’t commit to anything to help them out. That was pretty much what DeWine said to everyone on those many teleconferences concerned over their businesses. His message was, we’re the government, and we’ll tell you when and what you can do and how long you can do it, and you’ll like it. Mike DeWine showed himself to be just as bad as the worst of Democrats during his first three years in office, and what he has done to Ohio will take decades to fix. So for me, it’s easy; Jim Renacci is the answer to the Mike DeWine debacles of the first term in office as governor.  DeWine has been a disaster.

Sheriff Jones has been something of a thorn in DeWine’s side while Trump was in office. DeWine was one of the first in the country to attempt mask mandates leading all other governors to the mandate first, just as he did with lockdowns. Without DeWine, many other governors only fantasized about it. DeWine was the first to do it. He was also the first to unconstitutionally alter election laws which would then pave the way for massive cheating that the Democrats would perform later that year with mail-in voting to remove Trump from office before the courts could even process the assault. Sheriff Jones, who advertised himself as a “pro Trump” member of law enforcement, suddenly endorsed DeWine for governor after all that DeWine had done to Ohio. Why? Well, the first thing is that the DeWine money machine is kicking in. Corruption and DeWine are never far from each other, and Sheriff Jones is always attracted to a kind of power. I’ve known Sheriff Jones for several years and what’s most valuable to him is his brand. For instance, when his brand is aligned with the Trump White House, it’s a wonderful thing. But I’ve seen it negatively align with big government union business, especially in 2013 when he backed the Lakota school tax increase, which he put his name behind to get it to pass by the most narrow of margins. So the Sheriff isn’t always a hard conservative; he just plays one on TV and in public appearances. And with Biden in the White House for the foreseeable future and Jones up in years himself, he needs to protect his brand while the political world sets itself in a new reality. 

What does Sheriff Jones like to do with his brand? Well, we have seen what he did to Thomas Hall, an Ohio Representative from Middletown who didn’t vote the way that the Sheriff wanted him to vote in Columbus, so the Sheriff used his name to berate the young man on WLW radio to thousands of people, personally attacking Thomas. Nobody elected Sheriff Jones to control other members of congress that we have elected to vote on our behalf. The Sheriff is supposed to take care of law enforcement concerns, not to dictate the terms of how other Republicans vote in our community by bullying them to his will. As a reaction to Thomas, the Sheriff went out of his way to put a primary candidate up against the Ohio Rep by dragging Matt King into the race, which naturally was pitting Republicans against Republicans on purpose for the intention of getting his way and making his point as being the “king maker” of the party, which put all kinds of people into a difficult position. Sheriff Jones didn’t care. He just wanted to show who had the power and what they had to do to kiss the ring to appease him, to hell what the voters of Butler County thought about the matter. That is why Jones had to align with Mike DeWine. Even though the governor is known to be attached to corruption, that power overflow gives Sheriff Jones the power to his brand that feeds his need to stay relevant as a man coming to the end of his career. Jones doesn’t have time to wait for Trump to be back in the White House. The need for power is always present, and DeWine is the quickest way to keep it. 

Now, of course, Jones would never admit to any of this. I’ve spoken to dozens and dozens of people affected by this situation, and they don’t know what to think about it. They feel betrayed and don’t have the words to put to the matter. That is why I like corruption so much, because if we didn’t have some way to measure corruption, no matter what form it exists, we wouldn’t have a way to explain this behavior. From his big labor union perspective, everyone thinks they are doing right; Jones thinks he’s doing what’s right for the Republican Party. He’s a moderate at best, and Thomas Hall has turned out to be way too Trump for his taste, so he is taking action. DeWine loved the way Amy Acton’s hair smelled after she took a shower, so he gave her the keys to Ohio and let her destroy it. As a long-married guy who is a closet Democrat, DeWine thought Acton knew what she was doing, so he defended her against all those evil business leaders who were outraged that DeWine and Acton had closed them down over Covid. DeWine showed himself to be an idiot who thought he was doing right. That’s why we have elections so that when we learn these things about people, we can get rid of them with an option, in this case, Jim Renacci. But honestly, there is only one right, not the right that Sheriff Jones comes up with, or his new buddy, Mike DeWine. But in our Republic, for it ever to really stand, it takes the taxpayers and respect for their vote. If they pick Thomas Hall, it’s not for Sheriff Jones to decide otherwise. Or for DeWine to attempt to hide four years of horrible management of Ohio behind one deal from Intel worth 20 billion dollars and to ride it like a bucking bronco at a rodeo. Corruption seeks to hide its misdeeds behind a façade that, if you know what you are looking at, can tell you the truth about the matter and allow voters to understand who they are getting involved with. And that is why corruption is a lot better to understand than to pretend like it doesn’t exist at all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Want to Know Why We Aren’t Using Ivermectin to Treat Covid: Read Ayn Rand’s ‘Anthem’ to understand

More so than before Trump was in office, Ayn Rand’s work has absolute power in identifying who the enemy of our modern times is and what can be done to defeat them. Before Trump, there were many considerations, and nobody really knew whether or not the American Constitution would hold up under the Obama presidency. But now we know it will. Trump was a good, Constitutional president, and he showed the world just how powerful America could be if it followed its Constitution. It took him essentially just a few years, even under great fire, to fix many things that had been long paralyzing our country from the countless attacks that came from those unnamed enemies over the last century. Even with all their efforts, America could snap back into good effect quickly, and that is what we learned with Trump, historically. So now that we have seen the Constitution tested authentically, we can now turn our attention to the enemies and understand them and their motives so we can eradicate them from our lives. And to do that, I can’t think of a better writer, or creative person, in all human history that has put their hand on who that enemy to humanity is than Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand is the Holy Water to evil in the world. They hate her, and for great reason. But she is very much a product of American culture. Specifically, under this current Biden administration, the most significant authority of what is wrong with the kind of people who want to end America. And of all her works, I would say that her book Anthem, from 1938, is the best at showing who those enemies are and what they want to drive us all to, and I’d recommend everyone to read it now.

I read many books; it’s one of my favorite things to do. I’ve read Brave New World, Animal Farm,and 1984. I’ve spoken a lot about the novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward from 1888, which projected a socialist utopia across the world. These are all dystopian novels that many consider irrefutable classics in literature, and they have gone to a great measure to shape our modern world and our opinions about authority and government. But a better and more hopeful dystopian novel has never been written than Ayn Rand’s Anthem. I’ve read all her books many times, and I don’t think there is a better novel of this type out there. Anthem isn’t very long; you can easily read it in an afternoon. But its scope and story are undoubtedly influential and insightful. As a Russian immigrant who suffered greatly under communism and retreated to America for a safe haven, Ayn Rand took her unique perspective and passion and translated it into this magnificent masterpiece. And even though at this point it is nearly 100 years old, it is as relevant today as it was then, perhaps more so. I tend to think that everyone knows these books until I hear the constant complaints by many regarding Covid protocols and the lack of use of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin to treat the virus, and I say to them, “didn’t you read Anthem? That’s what the whole book was about?” Of course, the look I get back is mystification. “What’s Anthem?”

Essentially the point of the book is that a future society has regressed along the Vico Cycle back to a theocratic society that has retreated to a time before technological invention. A village council of wise people called the Council of Candlemakers spent 50 years inventing and getting it approved, the great new technology of making candles. The lead character, who has never known anything about the world like the rest of society, but social collectivism, doesn’t even have an understanding of the word “I” or “me.” Yet through a series of accidents, he discovers a lightbulb deep in a tunnel that has been hidden from the world hundreds of years in the past, perhaps even thousands. And upon discovering the light bulb (again), he takes it to the Council of Candlemakers, expecting them to be thankful. But what he finds instead are a bunch of threatened people who have spent their whole life inventing the candle and sharing it with the world. The lightbulb would destroy their power and prestige in their community which has far more power to them than the convenience of using lightbulbs over candles in that particular society. Many before Covid came along couldn’t understand such a reference. But now, they have seen it firsthand. Ivermectin is that modern lightbulb that the health authority class is threatened by. They want power and control, not a solution to Covid, and there you have it; we have the evidence of the villains in Anthem, except clearly now in real life in a way that people can understand. 

The book, as I said, is very easy to read. It’s short. But to make things even easier for new readers, or even old readers of Ayn Rand, The Atlas Society back in 2018 turned Anthem into a graphic novel, which was then turned into a series of videos that were easy to watch. Eighteen episodes will take viewers through the entire book. When The Atlas Society did this work, Trump was in the White House, so I guess the effort went unnoticed. People had an Ayn Rand character in the White House, and people dropped off interest a bit because of it in this kind of reading material. Ayn Rand was very popular during the Obama presidency. Now that Biden is in the White House, which continues that “enemy” of America perspective, Ayn Rand is making a comeback. I have had so many people talking to me about Ayn Rand and wanting to know more about her that I decided to do this to make it easier for people to get easy access to all her great works. The difference between now and the past obviously is that Constitutional element. In Ayn Rand’s day, she saw only a gradual erosion until the world would literally be destroyed in the way it was in Anthem. But a hundred years later, the American Constitution is still intact and is working. Of late, the Biden Vaccine mandates have been slapped down by the Supreme Court in a healthy way, so we have survived a lot of trouble since Anthem was written. But understanding the motives of the bad guys is another matter. They are still doing their work, and we now must know what they are after and stop them in the tracks. For that, Anthem will help a lot.

The villains of Ayn Rand’s novels are very much a real thing; we see them every one, in our communities, our national governments, our businesses, and even our families. It can be hard to see them because of the emotion that comes with our relationships with them that can cause us not to want to know the truth. Yet the truth is the truth, and if we really want to solve our modern problems, we must not turn away from it. Literature is a great refuge to get our thoughts together and to seek solutions, and to do that; you must know how to identify the problem. Nobody but Ayn Rand was better at articulating that problem, and Anthem is a masterwork of hers that everyone should read. And to make it as easy as possible, the graphic novel videos are fantastic introductions to her work or tenacious reminders of its relevancy. Yet whatever the case, Anthem is the only way to understand Covid-19 because all other reasons for rationality fall short otherwise.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Darbi Boddy’s Pre-Covid Proposal at Lakota: Making masks the parents’ choice, not a political imposition

Removing Masks from Kids at Lakota, Freedom of Choice

The first thing that everyone must understand is that wearing masks as protection from Covid or to spread Covid to others is 100% emotional, containing 0% logic. There isn’t one scientific study that rules in favor of masks being a preventative measure at all in relation to Covid, and over time, since March of 2020 when health departments in an initial act of helplessness wanted to take steps to slow the spread of the virus as it was unleashed on the world to do something, even if it was symbolic, not to incite a public panic as their worlds came undone with Mike DeWine lockdowns and closure of the American economy during a presidential election year. After two years of this behavior, some people are naturally timid and want to believe they can do something to control the various virus spawns that have come from Covid, and their fears have taken over their rationality. In a school system like Lakota with over 17,000 students in the population, there are lots of people who believe lots of things, but when it comes to the wearing of masks and imposing that belief on children who are supposed to be learning to think and not just take orders, this issue of mandating masks in schools has been detrimental to the learning culture of all public schools. Thankfully, the newly elected school board member Darby Boddy has made a motion to add a resolution to the agenda of the January 24th school board meeting to reset the health measures established before March 20th of 2020. In other words, to be rid of the mask mandates and the additional Covid standards that spawned from much irrationality as Covid was unleashed into our society and opinions about how to deal with it evolved strictly down political viewpoints, not around scientific logic. Darbi is proposing for Lakota to take leadership on the mask mandate issue and show the rest of Ohio what a logical management approach to the issue should look like, which is a wonderful thing that essentially took a new election even to put on the table. And thank God she has.

Now naturally, all the people who have been standing in the way of addressing this mask-wearing issue in public schools had their faces melt as Darbi proposed pages and pages of information supporting her position toward the safety resolution. But logic was never the factor in making children wear masks. What essentially happened was that all the really timid people in the world who seek government jobs in the health departments, the Governor’s office in Ohio, school administration jobs, people afraid of lightening, of wind, of sunsets, suddenly Covid gave them power over all the scary risk-takers in the world and they became addicted to the power like a drug addict on Heroin. And after two years of the behavior, they do not want to give up that power over others. They certainly don’t want to go back to normal before March 2020. For them, which is many of the employees in the Lakota school system, the lawyers who they employ, all the surrounding public employee unions, even the police unions, Covid has given them the cover story of their dreams, and they have no desire to return to “normal.” Roughly 5% of any work culture always want a doctor’s note to get them out of work whenever they want. Covid is far better than FMLA or any regular doctor’s note if they should be inclined to take a day off work excused. All you have to do with Covid is say that you were next to someone who was next to someone, who was next to someone who had Covid, and “poof,” you must stay in quarantine for some CDC recommended days. No doctor’s note, no logical approach, just perceptual reality. Covid has been a dream come true for the lazy in any workforce. 

Therefore, the fight to continue the mask-wearing mandates extends beyond political parties and descends into the cover of the less inclined employees. They spend a lot of time in their lives looking for reasons not to work. And that makes the management of any workforce a nightmare to conduct. That is certainly true in the private sector, but in a large school district like Lakota with thousands of students and hundreds of teachers and administrators, a 5% call-off rate is a nightmare to cover. To follow all the ridiculous CDC rules is irrational at best. But that’s what has been happening. The medical tyrants have had their way, and everyone has danced to their tune, including most legal representation. For lawyers, the easy thing for them to do is to recommend full compliance to CDC recommendations, even though there is no legal authority for the CDC or any local department of health to impose mandates of any kind on anybody, anywhere. Outside of government work, which public schools are, much life is returning to normal, such as in the NFL, where stadiums are open. People are enjoying the games as they did before March of 2020. Of course, the CDC recommends other behavior, but fans of the NFL experience are done with Covid and are returning to “normal,” and we do not see mass deaths. We hear alarming reports about case spikes, but as history shows, these cases aren’t any different from common colds in the past, and people have learned to live their lives anyway. They get the virus, get over it, and return to their lives as they always did. That same approach needs to be applied to all public schools as well. Covid protocols have gone on too long, and it is now having an impact on children in a negative way, which Darbi included evidence of in her proposed resolution, which will be voted upon in February 2022. 

For life to return to normal, which needs to, people like Darbi need to show leadership in political opposition. At this point, any scientific consideration about Covid isn’t a factor. There is nothing in science to support that masks do anything rational to help with Covid in any way. Instead, it’s purely political. It’s political for the teacher’s union. It’s political for the health departments. It’s political for the CDC connected to the Biden administration. It’s political for the law firms who see this Covid issue as easy money. But for those who must lead others and show courage to the world, it’s time to return to a normal life. To stop being afraid of Covid. And to start managing it proactively. It’s OK to support timid people who have real fears about Covid created for them in countless news reports rooted in politics and not rationality. But the purpose of a public school is to teach children, and it is the task of our society to ensure that they have the best opportunity at a good life while in that school experience. The authority figures might not want to surrender the controls they’ve enjoyed during Covid. But we owe it to children everywhere to take that leadership and show them that life goes on and that they don’t need to be afraid of every little thing in the world. The only thing dangerous about Covid is the perception that a government alliance with media has created. Legally, there is nothing to take action on. There is no liability to irrational fears. There is no constitutional enforcement. Governors have tried, and they have learned that the Supreme Courts of the states and the Federal level have no stomach for this nonsense. It’s time to take all that power back away from those who have become so addicted to all this Covid abuse. And to give kids a chance at a normal life, once again. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Good Government of Lakota Schools: Yes, elections do have consequences

Lakota is Off to a Great Start

Sometimes we get to talk about good things, which this article is one of them. The first Lakota school board meeting of 2022 was an excellent example of a good government. Over the years, I’ve watched thousands of hours of school board meetings, not just at Lakota, but from all over the states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, and I will have to say that this particular meeting which is included below, is perhaps the best one that I have seen. It was good, of course, to see that Lynda O’Conner was again President of the Board. But what made the meeting so good, aside from how smoothly Lynda transitioned from topic to topic, was the additions of the newly elected Republican endorsed members, Isaac Adi, who was designated already as the Vice-President, and the freedom representative Darbi Boddy. I was very impressed with those two new additions and the kind of questions. As they learn the job, if they can keep up with that level of engagement, Lakota will be very successful in the years to come. That is precisely how government should work. Not everyone will get along. But I will say that the attention to everyone in the room was outstanding, constructive, and conducive to conversation that leads to problem-solving, and that is fantastic. In all these government schools, chaos has been ruling for a long time, and those elements of chaos are indeed circling the campfire of that Lakota board meeting, waiting for everyone to go to sleep so they can feast. But I have a feeling, especially knowing the personalities of these new school board members, that the chaos will wear out before they do. Good to see!

Of course, most of these meetings are never very sexy. For instance, a school board member like Darbi, that ran on a platform of national concern and parent transparency, will find that she might only get to spend 5% of her time on the topics she cares most about. Most of the meetings will be votes on boring issues, like application fees for substitute teachers or the latest call-offs of the bus drivers. These may seem like small, inconsequential things, but there is good work to be done on all of them, and that is usually where school board candidates get bored and start to tune out. But in watching Darbi and Isaac, it is clear that they are going into the job with the right frame of mind. They are keeping their important campaign promises in focus while they also indulge themselves in the job’s nuances and extract value out of the tiniest little bits. It’s not always the big sexy things that determine the success or failure of a school district; it’s the thousands of little things that lead up to the big things, and if those get dealt with, with the enthusiasm that Isaac and Darbi showed on this first meeting, the 20th meeting will be much, much better and so will Lakota and all the participants in the district. 

For instance, as an example of tiny details that are of paramount importance, Superintendent Matt Miller gave an update to the Covid situation, the bussing call-offs, and the general below-the-line problems of managing hundreds of employees, where generally 5% of any work culture will use any excuse to call off work, excused. Covid has created a situation where those types of people are empowered to call off perpetually, without any recourse. Of course, the teacher’s union loves this problem because it benefits them, and Matt gave his summary in a manner where he felt like a victim of circumstance. The district’s management had been taken out of the Board’s hands and placed at the alter of the  Butler County Department of Health, and the union had a free pass to call off work as much as they could. Obviously, the way to break up this labor impasse would be to have plenty of substitute teachers ready to call at a moment’s notice to keep classes moving. But as we learned, there is a government fee within the county of more than $125 just to apply to be a substitute teacher. This was revealed in the meeting by a bright personality named Alicia Davis, who wants to be part of a solution to the staffing shortages but needs help getting through the bureaucracy of government to get to where the need is. There are likely thousands of young women just like Alicia who are willing and able to cover that 5% call-off ratio. However, obviously, the fee is a problem, a discouraging one. If anybody wanted to solve the problem, it would be wise for Lakota to find a way to cover the fee, get the applicant, and ultimately the resource. That may seem like a little thing, but little things lead to big things. 

For instance, the next time a labor contract comes up for a vote. Teachers want to be collectively paid more money and are threatening to walk; if Lakota has a bunch of sharp-witted volunteers waiting to be called into class to teach to keep the schools open, then that network would already be established. When I talked about chaos ruling these schools, this is one of the ways it happens. A superintendent like Matt is trying to navigate all the rules and regulations and finds himself reacting to everything over time. The Board needs to give him proactive solutions to these problems that also pave the way for possible labor strikes from the teacher’s union at the slightest provocation. If they decide to leave work and management has the task of keeping the school open, what else could be done. The chaos is caused by the high cost and bureaucracy of becoming a substitute teacher; the $125 usually scares off most applicants because they couldn’t afford to pay it for a part-time job they may not get much return on the investment from. So, the vacancies go unfulfilled, and solutions are never presented to the labor problem leaving the school a victim to the labor force that can be very politically active at times.   I would say that Lakota is a great place to live because of people like Alicia, not because of any measure of labor that might be employed at any given time. Good parents make good kids, and good kids make a good school. The purpose of government, in this case, is to remove those barriers, not to throw $125 roadblocks up to feed chaos. But to remove chaos from the management process because in chaos is where many lost dollars disappear.

But there will be time for more of that kind of talk for later. For now, I’m just happy to see an actual, functioning school board that has the look and feel of real management. I’m sure there will be trouble, but the measure of good management is how well that trouble is handled, and by the looks of Lynda, Darbi, and Isaac, everything is off to a great start, and it is very encouraging to start the year off. This school board meeting was the kind of school board I have been hoping for, for over 30 years. And although it’s only one, the obvious signs of future success are there for all to see. There is an excellent reason to be excited, and I am. Perhaps things will get better, and that all starts with elections because they have consequences.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Difference Between Me and Ayn Rand: To Strike or to Fight

Ayn Rand is a Good Place to Start, I like to Stand and Fight

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. I have read many books over the last four decades, but the author that is specifically American and deals specifically with the evils of our present time is Ayn Rand. Books like hers would not be produced by any other culture other than an American one, and the specific challenges we have now are addressed in those works, so it’s the quickest way to get people to what they need to know by referring them to her. I was delighted when President Trump was elected because, in many ways, I felt he was the main character from The Fountainhead and that America would prosper quite a lot by having an Ayn Rand type of hero in the White House. Ayn Rand fans have found my Gunfighter’s Guide blog site a safe place to think about big things for many years. The people I get along with most are people of the Objectivist philosophy, a branch of philosophy created by Ayn Rand, which I would say is a natural evolution of thought going back to well before Plato in Greece. It helped that Ayn Rand came from Russia, where communism ruined her life and the lives of everyone she knew. Fleeing to America, she had a platform to express those disappointments, and that became her great American novels. Most of all, Ayn Rand identified a very treacherous enemy, which I would simplify as the great fight between the lazy and the ambitious. Most of the world’s governments are in a fight to appease the lazy while profiting on the ambitious efforts, including parasites like the Davos crowd who want the same without the burden of even being in a government. But that’s not to say I agree with everything Ayn Rand said or did. For quite a long time, I have been doing my own thing that requires some explanation that many are having when they talk to me, as they have been lately very ambitiously, about Atlas Shrugged because it is so relevant to the world we see today.

I have several problems with Ayn Rand; first of all, she was an atheist. While that can bring a fresh perspective to a way of thinking, the lack of spiritual curiosity is too rigid for me. I have my own philosophy going on; I would never count myself an Objectivist or a disciple of Ayn Rand, which is why I’m not more involved in the various groups that evolved out of Ayn Rand. Too many people who call themselves Objectivists are just as religiously rigid in dedication to her as Christian people are to Jesus Christ. I have a problem with group behavior in general; all of them have the problem of insisting that their point of view of the world is the final nail in a coffin. Any challenge to their superiority results in conflict. In Ayn Rand’s case, her supporters tend to like to mimic the events of the book, to Strike against the world and deny it of their talents, hiding in some remote places in society and letting everything fall apart. That is my main problem with Atlas Shrugged; it’s built on the premise of Striking, which I am against in every way that you can imagine. I am a person who is against limits to my ambition, and I propose to fight those who get in my way instead of running away from them. I write my own books, and my latest, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, is my argument that it is far better to be a Gunfighter than an Objectivist in society.   Ayn Rand came late to the American experiment while it was under attack by global socialism pushes. In history, America had done great things long before she came along, even though our educations have sought to remove that evidence from our eyes. Essentially, the gunfighter mentality of western expansion was an approach that worked and should further be projected to the world at large instead of all this “striking” business. It’s like some wife that is trying to convince her husband into something she wants him to do by denying him sex. Withdrawing work in our society is not a solution, I would say we need to fight for our right to be productive, not to yield to the forces that are trying to shut it all down.

There were characters in Ayn Rand’s books who refused to the very end to hide from the parasites of existence, but my view of the entire effort is that it’s a feminine one. Women look at conflict differently than men do, biologically. I see no reason to yield to the lazy just so they don’t rob my existence, and that is essentially the plot of Atlas Shrugged.   Deny the world of your great effort until they say uncle and beg you to return to society to save them. Because by themselves, they will choke and destroy their lives. Then there was the problem with Objectivists over the Trump Presidency. He was too compromising to be the uncompromising figures from The Fountainhead. Ultimately, Objectivists had a problem with him as a person. That is where I separated myself from them during 2015 and 2016. Instead, I found the game of Poker and the smell of gunpowder to be much more effective in doing the same, in protecting the integrity of the ambitious while knocking down the efforts of the lazy to loot off the productive. When dealing with people with all types of backgrounds, we can’t afford to be rigid. It’s like landing in some foreign country and expecting them to know your home language. You have to adjust your thought to the people capable of considering it, and by such measures, you can win over everyone. Ayn Rand’s run and hide suggestion don’t appeal to me. I prefer 100% of the time to stand and fight. And I’ll fight over anything and everything.   But to me, that fight is more like winning at Poker with all the skills needed to win each round than in surrendering integrity to the masses. 

With all that said, there isn’t a better story out there than Atlas Shrugged at identifying our times’ problems. Where I disagree with Ayn Rand and Objectivists in general, it’s really a matter of strategy. But to understand the issues we are dealing with, which is why we are talking about Ayn Rand again a year into the Biden administration, which is ripped essentially straight from the pages of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand is a great place to start.   I would blame her rigidity in thought, her either-or approach to things on being a European immigrant who never fully recovered from what the Soviet Union did to her family. She became a libertarian in America, supportive of loose sex and drugs, and had a rigid political view which formed her concept of Atlantis in the book. Many of her followers are looming out there, disconnected from the problems of our times as much as they can be. They will not help the Biden administration have success off their efforts. They will Strike and let him die on the vine. But for me, that is a boring way to approach this problem. I much more respect the attitude of Andrew Jackson, who would dual anybody in a gunfight at the slightest provocation, and in essence, brought our government under a proper kind of control for the first time since the creation of the Constitution. President Trump reminds me a lot of President Jackson; he’s just as combative, just not with guns. But it is in that attitude I see its best to eliminate the enemies from our lives. And it’s the position I have with my Gunfighter’s Guide. Playing Poker with the enemy and taking all their money and power is much better than running and hiding. But Ayn Rand is a great place to start for the person looking for answers about why things are the way they are.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Democrats are Desperate, and Losing Power: Remember Aaron Burr and what globalists will do to protect their investments

Never Underestimate What Power Hungry People Will Do For Power

To understand Biden’s speech of January 19th, 2022, and the desperation of it, you have to look at the pressure that was created for the beleaguered President due to President Trump’s weekend speech in mid-January 2022 in Arizona. A year out of office, Trump attracted many thousands of people in the desert, and there they talked about the 2022 strategy of retaking both houses of congress and the capture of the White House in 2024. Trump spoke for over an hour showing great resolve and strength, so the Biden people felt they needed to answer the call. With voter rights legislation designed to give Democrats more of an ability to cheat in the upcoming election to maintain their power in jeopardy, everything was going wrong for Biden, and the administration couldn’t ignore how powerful Trump still was and how much momentum the anti-Biden surge was. So they propped the old man up and threw a hail-Mary hoping for a last-minute touchdown. But the threat of the whole enterprise came alive by accident about an hour and a half into the speech, where the most critical revelation came clear. That’s when a struggling Biden forcing himself to continue standing in front of the press like Trump always did, kept rolling over himself and finally said the most important thing of our times. Biden confessed that his “counterpart” in China, Xi Jinping, had been critical of “western democracy,” and we were being challenged to show its ability to make decisions, as opposed to the communist one-party government of China, who didn’t put things to a vote. They just told everyone what to do, or they killed them. It’s straightforward in China, and Biden used that example as an implied threat. Biden essentially said, under great exhaustion, we are challenged in America to show that our “democracy” can do the people’s work, or else we would fall to the rules of a changing world, the take over of it by the communist Chinese. 

Now that might not seem so bad to the masses, those who have trouble baking cookies even with the extensive instructions that come on the box for oven baking these days. But for those who are students of history, they might remember when Aaron Burr tried to stir up the chaos of the Mexican territories away from the Spanish to rise up against Thomas Jefferson’s administration shortly after the Louisiana Purchase. Burr, on the run from prosecutors in New York who wanted to try him for the murder of Alexander Hamilton during a perfectly justified duel, knew his political future was destroyed. The Federalists wanted his head, and the Republicans behind Jefferson thought of him as a liability to the party and wanted nothing to do with the talented young strategist, Burr. So Burr did what he thought was his only option, to stir up an insurrection on the western frontier and try to become the leader of his own country. Of course, this would occur a half-century before Jefferson Davis would attempt to cut America in half to maintain the European aristocracy of Europe in the South to preserve the institution of slavery, which came from years of the previous occupation. Turmoil and scandal are always on the horizon, including today’s Biden speech. So to assume all is well in the voting world and the maintenance of our republic would be extremely naive. We have an obligation to root out these insurrections as they emerge, as we did with Burr, as we did with Davis, and as we must now with the globalists who are trying to undo the Constitution of America in favor of replacing it with something they come up with so we can chase after the mythical threat of China, which like Covid, was a creation of our own government to acquire more power. 

I’ve said it for years, and I say it more emphatically now than ever. China would be nowhere without the United States. Without a healthy American economy, China dies on the vine very quickly. But, there are old European powers in the United Nations who, like Aaron Burr, know that they want in on the action that the United States has naturally. So they devise schemes to create war and disturbances to advance their own cause. Their latest attempt is the Biden administration. They have found some old fool made rich to purchase his name to promote their schemes. And the latest trick is to point to the Chinese and say, “there is the threat. We have to be more like them to compete with them.” Even though the Chinese were made by those same forces and propped up to get us to look that way instead of toward the United Nations where the World Economic Forum Davos guys are plotting just as Aaron Burr did to take over the world so they could be at the front of the leadership when it happens, this conflict is more significant in scale than the one that Burr planned. Still, it is all done for the same reasons. Those who think they are more intelligent and should be in charge of people by the rules of some imaginary aristocracy want their companies, nations, and billionaire footprints to live on in history, being remembered for something great. So they impose themselves on the rest of us for their devices. And that was what was significant about Biden’s speech; he revealed it without meaning to.

Things are looking very good for the MAGA movement, the carryover of the Tea Party. Trump and many Trump-supporting Republicans are poised to demolish the globalist intentions of this current Democrat Party. The election is only around nine months away, where many House and Senate seats are up for grabs, and the Democrats, as acknowledged by Biden by his long speech, are grasping at the air to attempt to hang on to power. Like Aaron Burr, they are being driven to insanity because they are losing their seat at the table. And that doesn’t mean that we have any obligation to give them a seat. They have lost their political power fair and square. They have shown Americans who they are through fake elections and Covid, and people, real people, don’t like it, which is why Biden is polling in the low thirties just one year into his term. The media can’t cover for these idiots as they have in the past. Now, unlike in the past, people can see just how bad their communist ideas are, and to justify their transgressions, they simply pointed to China and said in desperation, “we need to be more like them or else.” But too many Americans know better now. They voted for Trump, and with no ability to cheat in future elections, Democrats know they can’t keep the charade going any longer, and they are now desperate and caught in their treason and sedition. And their fate will be much the way it was for Aaron Burr, remembered for being a power-hungry insurrectionist instead of a freedom-fighting leader. When Democrats look in the mirror, they see the leader. But because of their stupidity and bad decisions shown to the world, more and more see them as the insurrectionists they have always been. And no amount of media, public relations tricks, or re-branding of their collectivist philosophy can save them now. So, beware of what they will do in these dying days because they are desperate. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

China is Hiding its Guilt: They’re late to the Covid game, but their actions show their intent

China is Hiding their Guilt

There was a bit of humor coming from Don Jr online where he posted, “Florida man found dead in a mansion along with 29 other corpses. Two tons of cocaine and fully automatic AR-15s: Authorities say deaths Covid-19 related.” See, he gets it, and so do most people these days. Covid has been a scam, a giant government cover-up for crimes they got caught conducting to destroy American sovereignty and to deliver us all to the clutches of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset.” They have killed people with Covid by not allowing them access to Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine and instead insisted on some ridiculous notion of hiding from the virus from behind a mask, social distancing, and partnerships with drug companies to force mandated vaccines that don’t work, all to drive a narrative they started in China with government money, to make the virus through “gain of function” with Dr. Fauci at the center of it all. China facilitated all this nonsense and put itself at the center of the action. Now it’s all out of control; two years later, many people died, lives ruined forever, and economic destruction that wipes out the terror of even the worst of our natural disasters. Covid-19 is government stupidity at its highest. Never underestimate what weak-minded people will do to stay in power. Tragedies like Covid-19 are the results, and this has been the worst that we have ever seen in human history. So, of course, a cover-up, like what Don Jr. mentioned with tongue in cheek, is sure to follow, and that’s precisely where China finds itself today. 

It would be funny if it weren’t so true and malicious; I remember it well and reported on it here at this blog site, the New Year in China from 2020 to 2021. They were feeling pretty good about themselves. They celebrated with crowded streets, packed nightclubs, and a finger in the eye of the United States. Trump was leaving the White House, and they would be dealing with their kind of insurgent, President Biden. There would be no more trade war. There would be no criticism of their communist government. China had launched Covid, helped out their United Nations friends with leverage only China could have produced, a virus under the cloak of darkness in the highly unregulated communist country, and it set the world ablaze with Covid protocols invented by a conglomeration of socialists and Marxists at the World Health Organization. That New Year, while the world still was under lockdowns, caused by China’s virus, China was showing how open they were, how well their “communist” government had managed the virus, and were open for business and their continued quest to sink America and the West as GDP competitors in the world marketplace. China was out to put us all down, destroy our cultures, and have us crawl to them for help. That was how 2021 started. But it ended a different way, on the cusp of the Beijing Olympics, which China was now hosting, and they had a problem. The eyes of the world would not go away from Chinese affairs.

China has a different problem now; they have a closed society to control what their people see and hear. But over the last few years, many books have been written in the West about how Covid was created and who was responsible. The most damning I have read is the Kennedy book The Real Dr. Fauci. In that one, it becomes clear that the American Defense Departments and many other political characters wanted to develop bioweapons in China because things could be done there due to their authoritarian government and their closed media to the outside world. They don’t have a Bill of Rights in China, so the authoritarian government can do pretty much anything they want. That was attractive to Democrats in America, so deals were made, and viruses to be used for bioweapons potentially were spawned. China figured they could play all these forces against each other at some point, which is just what they did as Trump was looking to impose trade deals on them that would hurt them dramatically, economically during an election year. China wanted to get rid of Trump, so they “unleashed” the virus. Was it an accident? Well, it’s just as much of an accident as Don Jr’s joking reference to drug cartel deaths being counted as Covid deaths. And now that information is flying around out there, China can’t put it back in the bottle. 

Their response has been to shut down their seaports, some of their most significant cities, and to show the world that they are just as vulnerable to Covid as everyone else. This is a far different China than the one from New Year’s Eve, going into 2021. Just a year later, the western media, books, television, blog sites like this one which has Chinese representatives looking at it every day, but they are unable to do anything about it, have forced them to penalize themselves like the rest of the world is, not because they believe that anything they do will help with the virus. If these governments wanted to solve the Covid problem, we would treat the virus and end it. Instead, now, China and all their conspirators have been caught in the lie, so they must now double down and, in so doing, penalize themselves so they can hide their guilt in the matter, to begin with. Gone is the arrogant audacity of the Chinese government; now they are in full cover-up mode, and the Olympics has only made that problem worse for them. 

But there is also an implied threat in what China is doing. By shutting down several supply chains due to Covid issues, China is warning the world that if they insist on blaming the communist country for its role in creating and spreading Covid, the wheels of the world will stop. The supply chains coming out of China can come to a halt, which will only hurt everyone downstream. So there is that slightly veiled threat that is very much a part of the reality. They are cornered rats who owe the United States alone trillions and trillions of dollars. Trump is already saying that if he gets to be president again, he’ll go after China for the money. Based on his past actions, I believe him.

China now isn’t so confident in its haughty actions because instead of the world coming under their control, as they planned, it is now coming after them in ways that China has no means to control. That is the problem with a tightly controlled government that won’t participate in full disclosures; they are vulnerable most to the opinions of the outside world, which have not been contained. And what’s coming from that outside world is blame, lots of it. And deservedly so. The Covid actions are a little too late for them; the world is pushing back against the health tyranny that came from Covid, and China is now late to the game. That cover won’t last long, so then what? What can China do to fend off the anger of the world? Well, not much. Everyone is coming for China and wants satisfaction from the incursion into their lives, and tempers are hot. Politics will change in America and what that means to China is bad things, very bad things. And believe me, I’ve read the books; China deserves every bit of what they will get. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Martin Luther King Jr., was a Communist: Getting on the same page by reading the same book, ‘Atlas Shrugged’

Atlas Shrugged is a Good Place to Start to Understand Today

I never needed to honor Martin Luther King, nor Nelson Mandela for that matter. Not because they were black leaders. I have never been a racist, nor will I ever be. I would have always treated Martin Luther King as a human being because I don’t see color in people. But I do see communists and other Marxists quite clearly, and King was two things that I can’t stand, he was an adulterer, and he was a communist. That makes him a piece of crap in my book, so there is a bit of slight at hand in honoring the Civil Rights leader with a day of his own, where it’s just one more excuse for people to take a day off work and not to be productive. It was Democrats who mistreated people of color. It was Republicans who freed the enslaved people and tried to empower blacks after the Civil War. It was Democrats who stood in the way of treating Blacks as equal people. So, Democrats don’t get to lecture all of us about how not to be “racist.” And they certainly don’t get to put a communist like Martin Luther King on a pedestal and lecture the rest of us about voter rights using Marxist ideas hidden behind a mask of equality to sell a federal takeover of our elections. To grapple with so many evil characters in our government and their nature, I would point to a portion of history where people were starting to get it, before Trump even entered the presidential race the first time, where thoughtful people were re-discovering Atlas Shrugged, the famous Ayn Rand novel, and seeing play out in reality what she proposed in 1957 about the descent of America into a collectivist nightmare. After all, she had seen it before, in her home country of Russia. And during the late Tea Party period that I’m referring to, around 2010 to 2013, I saw the same kind of resurgence of Atlas Shrugged that jumped on people’s minds as I am starting to see everywhere I go today, after just one year of Joe Biden. People see through the haze and are looking for answers, which Ayn Rand has provided in what I consider the great American novel. 

During that period I spoke about, 2010 through 2013, I did quite a lot of work to help sell the movie version of that book produced by Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro. It has been on my mind because it’s really been since then that I have seen the kind of interest in Atlas Shrugged that I am seeing today. Last week I had no less than 20 different people whisper to me as if they were going to be arrested for saying it, “this all reminds me of Atlas Shrugged.” Meaning, what has been going on with the Biden administration and the state of the world in general, especially with Covid, the Great Reset from the United Nations and World Economic Forum, and other elements of the daily news. As long-time readers here remember, I did quite a lot of work for those movies, to promote them, to talk them up on the radio, and to help sell Parts 1 through III door to door in a hostile media climate that wanted nothing more than to destroy the movies and everyone who made them, just for making them. Many people were shocked by how the media world treated Trump. Well, I wasn’t because I saw how the media and general establishment in unionized Hollywood treated the filmmakers of Atlas Shrugged for daring even to try to make those films. 

My History with Atlas Shrugged

The three movies were hard to make and cost John Aglialoro a lot of money. But he loved Ayn Rand’s book, and he was determined. Even though the three movies had the same general characters from the book, which I would say is about 10% of what’s actually in the book, there were different actors for all three. Hollywood was canceling culture the actors who worked on Atlas Shrugged, which was the first time I had seen this new corporate wokeness. Well, actually, I saw it for the first time when I was in Hollywood myself working on a project, and between takes, my politics naturally came out. I was the only hard-core Republican on set. Everyone got along fine, but I never got an invite to come back. I had a feeling at the time that would be the case, but that’s how it works in Hollywood these days. And by the time Atlas Shrugged the movies came out, it was even worse. From that perspective, the cancel culture of wokeness was written on the wall for a long time, many decades. We just saw more of it the more the villains of our day realized that they didn’t have control. 

There is a scene at the end of the book, and the movie, where they are torturing John Galt for not giving himself over to their looting nature, the villains of the story. Even though the characters are fictional, the situation is not. I have never read a book out of the many thousands I have that best articulated the problems of our current time more than Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. She lived it in Russia and came to America and put it in perspective for all history to identify. When Trump was in the White House, it was essentially an Ayn Rand character that we had there. People who understand Atlas Shrugged were happy about it. People who hate Atlas Shrugged hated it for the same reasons they despised Ayn Rand. There is a science to it which I’ll explain in further work. But for now, people are back to where they were during the Obama administration. They are looking for answers, and they know that Atlas Shrugged is a key to that understanding.

My thoughts on Ayn Rand have evolved over the years. I still like her a lot. I have been invited many times to be in the Objectivist movement, which is her philosophy essentially. The Ayn Rand Institute carries a lot of weight politically. But I’m not an Objectivist. I’m not much of a group player at all. I enjoy my freedom to think independently. Ayn Rand was too sexual for me. She also was much more libertarian than I am. For me, no drugs, no drinking, and no bad behavior. She was an atheist, and she loved to be naked. I’m neither of those things, so I have adopted my own kind of philosophy, which I see as a continuation of the debate she started with her books. I’ve read Atlas Shrugged nine times that I can remember. There may actually be a few more times included. There are a lot of really good ideas in the novel, and for readers today trying to understand what they see in the news, I would highly recommend it. And that is why people are starting to bring it up again, because it’s so relevant to what we are seeing today, especially coming from the Biden administration and the Biden crowd. They could easily be villains from Atlas Shrugged without any exaggeration. In that great novel, Ayn Rand put her finger on the problem and literally predicted the future, including our pains with Dr. Fauci. And with that realization, people are looking to reread the book so they can see how it ends, which to my mind, is a great idea. Because how it ends is literally how it ends in real life.

Reading Atlas Shrugged will help identify the new age villains that have leeched themselves onto new global commerce, the pacifying moocher who means to kill intellect rather than people. Destroy their minds, not their bodies, because the bodies are needed for labor upon the state and its controls. And this is most reflective in the grand scam that is Martin Luther King Jr, a cheater, a communist, and ultimately a mask to sell Marxist ideology behind the accusation of racism. And by accepting King as a great leader of the Black movement, it did two things, it sought to erase the Democrat Party’s complicity in racism that caused all the trouble, and it lowered our guard to the menace of communism that was seeking to destroy our country starting with our Constitution. Most everyone can agree that racism is terrible. But like the villains of Atlas Shrugged, we didn’t see the worst part of it, the looter nature of the movement itself and its design to make good people into villains while the villains ran the world one name-calling utterance at a time. When I was a kid, everyone worked on Martin Luther King Day. But these days, many people were home sitting around doing nothing productive, just as the villains of Atlas Shrugged would have planned all along. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

IRS is Planning for Failure: The CDC has turned laziness into a virtue by calling it “safety”

The IRS Has Turned Laziness into a Virtue

You might have heard already that the IRS is not planning to get our tax returns back to us promptly. Ahead of all the tax filings that are coming, they warned that they were understaffed due to Covid and that we should expect to wait a long time to get back the money they have been keeping from us interest-free for most of the year. Now think about what an absurd proposal this is; they have the power to confiscate our wealth at will and for as long as they decide. And they feel no connection to the public to do good service while they have our money. Instead, like all government unions, they have the attitude that they have all the time in the world and that the productivity of their jobs can move at a pace they decide it will take, whatever their comfort level is. And the world will just have to like it. It is just the latest insult that we have seen from some government division that takes too long to do things, and when they do get around to it, what they do is usually bad and falls well short of expectations. So this would be a good reason for those who wonder why people don’t want more government and would like to see the government we do have scaled back. It doesn’t matter if it’s the IRS or the BMV; all government activity is run by our society’s laziest and least productive by its very nature. And Covid has exposed some of the subtle elements of unionized workplaces that seldom were ever admitted to before. And for that, we should be somewhat thankful.

From the beginning, my view of Covid was that it came from a government agency, the CDC, filled with lazy employees looking for an excuse to stay home and order toilet paper from Amazon. Most government employees, including teachers, police, and firefighters, are essentially lazy and would like to be divorced from any expectation of productivity. So, of course, the CDC would come up with dumb rules to deal with Covid, a government-made virus, to alter society’s work expectations for productivity. This was never more evident in proof than the Chicago Teacher’s Union, which voted to teach from home because of health concerns they had over Covid. Now that we’ve opened that door in our society, all the lazy people now have the CDC to quote when it comes to working from home, staying in their pajamas all day, and still getting a government check for essentially doing nothing. Covid has given the lazy an excuse to be themselves without being looked down on for it. Instead of calling these losers lazy as we might have in the past, we now refer to them as “being safe.” Do you see how that little magic trick worked? Lazy people through the government losers at the CDC managed to redefine themselves with some virtue because of the definitions of Covid protocols. Bad behavior was now considered safe while productive, “can do” attitudes toward work were now considered “unsafe.” The CDC and their government communist labor unions, all labor unions were born from communism, by the way, are now using Covid as an excuse to be lazy, and now they can call it virtue. 

One thing that makes me madder than anything in life is planning for failure. Whenever someone does it around me, I get very angry, Incredible Hulk mad. Nothing makes me more furious than a loser attitude, someone who says they can’t do something because they don’t want to live up to the expectation of being successful at trying. That is what the IRS said in January, that they would not get back our tax returns promptly during this 2022 tax season because they were going to be understaffed. Well, they are their own managers, if they have not chosen to staff correctly, or they do not have employees who are willing to work 12 hours per day or 16 hours per day, they are making a decision to put their comfort over my need to get what they are doing for me, and for me, those are fighting words. It’s a decision to be a loser, and they’ve stuck themselves in the way of something I need to do, like using my money for things I want. They chose not to staff correctly or use Covid to excuse poor work attendance. They made a choice not to hire go-getters who would work 10, 12, or 16 hours per day if that’s what it would take to complete a task. Government workers tend to be the types of people who work only 8 hours per day. They start thinking about where they are going for lunch as soon as they clock in during the morning, and at 5 PM, when it’s time to leave, it’s a race to get to the door. It’s the fastest time they move all day when work is done, and they want to get to their cars so they can race home and essentially do nothing but complain about all the hard work they did that day. They are some of the most miserable people on earth, lazy, government workers. Now the government created Covid, the government agency of the CDC, has turned laziness into a virtue; they have changed the definitions from something negative into something that is positive, “being safe.”

The whole Covid thing has been such a scam, it’s given the lazy a chance to appear virtuous, and the IRS has heard the dog whistle. They turn to Covid to hide their terrible management of their bloated government agency, where they are overpaid to sit home on their asses essentially. It’s not far-fetched to conceive that with this CDC culture that the government has created, soon people will be able to call off work and stay home and get paid just for a squirrel crossing over their driveways. We know squirrels and their nuts can carry viruses, so it will be the next ridiculous excuse to stay home, get paid, and to do nothing as an employee productively because all government unions, all unions in general, are communist organizations meant to disconnect workers from the needs of productivity. They make the lazy appear hard-working and play with names such as “safety” to mean “virtuous.” But truly, the CDC has only given the IRS an excuse to be themselves without the judgment of a public that wants back the money that the government stole from them and has been holding without compensation for a time the lazy determines is appropriate. Instead of staying until 7 PM at night to process filings, the IRS agents will be hitting the door at 4 PM. The work will still be there the next day, the next day, and for as long as it takes. The CDC has given them the excuse to go home and to be safe. Because safety is more important than productivity, right? Karl Marx would say so, and that’s who runs the IRS and all government unions. Planning for failure for them is the same as safety; it’s a virtue. To the incompetent, it’s better to get it late if lives can be saved in the process. It’s better to work less if people can go home to their families and friends intact, without going to the hospital. But what they don’t talk about are solutions that would allow people to work more, like hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin. Or dare we say it, a Five Hour Energy supplement, to get the work done on time and back to the customer correctly, instead of having to wait months and months for a top-heavy, unionized group of slugs to get around to the work that needs to be completed.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Old Yeller: The fight between Thomas Hall and Sheriff Jones

Why Is Sheriff Jones Going After Thomas Hall

Sheriff Jones decided to go on 700 WLW and speak disparagingly about Thomas Hall, the current House Representative of the 53rd District. I like Sheriff Jones, I hope he runs and wins a few more terms, but nobody in their right mind could support the way he attacked Thomas Hall on those radio waves to hundreds of thousands of people. Long-time readers here know that I used to be a frequent contributor on WLW, like Jones. Over time, many of my people who used to work there moved away, were fired, or otherwise changed their point of view. We separated like some kind of divorce, and I have not had much of an idea of reconciliation. I have more freedom in media with this site, so I have not returned in several years. But Jones does go on WLW quite a lot, so because I don’t pay much attention to what goes on there these days, I did not hear the original airing where Sheriff Jones disparaged Thomas Hall in many negative ways calling him a 12-year old “goof,” not just once, but many times. Still, I have often heard from many Republicans who want to defend Hall but are scared of retaliation from Jones, and I think that’s a shame. Hall certainly isn’t 12-years old. I said in the video that he was in his early thirties, but actually, he’s in his mid-twenties and is the youngest member of the current Ohio House. However, the young man is an overachiever by all measures, and his age certainly isn’t a hindrance. He has had two terms as a Madison Trustee, and now he’s in his first term as a congressman seeking a second term. 

Sheriff Jones Goes After Thomas Hall over H.B. 99

Another thing I said about Thomas is a couple of times in the video, I referred to him as Thomas More, because for a lot of reasons, I think of the writer of Utopia whenever I think of Thomas Hall. It’s been that way for a while just because of my own reading habits. There are a lot of Thomas’ in English literature; another is the character of Thomas Becket from The Canterbury Tales, who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by his friend Henry the II. It’s one of my favorite books, and this story keeps coming to my mind when I think of Thomas Hall and his friend and mentor, Sheriff Jones. Jones had endorsed Thomas and was mentoring him until a few things happened. Apparently, Jones didn’t like Hall’s voting record. The Sheriff had a confirmed case of heartburn over H.B. 99, Hall’s bill in congress, which set definitions for minimal teacher training to carry firearms in public schools. Jones uncharacteristically turned on Thomas Hall and made quite an exhibition about it on WLW right before Thanksgiving in 2021. I hadn’t heard it until I did an endorsement video for Thomas Hall, and he mentioned it. I had heard from several very prominent Republicans, some very close to the Sheriff, that something had gone on really bad. As I said in the video, one of them was not Senator Lang. I never put people in positions where they get caught in crossfires with each other and given the mean streak that many fear in crossing Jones, many don’t want to be a part of it. Yet many more than ten contacted me to let me know what was going on between Hall and Jones, and they weren’t happy about it.

Thomas Hall Responds to Sheriff Jones

I listened to the Jones interview with Willie, included here; then I listened to the response from Thomas Hall the next day. I played them for my wife, who loves Sheriff Jones. We talked about the interviews and thought Thomas Hall did a fantastic job. He certainly won the argument. But Jones came across as petty and even childish. My wife offered that maybe he was hurting about something else, totally unrelated. Perhaps that’s true. Whatever it is, I would suggest a few thoughts regarding the excellent Sheriff. I’ve been sideways with him a few times over things, particularly school things and union business. I still blame him for the Lakota levy passing in 2013. He has a liberal streak in him that I can’t stand, but we have buried the hatchet since then. What he did for Butler County during the Trump years has been great. A person’s body of work can’t be defined by just a few years here and there or by the grumpy old dog that starts biting people who step on a porch to sell Girl Scout cookies. I hope that Jones runs and wins more terms for as long as possible. But perhaps my wife was right about him, that something else is bothering him. 

In my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I deal with this very issue of an older generation coping with the young people biting their heels. The chapter is called “The Skill of Developed Intuition” on pg. 181. You spend your whole life getting somewhere, making yourself into the person people put on T.V. Getting invited to the White House. Where you can’t go into public without people wanting to get a picture taken with you. And suddenly, here is some 25-year-old whiz kid who suddenly does more in one year than most state reps do in a lifetime. And he’s confident and won’t kiss the ring. Deep down inside, nobody would want to see such a young person broken, but consciously, the older person wants respect because he gave it when he was younger. The aging process isn’t fair. When you can start to see the end of the tunnel, and you know it’s going to be over soon, it is painful to see intelligent young people with their whole lives in front of them getting the attention it took you a lifetime to build. Sometimes, you might be tempted to crush the young competition, show them all they don’t know yet and teach them obedience. But I would caution you not to do that. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is encourage the young people, not tear them down, but build them up. 

Old Yeller

Listening to Thomas talk about the WLW incident, I was amazed he wasn’t more upset. I would be. I carry grudges for a long time, for decades. I would not have been able to say all the nice things that Thomas said about Sheriff Jones when I did my endorsement video with him. I would have been plotting revenge and embarrassment. But obviously, Thomas Hall has had a lot of good mentors in his life, his father being one. But several other politicians for another, including Sheriff Jones. So, there are a lot of lessons here that should be observed. I would hope that Sheriff Jones wouldn’t spend all the years of his excellent branding on petty nonsense that will overshadow all the good things he has done. There are people concerned about just that very thing by many of the calls I received. But Thomas isn’t that way; he understands that politics is a blood sport, and he plays to win without getting hung up on stupid stuff. And in his mind, he already defended himself on WLW the next day. But people were confused as to why the Sheriff went after Thomas, and I would suggest that it shouldn’t ruin the reputation of the Sheriff. I don’t think we are dealing with an Old Yeller situation here. Maybe just an old dog that would love to run around like the youth do but can’t anymore. There is still good to do, and from the point of view of Thomas, he’s willing to do good wherever possible.    

Rich Hoffman

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