Category: Mystery

Under New Management: The difference between the back of the train and the front

It was a good accident while I was shooting the video for this article, when a train came by.  I tried to wait for a previous, huge train to go by, but about 10 minutes later, another came, almost as if the trains wanted to help me make my point.  Because I was discussing the Metaphysics of Quality, a favorite topic of mine from Robert Persig’s famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I think it’s one of the most important books that the human race has ever produced because it puts its finger on a very allusive idea, which is why some people are better than others, especially in the field of business management.  And these days, now several years out of Covid, and a world obviously not prepared for Trump to be in the White House, a lot of companies are flat-footed on this current economy.  There was an assumption during the COVID pandemic, and all the way up to last week, that different rules would govern the world, a kind of socialist administrative state where work was bent to the preferences of the workers instead of the needs of the business.  And people are shocked by these very capitalist rules.  All over my town, signs are going up to let the public know that their companies are under new management.  Most of them are restaurants that have been too slow and understaffed for too long. Many people thought they would be able to work from home to stop the spread of COVID, which, in retrospect, was a laughable endeavor.   Yet the entire world tried to think it and actually put it into practice, which was one of the dumbest things ever.  To my point, which is why I can say that our COVID response, even as it was artificial, was really dumb. That train helped me make the point right on time, leaving a perfect demonstration of what the heart of the problem is with all these restructurings. 

What the world needs, especially from every company and every family, is a leader who leads from the front, where all the action happens.  Using a train metaphor, the front of the train, at the cutting edge, is where all the critical decisions are made. For instance, how fast should the train be going? Does it need to turn onto a different track in case something falls across it, posing a danger to the entire train?  Operating the train needs to happen from the front, where all the controls are, and the leader can see what’s coming before anybody else.  However, most leadership cultures, and I can say this after dealing with many tens of thousands of people, most of whom have advanced degrees and extensive experience in high-tech sectors, are behind-the-scenes people.  People who sit in the caboose collect data and report the contents of the train as it moves along.  The information they process can be helpful, but by the time they see it, the front of the train, especially on a very long one, has already passed the point where something was observed.  For exemplary leadership, by the time the people in the back of the train see it, it’s too late to do anything different.  Most management in the world, whether it’s a small company like a private restaurant, or a large company, or a government, functions from the back of the train because that’s where it’s safest, and people generally don’t like danger.  That is why good leadership, let alone outstanding leadership, is so rare in any industry.  It takes a lot of guts to run things from the front of the train. 

When people say they are under new management, they are trying to tell their customers that things are different and that they’ll get more responsive service from the organization, and they allude to this leadership quality.  As if to say that their management is new, and therefore the opportunity to be better is in the future.  But to be honest, the ownership is usually just throwing darts in the dark, and they don’t know the difference between good leadership and bad, because they are too afraid of the cutting edge at the front of the train to make decisions there.  It’s scary at the front, and most people in the world, more than 99% of them, would rather be in the back of the train.  I have literally dealt with consultants at every level who proclaim to know a lot about these things, who are in that consulting business because they are afraid of life at the front of the train, where all the scary stuff happens.  They don’t want scary things in their lives, so they do what many people do who aren’t very good at life: they teach.  Nothing is safer than putting the train on pause and studying its contents while it’s not moving, in a classroom environment where there are no dangers of driving through day-to-day life.  And this isn’t some fluke opinion; it’s actually a flaw in the way we teach generations of people in a classroom environment, and why those who survive the schools of hard knocks are actually better prepared for authentic leadership.  Leadership isn’t taught as much as it is learned in the challenging places that the world presents. 

The problem with all the COVID protocols and the obsession with moving the world into an administrative state management condition, where people could sit in their living rooms in their pajamas and tell others things from a Teams call, was absurdly stupid.  Yet, that is why so many companies are now struggling to meet customer demands.  The marketplace did not go the way it was expected to, and virtually everyone is struggling to catch up.  Many organizations are seeking new management to replace the old one, and they are posting signs to let their customers know that they are trying to find effective leadership, even if the kind of leadership they are looking for is actually one of the rarest commodities in the world.  Good leadership thrives at the front of the train while most of the world desires to hide in the back.  They might make a lot of noise back there and bark out commands, but on a fast-moving train, by the time they see them, the train has already moved well beyond the point of decision-making.  And that is the core of the problem; it takes courage to run things from the front of the train.  And our schools don’t and can’t teach courage.  They teach people to be in the back of the train, where the bootlickers and con artists reside. They are that way because they lack courage and have to fake it to make it.  They learn to appease the teacher in a static classroom, and once in the world, they do the same from the back of the train.  And that is why most management in the world is ineffective.  But then we marvel when we see individuals who have great success at almost everything they do.  This is why it’s called “Metaphysics of Quality” by Robert Pirsig, and it’s one of the most outstanding books on the subject of business that has ever been written or thought about.  I’ve read numerous books on business, including some of the most popular titles on Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.  All that means nothing if your organization doesn’t have a leader at the front of the train.  And you can put all the signs out about new leadership, but it doesn’t matter if all that leadership is where most leadership is in the world today – at the back of the train, hiding, where it’s safe.  Leaders need to love danger and to make decisions unafraid as they face it moment by moment.  That is the difference between success and failure.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

It’s All About Family: Why Michael Ryan is Right for Butler County Commissioner

It was a successful fundraiser for Michael Ryan on the West Side of Hamilton, Ohio, where he has served as a vice mayor for several years.  Ryan is running for Butler County Commissioner, so a fundraiser was held at the Shooter’s Event Center, which was very well attended and well represented among donors, showing a great early sign for his campaign.  Under normal conditions, a person like Michael Ryan would be an easy one to vote for.  However, this campaign represents a significant shift in direction for the Republican Party, as two incumbent candidates are running for the same position.  Cindy Carpenter is already a commissioner, and it’s her seat that is up for election.  There are some serious issues with her that we’ll address specifically.  But as to who is best for this commissioner seat, Michael Ryan is the easy favorite.  Then there is the latecomer to the race, Roger Reynolds, whom I have supported a lot in the past.  For him, this is the wrong seat at the wrong time for a lot of reasons.  Things I’d rather not discuss, but he put himself out there for a public seat, so it’s going to get uncomfortable.  As for the Michael Ryan fundraiser and why he is the best pick for the seat, as well as the future of the Butler County Republican Party being best represented by him, there is no question.  The task will be to show the average voter the differences between those three Republicans in name.  It really comes down to how we define what the “Grand Old Party” is, and I would say its economic viability as best represented by the MAGA movement and political figures like J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and locally, Michael Ryan.  They are all around the same age, and the young Republicans, who were well represented at Michael’s event, are looking toward the next generation.  Not the over-50 crowd.  Many people are seeking Republicans for a fresh start, and that is why Michael Ryan is the best candidate for consideration.

Lots of great options on High Street in Hamilton, Ohio

As I met Michael’s parents and his wife Amanda’s, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern in the kind of politician I most support, in virtually all cases.  They are good families with working relationships with their spouses.  One thing that really stands out about Michael is that his wife, Amanda, is very engaging, and they make a strong political couple, working together as a team to meet the needs of a political office.  For instance, there is a lot that goes into a political job that goes well beyond the function of doing the job itself.  Being a representative means talking to a lot of people all the time, and it is best when there is a supportive spouse to help with that task as a team.  And Amanda fits right into that role very well.  However, what’s also noticeable is that they both have very supportive and intact parents who are deeply involved in the process.  That’s great when it comes to Michael and Amanda, but it’s something I notice among all the political people I support.  They all have strong families that help them in the background, and for me, that is the first ingredient for success in a political position.  How can you offer yourself as a manager of the public trust if you can’t work with the trust within a family unit?  That is certainly the case with George and Debbie Lang, a compelling political couple who are supporting Michael Ryan’s campaign very early in the process.  George was supposed to attend the fundraiser, but was held up in Columbus and was running late. 

There were other notable couples present as well. Mark Welch has been very supportive, as a West Chester Trustee.  And Nancy Nix, who has a great relationship with her husband, Bob, ended up covering for George’s absence.  But what they all have in common, which I think a lot of, is that they have functional relationships with their spouses, which I would say is the foundation of any political office.  If you can’t work well together with your spouse, how can you work together with other people in the party, or the community as a whole?  Even more than that, I had a chance to talk to the Butler County Young Republicans, who were there to support Michael from Miami University, all dressed up in suits and ties. All of them were inclined toward that kind of life, including a healthy marriage, good personal decisions, and taking responsibility for themselves. Ben Nguyen, a very young man running for the Lakota school board, was there to support Michael Ryan as one of those young Republicans. He represents the new generation of hopeful people joining the Republican Party, which is very family-oriented. I am very encouraged by meeting them; they are part of the party that has emerged from Charlie Kirk’s efforts at Turning Point USA.  Gone are the days when the public would support scandalous figures who used a powerful political office to nurture sexual affairs and financial despondency by abusing the public trust.  No, these were all people who expect the best from those running for public office, and they are being judged on how well they handle their affairs, starting at home.

Downtown Hamilton is Thriving These Days

And whether it’s fair or not, for people to know what a good family is, it starts with having a good family, so it’s no surprise that Michael and Amanda Ryan both had their parents at this event, and they were very engaging.  They actually reminded me of a younger version of George and Debbie Lang, in terms of a couple who work well together.  When you deal with the public, you really need a good partner in life to help keep everything sorted out. Typically, that’s what I look for when supporting a political person: how well they maintain a relationship with their spouse.  If they are bouncing around between girlfriends or boyfriends and wearing gold rings on their pinky fingers, I likely won’t be endorsing them because, in my experience, those types of people don’t fare well in politics.  And ultimately, the measure of a good office holder is in what they have done, and for Michael, because he has a happy home life, that has translated into being an outstanding city council member who has helped build a good team that has brought excellent economic value to a city that has needed it.  Hamilton, Ohio, is on the uptick economically largely because Michael Ryan has been very effective at attracting investment interest to the town, and it all starts with being a good person who doesn’t get swept away by the tides of influence that often accompany such activity.  Having a good spouse to help keep everything grounded is a key to being successful when those pressures are applied.  And they are usually the difference between success and failure.  And upon meeting the family of Michael Ryan, it becomes obvious very quickly that the headlines that emerge from his public life will lean in the positive direction, rather than the negative, as people who lean into an office to fill a void inside them often do.  In my experience, to run a successful public office, you need a good private life with a supportive spouse as a partner.  And Michael Ryan certainly has that.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

What Women Hate The Most: Nobody wants to see a slug too lazy to work

There is a recent survey where women have indicated that the periods where they experience the most stress are when their men, the people they pick to share a life with, raise a family, and build something, are lying on the couch doing nothing but watching TV or playing video games.  Now I say all this after years of experience in employing people, many thousands of them, and after raising two daughters and being married for 38 years to the same woman.  What I’m going to say is politically incorrect in lots of ways, but it’s the result of terrible things that we have taught our society when we tried to implement feminism into a biological experiment that has essentially destroyed people at a very foundational level.  We have a laziness problem, and it came from people who wanted to socially re-engineer society by attacking men and toxic masculinity, to empower women to play a larger role in the workplace, and in spending less time raising families, because the idea of a family was under attack by radical leftist ideas.  So most of what men have come to believe about what they should be doing in the world has come from people trying to destroy them, purposefully by rotting their minds with social fashions that were never healthy for them or society.  But that doesn’t change the biology of people, where women expect a man to be strong and to take care of them so they can raise a nice family.  No matter what society has said about the subject, when a woman sees a man lying on the couch not doing anything, it brings her great stress.  It doesn’t matter who the woman is; it just doesn’t sit well with them because it makes it evident to the woman that her man is useless. 

Oh, the man might be good at something here and there, but if he won’t work, it makes him pretty much a slug, a detriment to the creation of the family.  And women were told by that same society that they could replace all those emotions with a career of their own and their own paycheck.  And that the public schools would teach their children everything they needed to know, so they shouldn’t worry about any of it.  But for women, there is always something going on, a bill that needs to be paid, oil that needs to be changed, grass that needs to be cut.  The grim reality for a woman when she sees that her man wants to sleep on the couch all the time without doing the work it takes to build a family is that she is doomed to a life of misery.  Once a woman trades sexual favors to a man to launch a family, which all women experience, like trout returning to the spring of their birth, if a woman fails to get a guy in her life who will help her build a family, the disappointment starts to really eat away at her, and everything starts to fall apart.  She may raise her kids in a somewhat reasonable way, but what she is left with in the aftermath is major disappointment and resentment.  Kids don’t stay young very long.  What is a couple supposed to do together once they have come together and raised kids?  Especially if the men are lying around sleeping while there is a lot of work to be done?  Chances are their marriage will end, or the woman will grow very resentful and start hating the man for all the disappointments he brought her during that key time in her life.  If a family isn’t working together towards a common goal, everything falls apart. 

I’m not joking when I talk about AI being more reliable than people.  I love the idea of being productive with AI because, based on my experience, people are often unreliable.  They have too much emotional baggage from the numerous decisions they’ve made over the years, which have led to personal destruction.  As I have watched many people grow up and go through this cycle, I have always thought of it as an artificial problem created by social values that were all wrong.  A lot of men were taught that hard work led to heart attacks and an unhealthy life.  So they think that eating potato chips all day while earning new merits in a video game environment will satisfy them.  All it really does is entertain them until the next revision comes out and they have to start all over again.  The idea of buying a house, keeping the cars running, and caring for their children with strong emotional foundations is someone else’s problem, doesn’t excite them as it should.  Someone will eventually pick up the slack.  They have been taught that the excuse for their lack of work is to maintain stress so they don’t die from being overworked.  But in that process, their wives secretly hope they’ll die and free them of the misery and embarrassment that so many men these days bring to their marriages.  People have been taught that hard work is bad for them, and that not working at a job and spending their leisure time trying to do less work is somehow beneficial.  And it is at that source that all the problems start.  I’m thrilled that we’re at a time when AI can begin to do what many young men won’t do: work in a productive environment. 

I’ve always worked a lot, at least 60 to 80 hours a week.  And I fix all kinds of things, all the time.  Growing up, most of the people I knew were farmers, who always worked hard.  And when people worked hard, they were happier people.  And that is certainly true of me, I’m a happy person.  What makes me unhappy is witnessing laziness, people who work hard to avoid working hard.  My experience suggests that they are bringing misery upon themselves in a rebellion against logic.  And they aren’t even curious about the poison they have been given through their learning, from people obviously trying to sink America by destroying its workforce.  After World War II, America demonstrated its industrial capacity through the hard work of its free people. Many people around the world then sought to undermine the American work ethic for various malicious reasons.  And as we look around today, they have been all too successful.  Many men, young and old, are wasting their lives lying around doing nothing, then complaining when they are expected to pull their own weight.   And the women who match up with them are miserable, because they only get a few short years in their lives to get it right, when their flowers bloom, and they can pick whoever they want in the world through sexuality, to build a family with.  And if they get a dud, it brings misery to them for the rest of their life.  They might raise their families and make the best of things.  However, nothing makes them more stressed out than learning that their men don’t want to work while the bills pile up and the family’s needs are not being met.  And the young girls turn into bitter women as their windows close.  Sure, they could get a divorce, but for what purpose?  To find a harder-working man?  There aren’t many out there; chances are, the next one will be a dud too.  And as women raise their families and are stuck with an uninteresting slug sleeping on the couch every day and won’t keep the cars running, or the bills paid, women slowly die inside with the grim reality that it’s all over way too fast.  And if only hard work had been at the core of their marriage, life would have been a lot better for everyone.  Life is about hard work, and the more you put into it, the happier you will be.  The definition of a happy life never comes from leisure.  We are meant to work, and to work a lot.  The last thing a woman wants in her life is a slug that is like another child she has to feed and change all the time, who doesn’t help her have a happy life because he is too lazy to work.  The woman wants to work to raise her family, and if he is just another parasite in her life, taking from her instead of her having to give everything to the creation of a family, of course, she’s not going to be very happy when he’s sleeping on the couch.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

We Are Not Better Together: The illusion of leadership

Let’s clear some things up right now, because I’m tired of hearing the term.  We are not better together.  More minds do not make something better.  These are dumb, communist ideas by outside influencers who have tried over time to slide dumb ideas about how society should be structured under the door and have left us with a lot of garbage like that term to muddle through.  I receive numerous emails from people, and someone sent me one of those LinkedIn links to a statement from a consultant group about leadership, as if to refute my position on the matter. I had to give that person a healthy dose of reality.   More is not always better.  More administrative minds do not improve processes. Instead, you often get the opposite; usually, you end up with more of a mess than any improvement.  If you want to improve something, identify your leader and then listen to them.  But don’t think that a bunch of useless people meandering through life can come together and improve something.  It never works.  The concept of teamwork has been grossly misused to incorporate elements of Marxism over the years through our public education system, and it was always a flawed idea. I think the reason for this was best captured in books like Robert Persig’s ideas on the Metaphysics of Quality.  His metaphor of people who sit in the back of a moving train is a particularly apt one that accurately reflects the truth in this matter.  Good leaders are at the front of the train where things can be seen as they are happening.  But most of the world sits in the back, where it’s safe, and analyzes data that has already passed.  It can be helpful information, but that’s not leadership.  And the communist societies of the world have tried to sell cowardice that way to make the timid feel like they were equal to good leaders.  And they are not. 

That is where most consultants get things wrong, and LinkedIn is full of those types of people who attend all the business seminars and listen to all that “team building” nonsense, such as the idea that no one person has all the answers and that more minds are better than just one.  What causes trouble in cultures that need leadership is the presence of committees, where administrative types try to lead an organization from the back of the train, rather than from the front, where they belong.  And often up front, where things are scary and coming fast, most people don’t have the guts to live there.  They always pick where it’s safe and build their 9-to-5 lives around the value of analysis, often from the caboose of a train, complete with lots of spreadsheets and graphs, but without the voice of leadership to guide the timid toward greatness.  Good leaders are listened to, not debated with.  So, any culture that wants to succeed needs to hear more than hold hands in the back of the train while the world outside moves quickly.  Leadership is not safe; it’s usually hazardous, and it requires a lot of toughness that most people never develop in their lives.  That doesn’t make those people useless.  However, they are unable to lead because they never developed the stomach for the rigors of the leadership task.  They have come up with all kinds of excuses why failure is best elevated in group consensus rather than the responsibility of leadership at the front of the train, where things are much more dangerous.

I’ve heard every excuse in the book as to why most people prefer the back of the train as opposed to where leadership lives, at the front.  They say, people, say dumb things like, “I don’t want the stress and want to avoid a heart attack.”  Or they will point to the need for time to decompress after work.  All they are doing is telling the world that they aren’t tough enough to be a leader of an organization and that they prefer the back of the train, where things are safe, and where they can share the experience with others holding hands for safety and security.  And it’s those types of people who want to believe that more is better and that no one mind is better than a collective whole.  This is the kind of flawed thinking that assumes the United Nations is better as a one-world government than the individual results of leadership that come from the United States, for instance.  You don’t see that the United Nations has accomplished much over the years to bring the kind of peace it has always intended.  It takes a strong individual country like the United States to provide that leadership.  And that same mentality could be applied to every organization; if a strong leader isn’t leading it, it is, to some degree, inefficient and destructive.  The only real way to pull off the illusion that more is better is to stop the train, which is impossible in day-to-day life.  But for the fantasy to work, the trains of life can’t be moving so that all those in the back can analyze data and make decisions in time to do something about it, which is unrealistic.  Trains are constantly moving, and they require sharp, focused minds to be at the front of the train, leading everyone at the cutting edge. 

I’m usually nice to people who send me stupid ideas like this one, the LinkedIn warriors who buy into all the corporate placations created by consultants who are leeching off the profitability of the few.  Consultants like teachers do what they do not because they are good or the best in their field.  Occasionally, you find an exception, but not very often, certainly not often enough to alter the statistical analysis.  What you get are people who lack the courage to lead an organization and try to sell companies on a scam that more analysis from the back of the train will help a struggling company.  However, as soon as the consultant leaves with their misguided ideas of ‘better together,’ the organization falls back into its previous state because it failed to identify its leaders and place them in the correct positions to succeed.  And success is usually found by shutting up and listening to a leader, not in building consensus with a bunch of people in the back of the fast-moving train who are too timid to do what it takes to lead people.  To conceal their timidity from the world, they have adopted these misguided notions about leadership, none of which are accurate.  And they have made a mess out of the world at every level.  So, if you really want to fix anything, figure out who you are: either a back-of-the-train analysis cruncher who likes things safe and secure, or a daring, cutting-edge type who will go it alone and make decisions where they matter, and tell people behind them what to do and when to do it.  If you find a good leader, you’ll find a successful organization.  However, once that leader is gone, the people are left without direction and powerless to improve their lives, and this is the case in almost every circumstance.  We are not better together.  We are better when those people shut up, and listen to the leader among them.  And then, and only then, does everything get better for everyone.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Truth Kamala Harris and All Democrats, Can’t Handle: In ‘107 Days,’ every day only eroded support

There is more that has been exposed than just the rise of the MAGA movement against a backdrop of authority figure Marxism.  And that was a theme that kept coming to me as I read Kamala Harris’s new book, 107 Days.  Yes, it is garbage, but I’ll read anything, just as I’ll listen to just about anybody, so I can make reasonable conclusions about things, even if it’s from people I don’t like or agree with on much of everything.  And her book is complete with the worst kind of fiction; it’s presented as a fact when the actual content is blisteringly fantastical in its scope.  And this is true of everything from the radical political left, where they think something and can make it so with the power of their observing it.  Such as deciding one day that a man is a woman.  That anal sex is just as natural as vaginal intercourse, that the rest of the world is equal, when in reality, they struggle to make bubble gum wrappers.  And that all facts and figures can be manipulated until reality is forced to agree with them at the point of mass authority rule over a docile and complicit society that has never grown up and away from their parents, and wants an overwhelming government power to rule over their perpetual insecurities. What has fallen apart most devastatingly for the Marxist left, for which the world’s socialist and communist governments have emerged to various degrees, is the sting of reality.  And that is what Kamala’s book most clearly conveys: the degree to which they have lied to their own faces, denying the nature of reality itself, which they are at war with.  The political left despises the truth about the world, and they have been at odds with it; if there is anything that is most devastating to their movement, it’s that all their fantasies have fallen apart under the scrutiny of reality. 

So let’s revisit this notion that I talked about extensively at that time, and which is the essential theme of Kamala Harris’s book, which she has said while on her media tour, giving the whole thing away under press questioning, there is nothing Kamala could have done with more time to run that could have helped her.  Her entirely fictional premise was that if only she could have run a regular campaign, she could have performed better in the 2024 election.  She could not have done better than she did; in fact, for every day she was in the presidential race, she bled support.  She didn’t gain it.  The more people heard from Kamala Harris, the less they liked her.  She wouldn’t have been able to build any support; her campaign was a complete fabrication created by people who thought they controlled the entire narrative and could autopilot her into office, just as they had been running Joe Biden’s campaign all along.  Kamala was not very likable; she came across as someone who had slept her way to the top, and people didn’t like her.  Her best support was the day she announced she was running, once Joe Biden had been pushed out.  Before many people heard her talk, there were a certain number of not very well-informed people who would vote for her because she was a woman of color, and nothing else.  Her most popular day in the campaign was the first day.  On day 107, as the book attempts to erase, her support had eroded as more people heard her talk and got to know her a bit.  The more she opened her mouth, the less people liked her. 

Kamala Harris, in her book, repeatedly mentioned that the 2024 election was the closest in history, which is another example of Democrats seeking something to rally behind.  Trump won 312 electoral votes to Kamala’s 226.  Most of the states where Harris won were states with very loose election laws, such as those allowing mail-in ballots and not requiring voters to show ID at the polling booth.  So when we talk about Trump having a landslide, 312 is a pretty significant number these days, given that things are so heavily leveraged to favor Democrats, at least until President Trump came along.  That’s also why Democrats want to get rid of the Electoral College so they can mass manipulate the way we count votes so that a few states with loose laws can win.  As I say all the time, if Democrats don’t cheat, they can’t win, because they are the seriously minority party in America, and they have only kept things close through election fraud.  In the popular vote, Trump had 77,302,580 million votes to Kamala’s 75,017,613.  That is out of 155,238,302 total voters, which is a very high number.  But lets just call it as they say it is, out of all the voters that there are in America, with a population of 342,034,432 million including all the people who are under 18 and can’t yet vote, where would Democrats close that gap of the 2 million that they fell short on, assuming you had a clean election with no election fraud whatsoever?  And that is the real problem that planners faced when making the decision to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris.  They had that plan all along, and they used that June debate with Trump to set up the real story.  It was a desperation shot to put in a woman at the last minute and hope that the math worked in their favor.  But they knew the truth all along.

In 2020, Trump received 74,216,154 votes, just three million fewer than his 2024 total, which was 77,223,615, while Joe Biden received 81,268,924.  Where were all those voters in the 2020 election?  The answer is, of course, that roughly 10 million, likely more, of the votes for Democrats were produced illegally by mail-in ballots cast under the new Covid rules, and the election was rigged entirely from the top down.  The FBI knew it because they assisted with the effort at the Capitol Building on January 6th, when people arrived extremely angry that Trump was being pushed out of office.  The FBI planted over 274 people into the audience to provoke them into violence so that the narrative of the election fraud could shift to some made-up insurrection and put people on their heels to the massive reality that the election had been stolen.  And we can prove it because Democrats were caught not being able to duplicate the numbers of the 2020 election when the rules had returned to normal in 2024.  And if states that voted for Kamala over Trump had to play by more rigorous rules, with voter ID and much more restricted mail-in balloting, they would have lost even more voters than they actually did, which is likely overstated by more than 5 million votes.  Because there aren’t that many people dumb enough to vote for Democrats, and they know it.  The illusion they have lived with through election fraud and a media that sold their socialist fantasy as a reality has been eradicated from the public scene, and they have no means of stopping that process.  And Kamala’s book only spells it out grotesquely for them, rather than changing the nature of reality in the way they wish it would be.  More time for Kamala Harris would have eroded her numbers even more.  But they couldn’t afford to have Joe Biden run again and come nowhere close to his original 81 million with a performance 10 million less.  People would have been outraged by the obviousness of it all.  So their best shot, Democrats, of concealing the election fraud of 2020 was to hope that Kamala would change the numbers because she was a woman and because she was a person of color, which gave her a few throwaway votes.  But the more people heard from her, the less they liked her, and there was nothing she could have done to change that.  And that is the truth of all future elections. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Arrest of James Comey: Bring a sword, don’t turn the other cheek

I feel like spiking the football on the James Comey indictment and arrest that occurred just shy of his statute of limitations expiring after five years, at the end of September 2025.  His crimes are actually far more extensive than the obstruction of justice and lying to Congress that they put his way.  And once again, I think one of the best experiences I have ever had in life was the period I spent as the foreman of a grand jury, so I know very well what kind of cases prosecutors bring forth and how the evidence is presented and discussed.  And how a grand jury handles multiple cases, not just one.  You get a chance to talk to a lot of legal people and see how different prosecutors react to other cases.  So I can understand why there was reluctance to prosecute James Comey.  There is a whole Deep State of career political people who could make life very difficult for future administrations, because in their minds, Trump will come and go.  Many of these individuals believe they will have entire careers in government and will last through many future presidents, so they approach them with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, as if our system of management from the White House were an inconvenience that they sneer at.  And they treat the rest of us the same, as if the power of the Administrative State was far superior to the voters whom they are supposed to serve.  James Comey and the government workers like him think they are superior to the basic intellect of the average American and that they can lie to our faces and not face any punishment for the deceit.  And with James Comey, I called him out a long time ago, in May 2017, just a few months into Trump’s first term, where I was one of the first people in the country to call him a liar.

CNN was looking to dislodge Trump supporters from the new president at the time, so they came to Butler County to speak to a hard-core group of Trump advocates.  We met at a local sports bar and watched live on television, with CNN producers, as Comey testified after Trump fired him from his role as FBI Director.  This was an all-day event, and later that night, we would gather on Anderson Cooper’s show to share our reactions to the testimony.  CNN hoped that Butler County would start to doubt their support for Trump with the horror of firing Comey, who at the time was thought of as America’s squeaky-clean Boy Scout, beyond refute.  But what I said shocked the producers, and they let me know it after the cameras were off and the live feed had concluded.  I said when asked on the air that I thought James Comey was more like Eliot Ness from the famous Al Capone mob cases in Chicago.  But what he turned out to be was more like Ian Fleming, the James Bond novelist.  And that the FBI Director was more inclined to fiction, which I thought was a nice way of saying that he was a liar.   Well, at that time, that was a shocking statement, and that was one of the last television interviews that I ever did.  Before that, I appeared frequently on radio and television; producers would seek my opinion on various topics, and I would offer it.  But after that, things changed dramatically.  I didn’t care because my own media efforts were much more potent.  I found it much more rewarding to express my thoughts than to try to fit into a producer’s narrative.  However, that fracture indeed occurred that night after the CNN segment.

That was 8 years ago, and the information was self-evident.  It took that long to reach justice in indicting James Comey.  And like most deceitful people who get caught in these terrible scandals, he sought mass collectivism to shield himself from personal judgment.  To show what a manipulative loser he really is before this indictment, which he knew was coming, he put out a video attempting to get support from Taylor Swift’s audience, hoping to manipulate pop culture soothsayers to his side, and to pit them against Trump.  This is actually a much more dangerous trait that indicates a deeper problem at the FBI and how they handle cases in a mass society.  We’ll talk about the way the FBI planted 274 agents into the J6 crowd to accelerate activism and cause trouble.  The FBI has been picking winners and losers for a long time, grossly abusing its authority in multiple cases.  Which is why they thought they’d get away with this Russian story on driving Trump out of office.  So yes, I saw it well in advance and I said so on national television, and I turned out to be right about everything, even when the world took a hard turn toward regime suppression just a few years later in 2020 with Covid and election fraud to throw Trump out of office.  It seemed that the bad guys truly had the kind of control that James Comey thought shielded them from reality.  And that he and the FBI could abuse their power to maintain a political order that they thought was more appropriate, a Taylor Swift kind of progressivism, they were going to impose on us whether we liked it or not.

So this is actually a grave crime, not just an FBI Director who went bad and abused his power to throw out an elected official from the White House that he disagreed with.  This is about a fourth branch of government that thinks it exists beyond voter approval, and this goes back to the killing of JFK and the getting rid of Richard Nixon.  And that’s why it was so absurd to everyone when Trump was elected that he would actually last, let alone serve a second term.  The CNN guys that night told me in the parking lot that we were all living in a bubble with our support of Trump, and that it was a regional issue.  That the rest of the world would disregard us as backward and out of touch.  And it made me so angry that I stopped answering calls from media producers and participating in their shows, because they all pretty much thought the same way as these people at CNN.  And after eight years, they all turned out to be very wrong, and I was right.  And they are all on the way out, and my position is stronger than ever, and it all feels pretty redeeming.  So I’m thrilled to see bad things happening to James Comey, and I want to see even more happen to people who are just as bad as he is.  Those who believe that an unelected form of government should be allowed to hold power need a reality check, and that’s what’s happening now.  It’s not revenge for what these same people did to Trump and many of us who supported him.  Although revenge is very appropriate, I would encourage people not to turn the other cheek, as Jesus said in Matthew 5:39, but to do as Jesus said in Matthew 10:34: ‘Do not bring peace, but a sword.’  We must fight evil wherever we find it, and James Comey was a facilitator of evil, hiding behind a deceitful façade.  And he has to be made an example of, and I am thrilled to see that day arrive.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Violent Video Games and Furry Culture: Why so many trans kids are becoming killers

I would probably never know about this “furry” culture of sexual deviants if it weren’t for my grandchildren.  My oldest grandson came across them online while researching video game information.  Furries, as they are called, are people who like to dress up in animal costumes in public.  And that’s important because the killers of Charlie Kirk and his boyfriend were participants in this culture, as they would dress up for conventions and play video games that involved anthropomorphic animals having sex.  And of course, as the furry condition is a tremendous psychological concern for public health, we are dealing with a homosexual relationship with a couple of guys who had built up so much hate for the godly purity of Charlie Kirk that they made a move to murder him on a college campus.  And we are seeing a trend among many killers who are going through the same problem, killing people, as video games have desensitized them to killing without any genuine concept of consequences.  If you have read the text messages between Tyler Robinson and his boyfriend, Lance Twiggs, who is in the process of trying to convert to a woman, you will find that they were bizarrely out of touch.  So much so that people naturally think it was a fake narrative created by the deep state to hide the real killers, because it seems so outlandishly coherent, considering this kid just committed one of the most memorable assassinations the world has ever seen.  So a transsexual element is at play yet again, in addition to the furry culture obsession.  The killer of the Minneapolis church attack was a trans kid, and we know now that the assassination threat against Bret Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court was a man trying to become a girl.  So what’s going on here, and how is the gaming culture producing all these young killers?  It’s a question that goes way beyond free speech. 

I’m far from a person trying to reform the video game industry, but we’re no longer talking about Pac-Man here when we talk about video games and how they try to stand out from a very harsh crowd in the marketplace.  I saw the recent Wolverine preview for an upcoming video game, and it’s really very violent.  I have been alarmed at the level of violence in video games as developers have gotten away with more and more violence; there is no question of a desensitizing effect.  The popular game of Fortnite has more cartoon violence, but Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and now this Disney-owned Marvel game, Wolverine, are very violent, where bones are ripped from the bodies of victims ruthlessly.  It is not a stretch to think that a small percentage of the population that plays these games is being desensitized to violence and is losing touch with reality.  I’ll repeat it, I used to write screenplays and I would submit them to studios and agents in the 1990s.  And I had a lot of mainstream people tell me that my screenplays were too violent for a mainstream audience, which Hollywood was a part of at that time.  They had a responsibility to the public good, that’s what they told me.  They would say to me I was a talented writer, but that resorting to so much violence took away from that talent, and they had a responsibility to the public not to be so graphic.  Then I saw Kill Bill and other Tarantino movies, and I mentioned to them that my work wasn’t any more violent than Tarantino’s.  And there really wasn’t an answer except that they said Tarentino’s violence was more comic book, and not as realistic as mine.  So, a line was being drawn, and watching that preview for Wolverine certainly was the result.  The self-censorship in the entertainment industry was ending about the time I mentioned, and it has devolved into what we see today, which is a very violent entertainment culture. 

For young people without strong father figures or good family structures, video games can distort reality.  And this Tyler Robinson supposedly came from a loving family.  Once he developed a sexual relationship with another young man, and they started crossing lines that society would judge them harshly over, they retreated into the violent world of video games, and we know that because those traits were marked on the shell casings from the gun used to murder Charlie Kirk.  We should be all over these traits because they keep repeating, the mode of operation for many of these killers is that they are involved in transexual practices and spend their free time on violent video games.  And when you spend many hours playing violent video games like Lance Twiggs did, there is a desensitization toward violence that ultimately becomes a psychological problem.   When kids delve into this rabbit hole, a trait emerges from this furry culture: the idea that people can be anything they want if only they wish it.  It’s consistent to make mistakes in a video game, where, if you wish, you can change the avatar of your character into anything you want to be.  And that is without question happening in these trans cases, where people make mistakes their families might look down on them for, and they turn to furries or trans sex to change their public image from mistakes they are ashamed of.  When society has opinions about those mistakes, they retreat into the world of video games, where you can be anything you want, you can change your name, and you can hide from society behind mass violence.  Given the frequency of these occurrences, this is a significant problem. 

This is one of those cases where treacherously evil acts are hiding behind conservative values, such as limited government oversight of the video game industry, allowing market forces to work out the problems.  Or to have a libertarian approach to sexuality.  We are told by those creating vile content that more oversight of these industry norms is intrusive.  Therefore, the attacks are occurring behind the values we advocate as businesspeople and conservative, market-driven economic values.  We’re not supposed to have an opinion on this topic because we support free markets, and in the free market, people want violence.  Just as we are supposed to accept that people want to smoke dope, or do other detrimental behaviors, that do not suit healthy mass psychology.  But that’s the thing, and it goes back to my days of writing scripts, when I was told that something was too violent, the standard was to go back and make the scenes less so, but just as impactful.  Violence is often used to make a point forcefully.  It can be necessary, but it can also serve as a creative crutch to avoid the details of actual artistic integrity.  Just like grotesque sex, violence is lazy in trying to appeal to our animal instincts.  And killing is a primal instinct we all have.  But we are expected to overcome that violent trait for something better.  And when we have artistic expression that feeds the fears and anxieties of a young generation with various insecurities, bad things can and do happen.  This video game culture is feeding them in a very negative way, and some of them are turning to actual killings.  And they are becoming desensitized to the world, especially once they start really embarrassing themselves with sexual practices they could never get their families to accept, and changing their public image like a video game avatar never solves their insecurities.  And before they turn to suicide, they are turning to mass social violence, which video games helped fuel their fantasies.  And we are now seeing a whole generation turning to violence and perversion to hide their mistakes, which they have never learned to deal with.  And it’s a really big problem that won’t go away on its own.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Carrying the Weight of the World: Trump’s UN Speech and earning the right to be blunt about escalators

Who wouldn’t love the UN speech of 2025 that President Trump gave, as the escalator broke as soon as he and Melania put their feet on it?  That’s the world we are living in, and obviously, the escalator incident was no accident.  Employees joked about the escalators’ malfunctioning leading up to that speech as a radical means of protest, hoping to garner more funding for the United Nations, as if additional resources would solve all the problems.  Instead, Trump and his wife walked up the escalator without a whole lot of drama and gave a speech that essentially wiped the smile off the face of a very radical world that has failed dramatically since the creation of the UN after World War II.  It wasn’t the usual speech of placation that often accompanies these kinds of things, with calls for unity, peace, and all that kind of rhetoric.  No, Trump had earned the right to call out everyone, right in front of their faces, and tell them what a bunch of low-life characters they all were.  And that is what earning the right by carrying the weight of the world earns you.  And why Trump changing positions on Russia is so important, because only by earning that trust, by enduring the weight of the world, can a person like Trump say the things he does in public.  The UN speech was a remarkable statement by a world that the United States was clearly leading.  All nations were not there equally.  Running the world by committee has turned out to be a disaster, and it took someone like Trump to point it out.  Not through the media with some passive-aggressive protest, but live, to their faces.  And while everyone was on their heels from what he was saying, they complained that the UN doesn’t work, and neither do its escalators or its teleprompters.  Technical sabotage was meant to throw Trump off his game, but it ultimately played to his advantage.

But to earn that right to be as blunt as Trump has been, carrying the weight of the world comes first, and when people wonder why people like Melania Trump and her husband would want to trade in their life of the rich and famous for this demanding job of being President of the United States, the answer comes from speeches like the one Trump gave.  Watching their faces on the 9/11 ceremony this year, the day after Charlie Kirk, a former friend of theirs, was assassinated in cold blood, was obviously hard for them.  And on the day of the speech, the would-be progressive assassin Ryan Wesley Routh was convicted on all counts in trying to plot the murder of Trump at his golf course, just a few months after the attempted assassination of the President at Butler, Pennsylvania, that drew blood, but had only clipped his ear.  Charlie Kirk wasn’t so lucky, and that was obviously weighing on Trump as he and his wife went through the rituals of 9/11 ceremonies to pay tribute to the most significant act of terrorism that ever occurred on American soil.  More terrorism on a larger scale than the escalator sabotage at the UN, but the same in principle.  And the knowledge that after someone of good character had just been killed on a college campus, many on the Democrat side of politics cheered about it, and to discover that so many of our public school teachers were happy that Kirk was dead, and were gloating about it.   The weight of all that evil when you are in a job like the one in the White House can really make you not want to get up out of bed in the morning.

Then, to add to that, the deceit of Vladimir Putin of Russia, who has been saying one thing about peace all along, while turning around and killing many thousands of people on both sides, ruthlessly can really shake your faith in any kind of relationship.  Even Benjamin Netanyahu has been deceitful in his platitudes of peace, while turning around and acting contrary, being very aggressive, knowing that the United States would always bail him out of any trouble he got into.  So he was picking fights anyway, putting Trump in a terrible position.  The evil that people showed, and being in a position to see it so bluntly, was really wearing on the President, as it does most people who find themselves in that perspective.  Leadership is hard when you know so much truth that most people get to dance through without too much thought.  And that leads to the question of why anyone would want to be a leader of anything, whether it’s the President of the United States or the CEO of a company.  Why would anybody want to put themselves through the ordeal of all the trouble?  Especially when they are wealthy and could choose otherwise?  Knowing the worst in people, because your perspective reveals it to you, why would anybody want to do it?  To know too much and to carry around so much weight, knowing the level of hatred in the world around you.  Most people never encounter this kind of situation because their relationships maintain an illusion of civility.  But Trump is seeing the raw evil that can come from people, and he never gets a break from it.  It’s tough to use the Power of Positive Thinking to overcome such menacing negative thinking, and the Democrats are the party of negativity and below-the-line victimization.

Well, you do it so that you get a chance to go to the United Nations and tell them all what you think of them.  You endure the pain of life so that you can throw it in their faces.  And in doing so, you make the world a bit less crappy because of the people in it.  The United Nations was a failure from the start, but it was able to hide its poor performance behind the evils of humanity.  And as long as people kept the speeches nice, nobody talked about the tough stuff.  And everyone could party on the town, buying prostitutes while away from home, and go to fancy restaurants without any real cares in the world.  But to pull that off, everyone needs to be equally trashy and guilty of the crimes that the world enjoyed.  But by carrying the weight of the world the way that Trump does, from a leadership perspective, he can break protocol and tell people what he thinks of them, because everyone he’s talking to knows they can’t do the same.  Their guilt weighs heavily on their minds, burdening them with the truth of it all.  And that is why it’s worth being in a leadership position.  And without all the pain and the desire to carry it from the White House, nobody earns the right to talk about the real problems.  And this United Nations meeting would be just one more eventless charade.  But because Trump has suffered through some terrible weeks where the worst that people can do to each other was made evident, and he smiles his way through it like nothing in the world can bother him, he earns the right to be critical of escalators that don’t work, or global organizations that fail just as spectacularly.  And that he can broker peace with the biggest nations of the world, who are up to no good, because he has been willing to carry the burdens of knowledge that comes from really knowing the deceit that people are capable of.  And we are all better off for it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

I Love War: The greatest joy in life is destroying your enemies

Erika Kirk’s statements at the memorial service for her husband were nice, but it has been something that has come up in my direction many more times than a few this past week.  I am more aligned with what President Trump said about his enemies: I hate them.  I don’t want to get along with them.  And I would be bored to death in life if I didn’t have someone to fight.  The idea of going to Heaven and sitting around playing a harp on a cloud all day for eternity is not appealing.  Forgiving enemies is not something I will ever do.  I love war, and I love being in fights with other people.  I love to destroy my enemies.  That destruction either happens fast or it happens over a great many years, depending on the circumstance.  But one way or another, the destruction of my enemies is something that is going to happen, and I spend a lot of my life thinking about it.  The idea of waking up every morning, sipping coffee, and watching the dew gather on blades of grass without having to fight is incredibly dull to me, and I would not be happy.  So even though the concept of Christianity is to forgive your enemies and all kinds of platitudes that I think were incorrectly interpreted over time into organized religion, that is where my thoughts end on these kinds of things.  I may share a lot of values with very religious people, but if there is no conflict involved in communicating those ideas, then I lose interest really fast.  Because to me, the fight is the only thing that matters, and if people aren’t fighting, they aren’t trying to get to the truth of a matter. 

Human beings are so deceitful; they have numerous value systems that protect their motivations behind the creative lies that surround their lives intensely.  That is the first problem with a society of peace: a lot of truth gets buried behind deceit.  When people ask me why I can sniff out so much truth about things, and have over a long period of time, it’s because I like to fight for that truth about people.  The pressure of conflict brings about the truth in people and exposes them from their hiding places.  In my experience, that is the only way to understand what people are all about truly.  Otherwise, they will conceal their true thoughts behind the façade of polite society.  If you love the truth, you have to love the means of extracting it from society in general, and the only real way to do that is through conflict.  People often reveal a great deal about themselves through conflict that they would otherwise conceal.  Along with war, I love uncovering the truth about things.  Whatever that truth may be.  I love war because I love the truth, and you can only learn it through conflict.  Because people, all people, will lie to protect their version of the truth until their dying day, if they are allowed to.  The reason for conflict is to settle differing ideas about things.  And to avoid war is to suppress the truth about what those things might be in favor of some common understanding that is usually a watered-down version of reality.  So the assumption of peace is the surrender of the truth, as people are willing to fight for it.  And that lowers the value of a society in general as a result. 

I suppose this has arisen recently, before Erika Kirk made her statements, because many truly reprehensible individuals believed they had some leverage over me.  And they have been very frustrated by my reaction to their aggressions.  Most people conduct strategies assuming that peace is the motivating factor in a human being.  To wake up in the morning and be left alone so that everything is just perfect.  I don’t see the world like that.  If there isn’t something to fight, then I’m bored.  So when I have a lot of enemies trying to plot my demise, I am far happier than if everyone just left me alone.  Many people are frustrated by my approach because they assumed, like most people, that I would do anything for peace.  They should have done their homework.  Ever since I was a little kid, most of my thoughts have been about war and fighting someone over something.  That’s why I love politics.  That’s why I love the business world.  That’s why I like most things, because they involve people, and those people are often at cross-purposes with each other. I love uncovering the truth behind concealed smiles and handshakes.  I never sit down with people and look for common ground or ways to enjoy another person.  I want to challenge them, with everyone, and to discover what it is they don’t want to be known for to the world.  I never assume that my interactions with anyone will be peaceful, and if they are, I lose interest in those people quickly.  In my youth, I wore army fatigues everywhere, under every circumstance, because they reminded me of my love for constant fighting.  I never wanted to join the military to “serve.”  Serving others was always a misguided idea because what if, in doing so, those people were found to be unworthy of my dedication, which is a common discovery in all institutionalism.  However, the fighting aspect has always been appealing. 

The teachings of Jesus are appealing ideas on the surface.  But if you like the truth of a matter, you will either be killed for it, as Jesus was, and John the Baptist was, and as was Charlie Kirk, and many others.  Or you will have to fight everyone, and like it.  And that means everyone, because most people are very deceitful even within their families.  There are plenty of fights, and if you want to know the truth about things, you’d better be willing to fight for it.  Fighting is more than just the physical aspect, because humans are very emotional creatures; they create many layers of deceit in their lives to protect themselves from the harm of judgment.  And the more people you deal with, the more deceit you can expect to be exposed to.  The only way to get to the truth of anything is through conflict, in stripping away the things people use to protect themselves so you can get to the foundation of their intellects.  Such a thing is never given up voluntarily; you have to pound away at their defenses to know who they really are, which only happens under duress.  So, if many people have found that they now have a handful with me, they should have thought about things a bit more carefully.  I am only thrilled when the world around me is on fire, and that is how it will always be with me, even in Heaven.  Heaven to me would be at the gates of Hell putting evil’s heads on a pike and spitting on their tortured bodies.  Everyone else can play a harp at the golden gates of Heaven and sing songs to each other in a quest for peace.  Which, for me, is the same as serving an obligation toward dishonesty.  Only in war do people really tell the truth, even in Heaven.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

We Were Meant to Fight for the Bible: Not to get along with the devils of life, but to slay them

I’ve had what I can only describe as one of the worst weeks of my adult life. Not because of global events alone—though the assassination of Charlie Kirk and other disturbing developments certainly cast a shadow—but because of the personal weight of it all. It’s not the first time I’ve faced a week like this, and I’ve long since abandoned the illusion that life is meant to be luxurious or stable. Comfort, for those who fight for goodness, is not part of the equation. Life, at its core, is a battleground for ideas, for virtue, for truth. And when evil shows itself, as it often does, the only response is to stand firm and keep moving forward with a tenacious mind to defeat it.

For years, I’ve carried my Bible with me across the world. It’s not a crutch, nor a talisman—it’s a companion, a collection of wisdom that transcends time and geography. It has traveled with me through many airports, across countries, and into countless moments of philosophic contemplation. I consider it one of the greatest literary achievements of human intellect, not because it is flawless in form, but because it captures the essence of what it means to be human, striving toward the divine. It is a book that has shaped civilizations, inspired revolutions of thought, and anchored the moral compass of entire cultures.

My study of religion has been deep and wide, touching on comparative theology, mythology, and the psychology of belief systems. I’ve explored Hinduism, Buddhism, ancient tribal mythologies, and the spiritual frameworks of indigenous societies. I’ve read the Golden Bough and other seminal texts that attempt to decode the human relationship with the eternal. But none of these, in all their richness and diversity, have articulated the human struggle for goodness with the clarity and power of the Bible. It is not merely a religious text—it is a blueprint for civilization, a philosophical foundation upon which the most successful societies have been built.

Western civilization, with all its flaws and triumphs, emerged from the soil of biblical thought. The Bible did not just inspire personal piety; it gave rise to systems of law, ethics, governance, and human rights. It provided a framework for understanding the nature of life beyond primal survival. It allowed humanity to step beyond the dog-eat-dog existence and begin to dream of peace, justice, and purpose. The philosophies that emerged from biblical foundations—Judeo-Christian ethics, the sanctity of life, the dignity of labor, the value of truth—are not accidental. They are the fruits of a worldview that sees life as a sacred struggle, not a playground.

When we attempt to remove the Bible from our cultural foundation, we do not simply erase a book—we unravel the very fabric of our civilization. The degradation of social norms, the rise of hatred toward those who speak of God, family, and moral responsibility, are symptoms of a deeper sickness: the rejection of the very ideas that made our society possible. Why would anyone hate a man who speaks of goodness, of biblical values, of the importance of relationships rooted in truth? Because rebellion against the good is seductive. It promises freedom but delivers chaos. It offers novelty but strips away meaning.

There are many religions in the world, and many have contributed to the human story. Islam, Buddhism, and countless others have shaped cultures and guided lives. But when measured by the success of civilizations—by their ability to sustain peace, foster innovation, and uphold human dignity—the biblical worldview stands alone. It is not a matter of superiority in doctrine, but in outcome. Societies built on biblical principles have thrived, while those that rejected them have often descended into tyranny or stagnation. This is not a coincidence; it is a reflection of the power of truth.

The Bible does not promise comfort. It does not coddle the reader with easy answers or indulgent philosophies. It calls us to be warriors for goodness, to fight for what is right even when the world is falling apart. It teaches that life is not meant to be enjoyed passively but lived actively, with purpose and conviction. The stories within its pages—of struggle, redemption, sacrifice, and triumph—are not mere allegories. They are the roadmap for a life well-lived, a society well-ordered, and a soul well-formed.

Even in the midst of a miserable week, when everything seems to be unraveling, I find truth in the biblical perspective. It reminds me that suffering is not meaningless, that hardship is not failure, and that the pursuit of goodness is the highest calling. We are not here to be comfortable. We are here to fight for what is right, to build what is good, and to stand against what is evil. That is the essence of human existence, and it is captured more powerfully in the Bible than in any other literary or philosophical tradition.

Civilizations rise and fall, but the ideas that sustain them endure. The Bible has endured because it speaks to the deepest truths of the human condition. It does not shy away from pain, conflict, or complexity. It embraces them, transforms them, and uses them to point toward something greater. It is not a relic of the past—it is a guide for the future. And any society that seeks to thrive must return to its wisdom, not as dogma, but as a foundation for thought, action, and community.

We are living in a time when the foundations are being shaken. The rejection of biblical values is not leading to liberation—it is leading to confusion, division, and decay. The intellectual persistence that once defined our culture is being replaced by emotional reaction and ideological chaos. But there is still hope. There is still a path forward. And it begins with a return to the truths that have stood the test of time.

To fight for goodness is to embrace the struggle. It is to reject the lie that life is meant to be easy and to accept the challenge of living with purpose. The Bible teaches us that goodness is not a feeling—it is a discipline. It is a choice made daily, in the face of adversity, and in defiance of despair. It is the path of the warrior, not the tourist. And it is the only path that leads to true peace.

So even in the worst of weeks, I hold great respect for the Bible—not as a comfort, but as a compass. It points all society toward what matters. It reminds me of who I am and what I love to do, to fight, not for myself, but for the world that could be, if only we had the guts to be what we were meant to be.  We were not designed to sip lattes at Starbucks and to swat at bugs that land on our foreheads.  We were meant to step into the gaps in life and to fight the evil that resides there, without fear.  And with ruthlessness.  We are not meant to get along with the devils of life.  We are meant to slay them.  And to build the foundations of civilizations on their defeated corpses.  And to plant our flags of justice into the eye sockets of their decapitated heads.  Not to love our enemies, but to defeat them so that even the soil that captures their blood withers under our quest for justice.  And that the entire universe will shudder by our intentions for truth, justice and the AMERICAN way.  And no other way.

Rich Hoffman

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