Category: Novel

The Greatest Thing To Happen in the World: SpaceX and their successful Flight 4

Unfortunately, this is not an article about how great SpaceX is and how what they did with Starship Fight Four was one of the most significant events ever to take place within the context of the human race.  Yes, it was remarkable that within a few months of the previous flight, where the engineering feats were magnificently complicated, the company managed to figure out well the re-entry burn of the largest artificial object to ever fly through the air, out into space, and return as a reusable vehicle.  Starship 4 pulled off a reusable Super Heavy rocket that landed back at Earth after delivering its payload of a Starship spacecraft to sub-orbital trajectory.  It returned to Earth and hovered above the sea as if it were going to do a soft landing and could have easily been captured by the chopsticks at Starbase.  SpaceX would have been successful if that’s all it accomplished.  They essentially proved that the Super Heavy rocket could be as reliable and reusable as the Falcon rockets that are carrying most of the world’s payload to space these days.  And that by itself was astonishing.  But continuing on its journey to the Indian Ocean was the Starship that maintained stable flight throughout its mission trajectory, and it did a re-entry that was very punishing, where a fin melted away due to the incredible heat from the process.  But the Starship showed that it would be just as tough and resilient as was hoped, and it performed a fully functional landing, even damaged by sky diving back to earth and flipping vertically to hover above the ocean before then spinning back to its belly for a soft landing in the sea. Indeed, remarkable engineering and technical innovation were on full display, and they were a fantastic feat for the entire human race.  SpaceX had validated its hope in making Starship a reliable bus that could bring humanity into space in genuinely magnificent ways over the coming years. 

But there is more lurking behind the surface of this incredible display of ingenuity.  SpaceX pulled itself above typical manufacturing standards in dramatic ways that shocked the world very quietly.  And since I can afford to say it because many people can’t, I’ll address the elephant in the room.  SpaceX, an American company, is the only company in the world that could have done what was done by Starship 4.  No other country, not China, not Russia, not any country in Europe, South America, not even Japan, could have done what SpaceX had done with building and solving all the rates of resolutions that were required to pull off a successful Starship 4 launch.  All the other countries would have micromanaged any aerospace company out of existence long before any successful launch occurred, leaving what happened in Boca Chica, Texas, a unique feat specific to our times and tied to the efforts of Elon Musk.  No group of intelligent people working with government anywhere in the world under any other conditions could have done what SpaceX had done because only in America are freedoms provided so that risk-takers can take such plunges and dare to do the impossible.  If NASA, which I like a lot, had tried to build a Starship, it would have taken them, under government pacing of work, five years to make another Starship after the failures of Flight 3 in March.  I happened to be in Japan watching that launch with friends, and it was clear then that not even Japan could have pulled off what SpaceX was doing.  They may have been smart enough to do it.  But they weren’t free enough to enable their risk-takers to unleash so much power of the human intellect. 

And that is what we are fighting for, that kind of freedom in America that is clearly under siege by global communists who want desperately to subdue America into a worldwide citizen movement that is just as crappy as every other place on earth.  Notice that Elon Musk did not start SpaceX in South Africa, where he is from.  He didn’t build it in China, where he partnered to get electric car batteries for the Tesla Company.  The truth is that America is worth fighting for because it takes the elements of American freedom to produce companies that can do what SpaceX has proven it can do.  And it’s a trend emerging in manufacturing to the terror of many globalists who have planned an entirely different kind of world.  The manufacturing trends of the future are not in the massive bureaucracies of an administrative state, where pinheads and keyboard pushers sit in cubicles or work from home between COVID tests and World Health Organization mandates for social distancing.  Where corporate boards would buy up every last privately held company only to transfer the ownership to money managers like BlackRock to flow through human resource departments mundane work requirements created by a communist Department of Labor that has no idea or respect for how work is done in the world, they only care to build and sustain an administrative state of small-minded do-nothings who measure work with false assumptions and ridiculously inefficient utterances of processes that feed communism into every corner of every community on planet Earth.  Only stubborn companies that visionary risk-takers, like SpaceX, still lead have a shot of doing anything.  And due to their success, many companies are rethinking the whole globalism mess.

We must solve this problem now, so I expect it to be contentious.  The success of Starship 4 was such big news that it should have been on every channel, talked about on every radio station, and flashed in every newspaper’s headlines.  But what we saw was barely mentioned by a jealous world watching its vast attempts at globalism and a global citizen movement vanish like mist on a hot day in the desert.  SpaceX was proving that the administrative state built into just about everything money touched was wrong.  And the world was turning away from the communist plans that were so maliciously planned for all of us by people not qualified even to buy toothpaste.  When the Starship landed successfully in the Indian Ocean, more than humanity becoming a spacefaring society occurred.  The way we measure work in our human cultures changed forever.  There are pockets of companies that still operate in such a fashion where the risk-takers are aligned with the smart people who sit down and solve problems under impossible circumstances out of the necessity for adventure and innovation.  But there aren’t many.  And SpaceX is undoubtedly one of them.  With this great success, more companies will do much the same, turning away from globalist administrative state approaches to work and more fully embracing the rag-tag American innovation approach of risk-taking and tenacity that has made America the most dominant economic engine in the world and now space.  It was more than just a technical feat to get such a monster into space and back again.  It was an escape velocity from the real treacheries that hold back humanity, the human tendency to follow tyrants to their deaths and limit themselves to sustain a polite society from subservient redundancy.  It is on the shores of aviation and aerospace in general where advantage and excitement meet economic opportunity for a time to come that the human race has only dreamed about.  Yet it is right before our faces to reach out and touch for the first time. 

Rich Hoffman

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

No More Mr. Nice Guy: Trump needs to put all his opponents in jail, and even worse after sentencing Steve Bannon to prison effective July 1st

Trump is a lot nicer than I am.  When he had a chance to throw Hillary in jail, he should have during his first term.  Because when the communist left acquired power, look what they have done with it.  It is best to strike first.  To destroy your opponents and forget about all this sissy turning the other cheek stuff.  That’s for Jesus and the gang, everlasting life, forgiveness, and all that.  I want heads on pikes.  I want the enemy destroyed.  I want revenge.  I want to see anyone who expresses hatred toward the American flag go to jail for as long as we can put them in there.  I don’t care if the woman who married the crack-addicted sex-obsessed Hunter Biden calls people a Nazi for pursuing justice against the President’s disgraceful son.  Nazis are just more members of the same lefty problem, and they should all be prosecuted and tossed away for as long as we can do it.  So I wasn’t particularly impressed with President Trump’s interview with Sean Hannity, where he talked about his reasons for not putting Hillary Clinton in jail when he could have and should have.  And even Obama.  Trump made himself a victim of communist insurgency, including being such a nice guy that Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci talked him into shutting down the American economy to prevent the spread of a virus they helped make in a lab in Wuhan.  Covid-19 didn’t just naturally jump from animals to humans; it was made that way on purpose, as a bioweapon released for political reasons.  And they marched into Trump’s office and lied to him because they knew Trump was too much of a nice guy to call them out on it.  Trump has no plans to be a dictator, even now.  He wants to Make America Great Again.  And to win an election where the cutthroats in politics don’t want to ruin his life for existing.  Trump, I think, is a very reasonable person.  Much more so than I would be.

But now they’ve gone and done it, and even as we speak, Trump is wondering if, during his sentencing hearing for the Fat Alvin Bragg case in New York, he too will have to go to jail until after the election is over, where he will be released because people have elected him to be president.  Peter Navarro is already in jail. He was a member of Trump’s immediate staff and right-hand man in the White House during his previous administration and will likely be his right-hand man during the next Trump term.  Steve Bannon is also now sentenced to go to jail on July 1st, effectively to take the popular pro-Trump WarRoom podcast off the air during the rest of the election.  Democrats have gone way too far with lawfare, and they have to be punished, and I don’t mean just a little bit.  From top to bottom, they must be prosecuted for their gross abuses of power.  So, they have no reason to call Trump a dictator and tyrant.  They behaved that way once they had power and had to be punished for it.  Otherwise, they will do it all again if given the chance.  These fears that the left have of Trump returning to the White House are of their own making.  Because they know what they did and still plan to do.  And when Trump is back in the White House, I expect him to do what’s hard for him, and that is prosecute everyone who has participated in the coup against him over the last ten years, from Robert Mueller, Barack Obama, and of course Joe Biden.  Even Paul Ryan for the way he worked Republicans against Trump and assisted with the Russian Dossier scam.  They all have it coming, and they must get it. 

So this greasing-the-skids thing going on now, trying to force Trump to do the opposite because of their accusations, will fall on deaf ears.  These are vile people, and there aren’t jails to hold them all or graveyards.  My policy is not just to fight fire with fire.  But to respond with a nuclear bomb, even in reaction to a squinted eye, and to make sure to rub their nose in it for the rest of their lives.  That is not Trump’s personality.  Like I said, he’s a nice guy.  He’s running for president and has built his life to do it.  I have not.  So, for all the people involved, that’s a good thing.  They’ll get off easy.  However, Trump is more than justified in putting a strong Attorney General into the Department of Justice and cleaning the house.  These hearings with Merrick Garland, Hunter Biden, and Dr. Fauci are just the tip of the tip of the iceberg in that disgusting town.  One of the reasons Trump is still the leading candidate for the presidency, even after all that has happened, is that people still see him as their best revenge against a corrupt and out-of-control government.  And yes, people expect revenge for what has been done to their representative government, at the very least.  They don’t want to kiss and make up.  They want their political adversaries in jail because of what they have done to their picks.  And it hasn’t just been Trump. 

While all this was going on, Joe Biden was giving his pitch for making the wealthy pay their fair share, as if that is what people want and expect of their government, wholly clueless and braindead as to what the words meant as he read what people had prepared for him from the progressive playbook.  Who says that the government deserves the level of money they are demanding? Look what they have done with it in the prosecution of Trump.  Why should we want to pay the government anything the way they waste money?  Yet that is the essential platform for the Biden presidency: more money to fund more government that will break the law and throw conservative resistors into jail for not doing what they want them to do.  That is how disconnected they are from the realities of the day.  They shouldn’t be asking for more money to waste or even demanding it, as they arrogantly do.  They should be waiting for their court dates and when they will be prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law.  And to save some of the money from incarceration, many of them should suffer capital punishment for their crimes against our nation.  Anybody, and I mean anybody in the FBI, CIA, or elected office, who participated in a coup against President Trump should be prosecuted with capital punishment in mind because that is a crime of high office that intended to harm our nation at its core.  And Trump is way too nice to say that on his own.  When we elect him again, we expect him to see things our way and not let the left play him for a sucker as they have in the past.  However, as to how the future looks, the political left should be thrilled that Trump is more forgiving than most of the people supporting him.  Judgment Day is coming because they deserve it for what they’ve done and continue to do, and I don’t mean the one for everlasting life.  But life in America is about how it steps forward out of all this smoke and treachery to live again for the people of its creation.  Turning the other cheek is not an option.

Rich Hoffman

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

Making The Noose Great Again: Punishing the bad guys with capital punishment

In reaction to many of the things I have been saying and predicting about our present society, people are strongly inclined toward Making America Great Again by Making the Noose Great Again.  The courts have been shown, which I would argue they never were properly working, to be only good for leftist Marxist ideology.  Frontier justice, where hanging for crimes committed against a community, gave people a level of satisfaction that satisfied communities, and their work toward a justice-driven society is being yearned for.  Even though we may look back upon Western expansion with reverence and ideas of romance, in living freely, there were a lot of problems that are much better in our present conditions.  We don’t have to worry about Indian attacks or picking up unknown diseases every few feet.  Our lifespan today is much longer than they used to be.  We have considered that we are much more sophisticated now than when capital punishment was as common as a sunset.  But, the general feeling is that people behave concerning each other if something they might do might come across as an offense that could lead to their untimely death.  If a criminal was caught before Western expansion had traveling judges to enact law and order, hanging the bad guys, happened all the time.  And without it, there would have been no ability to have a growing society.  When people talk about the evils of Western expansion, again, it’s the political left, the same losers who are behind pornography, international financing, abortion, pot smoke, and welfare programs who were against it and think the Indians should still be in charge of a teepee and dancing in some field to make it rain.  Much of what they have brought the world through the pages of Karl Marx has been ridiculously stupid, and people are slowly admitting to just how bad it has been.  And they are ready to make some changes.

https://gettr.com/post/p363cad6cf8

I’ve been to court many times and have known many lawyers and judges.  I want to like them.  I like the idea of a courtroom to be respected.  I love our various state and federal constitutions and think a law-and-order society is the only way. Strict enforcement of the law is how you protect the kinds of values that make a society work.  But, and this is a big butt, a suburban mom who votes for tax levies for corrupt leftist government schools big, we were a better society when we had dueling.  I think of Alexander Hamilton’s duel with Aaron Burr and the many duels that President Andrew Jackson had over his lifetime; we were a much more respectful society when bad behavior was called out to satisfaction and carried out with seconds there to represent the effort.  If people hadn’t worked out their differences before one of them ended up dead, they may have ended up friends for life.  That was a much better way to solve conflicts than what we have now, where crimes are punted to the state, and the state processes their punishment through the legal system.  The state, what happens to most things the government touches, messes everything up, and the only people who benefit are the state in confiscating wealth and redistributing it to people who don’t deserve it.  The courts and their lawyers make all the money off conflict resolution.  Then, the worst thing that can happen to a criminal is they are locked up in prison, which then makes them parasites on society for that duration.  Someone has to feed them, and the general hope is that they might be reformed and let out to inflict crime in the future.  That is the best that our court systems are offering us.  And even that is a rare occurrence. 

These people have no idea how much anger is coming in their direction, for what they have been doing to us for years. De Niro has no idea how much the game has changed.

Most of the time, court cases drag out too long, and it’s always the wrong people getting punished.  These days, as we have seen with President Trump and many others, the courts have been weaponized.  Two local cases in my community, the Darbi Boddy school board case at Lakota and the Roger Reynolds case, were clear examples of a weaponized court system that had nothing to do with justice but political power intent to rob voters of their picks for political office.  It was utterly corrupt, and lawyers were the only people who benefited from those cases.  Replacing gun battles with foes with pinheaded lawyers arguing with words, and not bullets, has turned out to be stupid.  And the bad guys know it.  There is nothing about our present system that inspires people to behave themselves.  So why not rape that innocent person?  Or steal from a family and their efforts at hard work?  Why not be a louse, a drug addict, or an abuser of alcohol?  What in our society inspires people not to be losers, criminals, and leeches off society?  The answer is nothing.  The works of Karl Marx from the early 1850s on, and spread through Masonic orders all over Europe and America, have not been satisfactory, and people have given it a chance and have been left wanting.  We are not a better world because of our courts and a lack of capital punishment.  We have empowered the criminal-minded to abuse innocent people in the pursuit of some great society as the radical left envisioned it.  And we have been left with a society of disaster. 

As I have said many times, I have traveled extensively, and one thing that I do while traveling is pick up books from those areas to read.  While traveling in my RV, I commonly get up before anybody else and read outside in the portable office, which travels with me everywhere I go.  I have read many books from exotic places like Deadwood, South Dakota, Jackson Hole, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Texas—everywhere, about law and order and the attempts during Western expansion to solve these problems.  The conclusion is that society was worse under court systems than frontier justice.  Once the criminals realized they could hide their acts of villainy behind bureaucratic courts and their processes of pinheaded lawyers and corrupt judges, there was nothing to fear from society, so they performed more crimes as a result.  At least with this Marxist-inspired court system, they were promised a free meal every day and didn’t have to work in society to get it.  Once we stopped hanging people for crimes in our communities and shooting them to defend private property, the criminals started to run our society which is a massive problem to this very day.  And people are beginning to admit how unhappy they are about it.  Crime thrives in a society where courts get in the way of justice and where the courts are used as weapons, which is happening now in our daily news.  A better way to handle many of these cases would be through capital punishment. Nobody wants to see innocent people killed and hung for crimes they didn’t do.  But the fear of getting caught doing something wrong kept a lot of criminals from crossing the line, and we became a much better society.  As people think about it, Making the Noose Great Again makes a lot of sense. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Definition of War: Yes, there are many enemies at war with America, and us

Before you can fix something, you must admit there is a problem.  One of the concealment strategies utilized against our nation is the reality of what has been done to us.  No matter what level of evil we are talking about, which I would say is innate and subconscious, well beyond the scope of human interaction, reality is well-defined if you apply the correct definitions to things.  And that is that America has been at war with many characters who run various groups intent on our destruction, and it’s been that way from the beginning.  And like the Trojan Horse of Troy, the villains purposefully disguised their efforts to catch us all off guard, and they have done that by hiding their malice behind polite society.  And the war they have declared on us resided beyond our social definitions of human behavior.  But yes, we have to understand what’s been happening to us with definitions that matter, and that is grappling with the concept of war and the fact that our enemies are numerous and vicious.  And they are plotting our doom moment by moment and quickly if they can’t make a lot of money off us.  They seek to destroy us for all we’re worth.  Classically, the definition of war is “to overcome the enemy’s will to resist.”  As I saw the stock market results for the second week of May 2024, I didn’t see good news for 401Ks and family planning.  I saw a strategy to put people back to sleep because Joe Biden is losing in the upcoming election, and the enemies of America are attacking our culture with a clear strategy to remove our desire to resist what it is they want to do to America, and that is to convert our entire culture to globalism, Chinese communism style.  And the stock market is just one of their many weapons in the ways that the world is at war with America, and us as its caretakers. 

This is money created through inflation. Not the actual profit of true value. Fake money printed by the Fed to protect Biden from the reality of horrendous fiscal policy in an election year.

Now I get it; people just walking their dog and thinking of a two-for-one special at their local smorgasbord think of war as our involvement in Vietnam.  Or, Iraq.  War involves military action by governments intent on that purpose.  In the past, a general representing a nation or some other sovereignty directed soldiers on a battlefield toward suppressing the enemy and designing victory from a surrender once an overwhelming force had been established and utilized toward victory parameters. Upon such wins, people fly their flags and feel good about their nation’s victory against other countries, much the way we think about sports teams that we cheer on who win.  In that way, war is thought of as something that happens “over there” and is done by “other people.”  We don’t think of ourselves and our lives as being at war because our enemies use the concealment of the true definitions of things to perform their malice.  One way to do so is to subdue people away from their defense of a nation by changing their definitions of what war actually is and why people would be or would not be interested in having war to defend something they value.  The enemies of America, as we have seen often recently, overtly out in the open, is to destroy our desire to resist anything, such as in the transgender movement where even the concept of a boy and a girl is in dispute.  To our enemies, it’s not the sexuality involved that is the issue but the ability to corrupt even simple definitions so that significant attacks are never seen by a society that has lost its ability to have a conceptual faculty.

For instance, the good news that is not such good news on the Dow Jones closing at over 40,000 for the first time in history is a kind of Trojan Horse intent to sneak the enemy deeper into our culture while disguising it as something beneficial to us.  Many people do not realize how powerful BlackRock as a financial institution is in the performance of this scandal, which is relatively simple.  The Federal Reserve, through monetary easing using a clear strategy of Modern Monetary Theory, is doing precisely what crime syndicates have done since the beginning of time, and what is happening now with the war machine pumping large amounts of money into Ukraine behind a fake, and provoked war effort with Russia, and that is to wash illegal money through a legitimate business to give it the illusion of validity.  Not to mention that this practice is the cause of inflation, which is too much money chasing too few goods, and that even with more money in your pockets, it is worth less in what it can buy.  The sudden jump of the Dow over 40,000 isn’t about making money but printing more to represent the same value at a much lower value.  But it’s all disguised to give the illusion of profit by hiding the inflation behind a historic milestone.  In this case, the Fed dumped money into BlackRock and other Wall Street firms to have them distribute the money as if it were real into the economy through person-to-personal investments in the form of 401Ks and other financial strategies to prop up the economy with fake numbers to help Biden not take the blame for the impact that globalism has had on American sovereignty. 

This financial game is just one way in which the enemies have sought to suppress American understanding of the war that has been conducted against them.  Another means of such vile menace is in pornography.  Through the internet, porn has been made accessible to the public to weaken our resolve toward a just and moral society.  By attacking those values and the family creation that often comes from successful family relationships and the production of children who are healthy and independent, the governments of the world have purposely sought to corrupt our intellects so that we wouldn’t be able to resist them in war.  But would instead be addicted to vices of destruction meant to take away our will to resist their intentions.  When you understand how “they” are attacking us, you can know that much of what we do and what happens to us is the result of war, and the intentions of our enemies are pretty vicious and maniacal.  Most of what we experience daily is an act of war against us hidden behind definitions meant to conceal their strategy and keep us from seeing what they have been up to.  And we are stopping them from doing it.  For them, the best thing to do is take away even the reality of seeing what had to happen to resist their desires, which is our destruction, after they have made a lot of money off us in the process.  This has been going on for a long time, and it’s certainly not just a current thing.  Only the plot has been revealed in ways they have lost control of the narrative, and people are talking about it in ways they never dared to before.  But war is our reality, and it’s not something we can hide behind some soldier’s ethical code of battlefield conduct.  This is coming into our homes and neighborhoods disguised in ways we don’t think of as threats of war.  But you can bet they are every bit as such and worse. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Getting Out of Bed to Fight for Your Country: Most people don’t have the guts to be President Trump

There are a lot of sunshine patriots out there who will fly the American flag over the Fourth of July and cook their hot dogs on a grill. But when it comes time to do any kind of heavy lifting and to stand for something, they are nowhere to be found. Most people bootlick their way through life, and they will do so to make the most money possible while doing as little work as they can. And when times are tough, they hide under their covers and turn off the alarm clock until the danger is averted. The world is full of such people. And it is because of them that there is so much evil in the world, empowered and doing what they are doing to destroy the world. I have been warning about these things for most of my life and as people ask me about some of the chapters in my book of life and wonder about all the carnage and hurt feelings, it points back to this essential issue. When times were tough, who got out of bed and did something about it. And one thing I can say, with all the violence and debate, I did not turn off the alarm clock and go back to bed while it was storming outside. I got up, went to where the trouble was, and did what needed to be done. When I fly an American flag, I do so knowing that I have done all I could to make it proud, because the fights to have the right to fly that flag are always under threat by hostile enemies foreign and domestic. It would have been easy to just do like everyone else, take a nice vacation, go to fancy dinners, and play golf without ever talking about anything too serious. But that would never be enough for me, because there was always a lot of work to do, and America needs as many people doing it as possible.

And I saw in Trump many years ago, 2012 to 2014 a person who had achieved a certain place in life where he wanted to do the work that it takes to keep America alive and well. I would point out even back then that Obama was a socialist, and that his birth certificate had major problems and that he probably was not qualified to be president. Which at that time sounded crazy. I remember what I was doing on 9/11 when terrorists attacked the symbol of American capitalism, the World Trade Center. I sent my wife to pick up my kids from school as everyone around me was as floored as everyone across the country and our skies stopped having air traffic for a couple of days. But I never believed the narrative, what made those terrorists think they could get away with it. Globalists looking to topple America are always involved, and they are sloppier these days than back then when people still had some trust in authority figures. 9/11 was a provoked terrorist attack meant to expand government and to give the FBI, and the CIA more authority, which they have obviously abused. And it all happened right under our nose, while people went about their lives worrying about being too controversial, because they might become social outcasts. But out of all that came a few people here and there, like President Trump, who were able to do something to help the flag, so he started thinking of running for president and he was visiting Tea Party groups to build up his brand in that direction.  And I was a supporter, because I knew what kind of work really needed to be done in America, and most people were not willing to do it.

When history looks back on this time, it will remember all the sunshine patriots who sat on their hands and never engaged the enemy, which empowered that enemy to the levels of menace that we are seeing now. Their neighbors might think they are swell people. At the local wine tasting where everyone is talking about sending their children to college so they can learn about Karl Marx, essentially, people might complement the high heels of an attractive woman, but talk behind her back at all the men she is sleeping with, while an American flag flies outside looking for someone to defend it from the tyranny of a jealous world.  But it will also remember that it took 12 years of Trump to return our country back to all those worthless people who should be more grateful than they are. Everyone will be grateful in hindsight even though they did extraordinarily little to help along the way, including most of the current Republican Party. They talk tough, but when it comes time to go out into the rain to engage the enemy, they stay where it is safe, and let others do that. The very few others. Trump is one of them. Thank goodness he won that first term in 2016. And in many ways, what happened in 2020 had to happen because people needed to see just how bad this current government of criminals really was. How deep the rot really extended. They did not believe me when I told them in the 1990s, then the 2000s. And of course, in 2020. But now, because Trump was essentially a president in exile in Mar-a-Lago, and all these horrendously bad people have come after him to destroy him, do people finally see the danger. 

It was always going to take three terms of a presidency fully committed to the preservation of American life to do the job. And Trump seemed poised to do that job going back to the Reform Party. I am not new at this. I remember talking to Ross Perot’s family in the parking lot of their Texas company on the eve of the 1992 election about all this. And most people just would not get out of bed, they wanted to stay asleep. I did all I could, including being in that parking lot with the Perot family in Texas, and 19% of America knew something had to be done and supported Ross Perot anyway. That number has grown over the years to around 38% who would stand by Trump no matter what, because they get it. They are out of bed with the alarm clock off. And I think now, because of these previous two terms of Trump, one official, one in exile, that a third Trump term will put that number closer to 60% of America will finally get out of bed and do the work of patriotism that is required. And as bad as it is for Trump, he has inspired others to finally get out of bed and to fight for our flag. Sometimes it takes a person like President Trump, or a Ross Perot, people who have achieved a certain level of success in life to turn away from polite society, roll up their sleeves, and fight for their country in ways that very few have the courage to do, because they are too busy trying to build a life for themselves to get to some level of independence.  I know what it has cost me, and many people just will not do it, because they do not have the stomach for it. But that did not take away the requirements of the job. It will take three Trump terms to start to fix our country from the hostile communists who have been attacking it for most of the last one hundred years. And it will take another decade or two to implement patriotic policies to restore America to greatness. But we are seeing that process play out now, and thank goodness for people like President Trump, and an exceedingly small group around him who are doing the right things for all the right reasons. I have a lot of respect for them because I know how hard it is. And everyone should appreciate the effort for many thousands of years to come, because it was necessary.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Importance of Musk Buying Twitter: A plot caught in time to save America

I wasn’t sure what it all meant then, but when Elon Musk bought Twitter, the anxiety caused was a bit baffling.  I didn’t really know the story. I had a Twitter account, but when they started banning anybody with the kind of Chinese-style censoring standards that should never be possible in America, I simply stopped using them as a news source or for participating with my input.  I could take or leave them, I was not a Twitter fan.  But, they were a private company, and I figured they could do what they wanted to do.  As a consumer, I could decide whether or not to utilize them.  And those were the ground rules.  But to the Deep State globalists and the communists ruling in the background through finance who were essentially using companies like Twitter to capture American minds into conversion from capitalism to communism with the China model in mind, Twitter was much more than a social media platform.  I never knew the whole story of it until I read the latest Walter Isaacson book on Elon Musk, which spent about a tenth of the book talking about just the “Twitter Deal.”  I had a lot of questions as to why Musk would even waste his time with Twitter, and it started as a kind of gag with Musk putting one foot into the political world out of concern that he was dealing with a Biden administration that had shown its teeth to industrialists like him.  If you didn’t do what “they” told you, you would be ripe for a target of destruction. Twitter’s construction was far worse than what people thought it would be, and the deeper Musk stumbled into it, the worse it got. It was too late, and the truth was realized.

I was perfectly happy to move my attention to other social media platforms, especially Truth Social.  And most of my news these days comes from Gettr.  I interact with Gettr most of the business day and over the weekends.  They have great streaming content and much better news offerings than where you could even hope to get on cable news, or network news.  To have the ability to get information straight from President Trump, Truth Social became his official platform, which I have said will turn out to be the most important aspect of the 2024 election.  It has already doubled his wealth at a time when the Deep State ran straight from the captured asset of a White House has been trying to do one of their famous strategies, and that is to drain people of financial resources through the courts so they could destroy Trump and everything he has built over a lifetime because they can’t beat him at a ballot box.  But Twitter was the social media platform of progressives, which turned out to be just a new name given to hide what they really were, Karl Marx communists.  And it didn’t hurt my feelings at all to not think about Twitter in any way.  If they were run by a bunch of Deep State losers from San Francisco, well, they could choke on it as far as I was concerned.  So when Musk talked about buying Twitter, I thought it was a gimmick at best.  But when the writing was on the wall from other competitors, such as Truth Social, the pressure was squeezing out the previous owners of Twitter, mostly in a desire to keep your enemies close kind of way, to control them, until the whole bottom fell out in the courts and the desire to drain Musk with a failing asset became lucrative, and they forced the sale of Twitter to Musk with the same kind of lawfare we have seen applied to Trump and others recently.  And Twitter was a drag, being subsidized by the Deep State; it was not profitable by itself. 

What Musk inherited was a piece of garbage, a workforce built like most of the World Economic Forum companies were poised to do, progressive workforces, gender neutrality, short work weeks, essentially a company run by government subsidies, where people were paid not to work.  This falls in line with the government’s desire to provide people with a “living wage” not based on merit but statistical suppression, where more money was given to the down and out to incentivize them into power and purpose where a merit base society would otherwise reject lousy behavior and choices.  A government that wanted to topple the “American Spirit” obviously wanted to attack this premise aggressively.  And the headquarters in San Francisco was an example of the worst of American companies falling to open communism with a globalist thrust behind it.  Twitter was a company that was being supported as the typical corporation in America.  Because they existed, other companies felt they had to emulate them with ESG standards and EID values, which led to severe economic and social problems.  Twitter was a snakepit full of vipers oozing with venom. This is precisely why Biden’s administration reacted unfavorably when they heard that Musk would be the new owner.  It is an accident on many fronts that the courts, in their short-sighted efforts, wanting to hang a big loser of a company around Musk’s neck, hoping to destroy him in some way because they don’t really understand what real value is and why he’s rich, to begin with.  It’s the standard court model they use with everyone: bankrupt people into compliance or throw them into jail.  There is entirely too much communism in our courts these days, which is yet another designed strategy. 

“X” under Musk is much better than Twitter ever was.  Musk prioritized free speech for several reasons.  He needed free speech to make humanity an off-planet species.  And the governments of the world who want to cripple that effort actually wanted a Jim Jones kind of communist global community where social media platforms served their needs in editing social content, and it made dependents out of employees until they could no longer think for themselves but could only function in a massively progressive environment like Twitter.  That has been the model of all the Larry Fink radicalism from BlackRock and the World Economic Forum gang, which would then force a universal wage rate and complete communism on a global scale because all companies would be equally wrong and subsidized by governments that the World Economic Forum controlled.  It was a pretty sinister plot that unraveled for many reasons, some of which Elon Musk accidentally stumbled into.  But as history will view it, it was a good accident.  One thing that needed to happen was for Elon Musk to influence the direction of free speech worldwide significantly.  I do like “X” under Musk’s ownership.  I am still heavily “shadow-banned” on most internet interactions, which is tied to many bad guys having too much control over the internet.  But control was why the internet was created in the first place.  So, it’s just a new battlefield in the exchange of ideas.  It’s nothing to cry about or declare unfair because it isn’t.  But it’s better under the ownership of Elon Musk, and what was learned in the wake was that the Deep State had control over our society in genuinely maniacal ways that many didn’t realize until Musk bought Twitter and saw what a designed mess it was.  And in that undoing, a lot was saved that will be realized.  But the depth of that mess was genuinely terrifying and lends weight to the argument of divine providence where an unknown future is undoubtedly leaning more toward self-empowerment and anti-communist sentiment globally. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Secret to Elon Musk’s Success: An obsession with risk and the management of its destructive elements

It’s certainly worth a discussion, although I had been avoiding reading the book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, mainly because it was a Time Magazine view of the world, and I tend not to enjoy books like that very much.  I’ve read other books by Isaacson and enjoyed them enough to learn new things.  In this case, Isaacson was given access to Elon Musk for the last few years to study him and learn all he could.  So, it was worth reading about the daily life and details of a person who is often the wealthiest in the world and runs some of the most successful companies.  But politically, I think of Elon Musk as a Barack Obama fanboy and a global greenie weenie.  But I do admire how he built Tesla.  I’m certainly not a EV fan of electric cars, but Tesla has carved out a nice little niche for themselves that I think is valuable.  SpaceX is an incredible company that is doing wonderful things.  I’m a tremendous fan of the Starship program and what has been done with Falcon 9 and the Dragon program.  I appreciate them for what they are, and I think Musk is just a unique personality to continue healthily pushing society places it needs to go.  I think of him as a great case of “dynamic intellectualism” that I talk about with the Metaphysics of Quality and the philosophy of Robert Persig.  But Elon Musk smoked pot on the Joe Rogan Show and wanted to put fart apps into his very expensive Tesla cars, so he’s not my kind of guy and people like Isaacson tend to get the surface qualities of his subjects, but not the real intellectual gist of their value.  However, after reading Elon Musk by Isaacson, the unavoidable trait of the secret to success did emerge without question, which is why I kept hearing about the book from friends and respected business leaders. 

Since the book came out in the fall of 2023, I have had at least someone once a week asking me if I had read the book since I usually read everything that comes out.  But I typically avoid the trendy stuff and lean more toward big-picture things.  I wasn’t interested in another get-rich book by people fascinated with wealth creation viewed through a popular cultural lens.  But so many people were getting the book and passing it out to their management teams, looking for some secret sauce that Musk obviously has.  So when I was at dinner with some very important people at Son of the Butcher at Liberty Center in Ohio, and under great encouragement from those people indicated that I would love the book, I left that dinner, stopped by the bookstore, and bought it just before Barnes and Noble closed for the night, and I promised them the next time I would see them, I would have read the book and told them what I thought of it.  That was on a Thursday night, so by Monday, when I would see some of them again, I had read the book, it’s a pretty big book with a lot of details in it.  Many people had bought the book, but they hadn’t made it very far through, and they wanted to know my opinion on whether to continue slugging through it.  In truth, it was a good book; Walter did a good job for a Simon and Schuster publication intended for static society audiences.  And I would say it’s one of the most important books of our time, for a lot of reasons, which I’ll spend separate articles covering.  But the secret sauce, yes, it was there and in all its glory.  I understood it, and it’s something I relate to. 

Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but think of President Trump when I think of Elon Musk and how wealth has been projected over time.  Trump’s Art of the Comeback from 1997 was about knowing influential people, supermodels, wives, exotic cars, and tall skyscrapers.  And in the part of the book where Elon Musk went through his period of wealth acquisition, Walter Isaacson seemed to be on comfortable ground.  However, in the cover inserts were exciting value changes for Elon Musk.  The things that Musk thinks are successful and what Trump thought was successful have changed a lot over time.  Musk had exhibitions of massive engineering feats displayed in his book, where Trump featured the building of skyscrapers and the New York skyline.  But while the things that wealth could buy as a value may have changed, getting there had not.  Most wealthy people have some prevalent traits they share in common, which is the concern of Walter’s books, especially with Steve Jobs.  What makes successful people successful?  And everyone talking to me about the book wanted to know this.  “If I read this book, will it make me successful?  Can we pass this book on to our super managers and sales teams and learn something from Elon Musk to help us be more successful?”  The answer is yes.  However, knowing how to be successful doesn’t mean most people have the guts to do so.  You can’t cheat that, even though that is what causes most of the corruption in the world—the desire to take the easy way to wealth to have the benefits without the downside. 

The downside with Musk and Trump, along with many others who have done similar things, even Jeff Bezos, is that they are addicted to risk and obsessed with it.   Elon Musk is a classic riverboat gambler who loves risk.  But has the unique personality to be very intelligent enough to know when and how to mitigate risk.  But yes, he is an obsessive gambler who would play Texas Hold ’em’ by pushing all in for every pot, blowing a lot of money in the process.  But in so doing, he would also get the biggest jackpots.  And that’s clearly how he achieved success at the level he did.  Anybody wanting to succeed would have to learn to bring more risk to their lives to have the success that comes from winning big.  A gambler like that might spend a fortune on betting.  But mathematically speaking, people like Musk and Trump know that eventually, things will swing in your direction.  What separates them from everyone else is how much you can take until you fold up on yourself, broke and destitute.  Musk certainly has a personality that could be homeless and poor beyond any reasonable scale because he is a person obsessed with risk.  I get it; I have many of those same traits.  It’s not the money someone like him is interested in.  But its success in risking and surviving, that is.  And without that risk, there would be no success.  Elon Musk would be just another person with Asperger’s and too much brain power, applying it to a static society that is not interested in risk.  They wanted everything safe and predictable and would push themselves by nature as far from the Elon Musk types as they could, to maintain their safe lives.  That’s what makes Walter’s book so good because it indeed chronicles this risky behavior in ways that the public usually doesn’t get to see in people.  But just buying the book wouldn’t make people successful by itself.  What it could do, though, was let people understand that risk is critical to business and how risk is managed is the key to all successful enterprises, which is my general opinion of the book.  Yes, people should read it.  However, they should learn from it how to put more risk into their lives without becoming destructive.  Because there is no way to cheat risk, you either develop a healthy relationship with risk or get standard, predictable results that stagnate and rot you and your culture from the inside out.  Luckily for us, there are people like Elon Musk out there who are making things exciting.  But, there should be a lot more, and maybe yet, there will be.

Rich Hoffman

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

Kimonos in Japan: If America wants to be Great Again, perhaps we should dress for that greatness

You might have heard about Jimmy Kimmel’s recent trip to Japan, a topic of its own.  But he is right about several things: Japan is clean, and crime is low.  He didn’t understand why, which I’ll break down in a separate article.  However, one thing that is quite clear that I admire about the Japanese people quite a lot is their embrace of their traditional culture and their kimono dress.  I, too, was recently in Japan. I’ve been there a few times during this year, so I am very familiar with some of the unique customs that they have there.  However, during this most recent trip, I saw quite a lot of Kyoto on a Thursday afternoon and for an extended period, and I was surprised by how they dressed.  Most of the people I encountered there were walking around the streets, the temples, and the bamboo forest in full kimonos, both men and women.  And there were rental shops everywhere that kimonos could be rented to wear around town.  It wasn’t a samurai cosplay convention, which was what I thought was going on.  This was how people dressed all the time, and it was very refreshing to see.  It reminded me of something I have been saying all the time, that in America, we need to embrace more of our traditions.  While in Japan, I fully expressed American culture, which they appreciated.  In America, I tend to wear a poncho to my gun competitions and other Second Amendment activities, the kind of Western wear that is very traditional to Western expansion and hard, cold nights on the open ranges next to campfires.   I have several of them, and when I wear them, I always get a lot of strange looks.  But I don’t think they should be considered strange at all.  And when I dressed that way to go out to the store in the middle of the night outside my hotel in Kobe, nobody in Japan thought it was strange at all. 

I had a few ponchos in Japan which I like to put on instead of a jacket, especially in inclement weather.  It’s like having a wrap-around blanket without worrying about it falling off your shoulders, so it frees up your arms underneath.  It’s suitable for short-term warmth without messing around with a cumbersome jacket.  And I like that a poncho hides a lot of what you might not want people to see, such as the many knives and guns that I carry all the time.  With concealed carry across multiple states, it is better to hide the big stuff with very baggy clothing instead of trying to contain the weapons in modern-day America’s conventional dress.  In Japan, their reverence for history, especially in their samurai culture, is unmistakable, and they openly embrace it, which I thought was very classy.  It was nice to see the women dressing up in these classic robes to go shopping and be seen around town.  And the men dressed similarly to accompany them.  Instead of being repealed by the display of my own dress, a few times on this latest trip, as I wore my poncho down to the local store to pick up supplies, people wanted to take a picture next to me in my boots, poncho, and Stetson cowboy hat to show they had met a “real American.”  And they were pleased about it.  As they snapped their pictures with me, I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite quotes from the Dune books: “How else do humans invent the traps that betray us into mediocrity?” 

Mediocrity is what we have adopted in our modern Western cultures, with our associations with communism introduced through our education system.  They have rejected this mediocrity primarily in Japan due to their reverence for traditional values.  But in America, these days, we have associated fashion with an alliance with sportswear.  Nike, Adidas, and other brands seen from college sports programs have largely inspired our public presentation of ourselves.  These days, the idea of proper dress on casual Fridays is a golf shirt that shows we are interested in sports programs.  That is something that they don’t do as much in Japan.  They love sports, especially baseball, but they don’t go out of their way to show reverence for it out of disrespecting their traditional cultures.  But in America, we want to look like the coaches and players of our sports teams, which behind them have all kinds of corporate communism attached to them.  So, our American dress has shifted from individual expressions of a rugged outdoorsman to billboards for corporate influence over our sporting markets.  And the not-so-subtle message there is to accept that individuals are less important than the team’s greater good.  And, of course, behind that is that communism defines the greater good.  So, wearing a cowboy hat in America is quite a statement.  More people are doing it now than they used to, mainly because of the popular Yellowstone television show and the failed politics of the communist left.  People want to make America great again, and like the Japanese, they are turning to traditional dress to convey that trait.  But in America, our dress directly influences our society’s condition. 

I have always worn a cowboy hat.  But over the years, I have been less inclined toward sporting goods fashion trends in favor of my traditional gunslinger apparel.  I’ve been that way for many years.  I remember many late-night encounters in my twenties where I would wear my ponchos everywhere, including the Kenwood Mall in Cincinnati.  It’s one thing to do when you are in your 50s, as I am now.  But when you are in your 20s, many people look at you weird because you are so out of step with mainstream culture.  But it’s always been a visual hedge against mediocrity, which is how I view modern dress codes, and I largely reject the premise.  A culture should strive to stand out from the crowd in everything, individually.  Not to retreat into submission to the mob.  In Japan, particularly Kyoto and even Tokyo, even though the kimonos are uniformly similar in their loose-fitting robes, they are colorful and full of individualized expression.  I thought that seeing that expression was wonderful and was a major contributor to the quality of their society.  I had a chance to eat at a very nice restaurant in Kyoto with some friends.  It was a classic place; most people wore kimonos, and you had to take off your shoes while eating.  It had a spectacular garden to walk in while you waited for your food, and they provided you with slippers to do so.  I stepped into that place, mostly having to duck because the ceiling was low, and the whole place was primarily made of paper and wood.  They gave me a very large locker for my big cowboy boots, which is what they do when you enter to put your shoes in while you eat, but I still wore my cowboy hat.  And they took notice of it.  But it wasn’t in a “you’re not like us” way.  But rather, a respect for the culture that I came from.  And they were proud of their culture.  And what we all shared was a disrespect for sameness as defined by communism and an embrace of versatility as defined by capitalist markets.  They brought us mostly raw fish and vegetables, certainly not chicken nuggets as I might otherwise be used to in the States.  But it was a good look into a culture that embraced their uniqueness and certainly wasn’t shying away from their projection to the rest of the world.  And if America wants to be Great Again.  Perhaps we should start dressing for that greatness instead of playing everything down to some corporate version of casual and accepting sameness as a value rather than uniqueness. 

Rich Hoffman

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

War and Mashed Potatoes: Open borders are an act of war, and the aggressors must be punished as such

There is more to the border problems of the world than just attracting voting demographics.  In the United States, the assumption is that Democrats want new voters because they are losing their old ones, with reckless border security, and they intend to turn red states like Texas into blue states like Illinois and Minnesota.  And that is undoubtedly a surface-level concern.  But this isn’t just a problem in the United States.  I feel very fortunate to have seen with my family Notre Dame before it was burnt down by terrorists in Paris.  They are about to reopen it, although it will forever be damaged because of the history it contained; the cause of the destruction was globalism and the deliberate military intention to provoke open borders all around the world so that new ideas and cultures would burden the old cultures of nationalism and in that way, take down all notions of borders and achieve what progressives have always wanted, a borderless world ran by a one world government that identifies as global citizens.  With that known, all the attempts at such a cause must be viewed as a military objective as hostile agents, no different than when an Emperor of the past sent troops to conquer some foreign land so that they could acquire the resources of that territory.  That is how the Greek, Roman, and British empires and countless others were established.  Genghis Khan comes to mind.  What is happening with open border policies around the world is no different, it’s just being done on a scale we usually don’t consider, which is one of their strategies for aggression.   To override our cultures before we figure out what has always been the intention.  Which is to destroy all concepts of nationalism in the world and to replace it with globalism. 

Just imagine making mashed potatoes for your Thanksgiving meals.  The decision to isolate a potato and serve it as it takes work distinguishes it from the rest of the contents on the plate.  If you are looking for uniformity, you don’t want to isolate the ingredients when cooking; you want to mess them all together, like a stir fry or a mashed potato serving complete with a lot of gravy.  For those in the world at the World Economic Forum who want global communism and a centralized authority run by the United Nations but don’t have a military of their own, how else would they perform their task?  They have sponsored open border policies desiring to move migrants from one part of the world to the next to mix all the ingredients of the world so that the concept of identity is destroyed, and the newly displaced people, even in formally strong countries, will be thrown together looking for a new leader to unify them, and define new rules of conduct.  This was always the risk when transportation and communication worldwide made it possible; the temptation for the next tyrant to conquer everyone would prove too much.  But in this case, all the tyrants of the world have united under a common cause and set globalism as their means to achieve their tyrannies in a shared way under the banner of communism.  Because they at least share all that intention in “common.”  So there is only one way to view open border policies, as a military threat and an intentional world war against all nationalist concepts, nations that intend to maintain their identities and resist a global world order of centralized government.  The attack is no different than Pearl Harbor or any other aggression against American soil.  But since it’s innocent people being used as weapons, and not tanks and troops, people have been slow to realize what’s happening. 

This is clear to me as I travel around the world.  I visit Japan relatively often, so I see the dramatic contrast in apparent manifestations.  Japan is an island nation that is difficult to get to.  You can’t just have an open border; you must fly in or arrive by boat.  And it’s small enough of a nation to cover the borders easily by water.  Nobody is getting into Japan without them knowing about it.  So, they have maintained their culture in a very traditional way.  They are friendly to foreigners and are always nice to me, but they don’t give up their culture for anybody.  It is also why they are one of the top economies in the world despite the challenges of their remote location and lack of resources to work with on their island.  One striking thing about their culture is how little crime they have and how well their cities operate.  That is because they are mainly free of the manipulations of foreign hostilities, such as the World Economic Forum. Because Japan is isolated, the World Economic Forum has a hard time using policy to overthrow the country and to destroy its concept of nationalism.  The world has bigger fish to fry, and that is where the World Economic Forum is focused.  They will worry about Japan later once the rest of the world is under their thumb.  Currently, the game is to prop up China with phony money and then use the communist model to overthrow America and Europe.  The war with Russia is meant to degrade their concept of nationalism, and then once the domino falls, countries like Japan can be targeted.  But for now, the vulnerable countries are those who tolerate diversity so that open borders can destroy the concept of sovereignty. 

But for all those fools who say, “It’s for national security,” when you have open borders, your national security is gone.  And for all the money we spend on the military, what good is it if the real war is moving people all around the world with fake hostilities to provoke globalism in a kind of mashed potatoes presentation?  As I said what I did about Japan, I could say the opposite about England and France, obvious targets of globalism to weaken the former empires of Europe and beat them with incoming migrants from formally conquered territories.  Rather than fight them directly, the goal is to undermine their cultures.  And I have had a chance to see the progress over the previous decade.  The hostilities between cultures are purposeful.  Race relations were weaponized to achieve this goal of globalism.  And the only way to deal with it is to recognize it for what it is: war.  An attack against sovereign nations to overthrow them and, in the wreckage, create new laws centered around globalism.  Knowing all this, then we should be applying our military to these hostile actors and punishing them for their attack against our country.  Like Japan, a country is a set of ideas that produce good or bad results as they are applied to the world.  Japan is booming, and America has been.  Europe has been.  But this is just another attack on financial values, such as capitalism by communism.  It’s only that the approach has not directly involved military hostility.  However, hostility is different between races, sexes, and regional values.  Putting them all together as mashed potatoes to be served up to the lords of globalism is what the goals have been.  People have been slow to realize what the game is, and how to play it, by calling it what it really is, war.

Rich Hoffman

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

George Lang’s Business Ratio: The New Bass Pro in West Chester, Ohio

Over the last several weeks, it has been interesting to hear from so many people upset that I support George Lang, the current State Senator in the 4th District in Ohio, and will continue to do so.  They think he is a RINO and that somehow I can’t tell the difference between a rhino and an elephant.  And the concern continues because I know many politicians, and I like many of them, and I’ve been very open about it.  People new to politics or who don’t have an excellent understanding of what the government is supposed to do for all of us get wrapped up in the horse race criteria that the media creates for them, so supporting candidates for various positions becomes a kind of football game where some people in Ohio support the Cincinnati Bengals because they happen to live south of Columbus while people in the north support the Cleveland Browns.  Those in Columbus fight over which is the better, depending on the record.  But in the end, it’s all rigged, and they are all the same guys and corporate products designed to sell advertising to people.  Politics is much the same kind of thing, and what we usually end up with are people who don’t do a very good job once in office.  They talk the talk but never walk the walk.  And the people I tend to support do so on merit-based standards.  I judge them more on what they actually do than what they say, and when it comes to George Lang, who doesn’t say much about himself too often, he does a lot in the background that is very successful.  And one of these, there was undoubtedly a topic of conversation ahead of the March primary; I had the good fortune to attend the opening of Bass Pro for a unique sneak peek ahead of the crowds with George.  And we geeked out by what we saw.  But as we enjoyed a private tour and I did a scouting report on some of my hard-to-find .500 magnum ammunition and acquire much-needed 209 shotgun primers, I was reminded of why I like George so much.  Not that it’s a struggle, but when I say he’s a great politician and has done all of us such a great job, I look at Bass Pro moving to West Chester as part of the great free enterprise initiatives that George Lang has built over the years, things that operate in the background, and the case for George Lang makes itself quite clear. 

I remember when George and I were friends as he was a trustee in West Chester 15 years ago, and he struggled to fight to keep the trend of the area toward small government and generate much economic wealth, as a township instead of a city.  I have a rule I talk about all the time, which I discuss in great detail in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which people worldwide have been enjoying because the balance of government is the key to a country’s success.  Just as it was set up to do in America, the government needs to be big enough to support the needs of a country or a community but not too big to become authority figures, which is tricky business among anybody in the human race, anywhere in the world.  But few places have done it better than West Chester, Ohio.  I have been a part of it since the beginning, starting when we used to call it Union Township, and it was mostly farmland and open fields.  It was strange to stand in the new Bass Pro parking lot with my wife a few days later during the grand opening when she remembered me racing cars against other rival people in that area.  Things have changed quite a lot.  However, the form of government formed around the growth of West Chester Township is a success story that traces back to George Lang.  To have such a community run by three trustees is unusual in the world, where so much wealth is generated among so many people, and to have such a high standard of living is almost unheard of.  But George established much of that in those early days, and the trustees there now have continued those policies and resisted the temptation to turn West Chester into a city with a mayor and city councils running everything.  The success in West Chester is that George Lang and future trustees have embraced the capitalist concept of free enterprise and kept government as small as possible to allow businesses to grow, and as a result, West Chester has been, and continues to be, one of the best places in the world, not just the country.  I’ve been all over the world several times.  And I’ve been all over the United States and seen a lot of very nice communities.  There are few places as good as West Chester, Ohio.  I would argue that no place is better.  The reasoning is that the government ratio has been figured out and maintained in West Chester mainly because of George Lang’s precedent.

The Bass Pro story is a good one.  We have been fortunate to have a Bass Pro in Forest Park and a Cabela’s in West Chester by Liberty Center.  Since Bass Pro bought Cabela’s over the last decade, I have mixed feelings about them combining resources to make this new Bass Pro in West Chester, which opened on February 21st, 2024.  I liked both previous stores and hated to see them go.  But the property for the new one was established over a decade ago, and once they were planning to move to the new location, Forest Park made them an excellent deal on their lease, so they stuck around while the market settled down and the agreement with Cabela’s matured.  The giant outdoor store market has found its balancing act, as Field and Stream have discovered.  How big can you be and still be small enough to survive?    I tend to judge all Bass Pro stores based on my favorite, the one in Springfield, Missouri, the headquarters of a vast store, as I have discussed before.  As George and I stepped into the new Bass Pro, it was more Cabela’s in its presentation than Bass Pro, but it’s a fantastic size and filled with everything anybody could ever hope to have regarding outdoor life.  My family spends a lot of time exploring and traveling, so a store like this is a wonderful addition to our life.  The new West Chester store is enormous.  It is noticeably different from the one in Forest Park, but it is right-sized to fill the needs of the current outdoor market.  Having the ground on the Streets of West Chester is far better for them than in any of the other two previous locations. 

And that’s the trick: why did Bass Pro select that location in West Chester instead of other regional places?   The Forest Park site was failing because the community failed, as has Fairfield, Springdale, and Sharonville around the area.  All those places have moved in the city direction and have added government in the form of mayors and city councils that slowed down the growth rate because they started looting off their businesses to support the government.  West Chester is very business-friendly, and the tax structure is not penalizing.  If you keep your government small, they don’t have the ability to loot off the community.  And additionally, we have kept the government school of Lakota under check for well over a decade now, so they haven’t been able to suck the life out of West Chester and Liberty Township the way the schools do in other parts of the world.  The result is that investments like those that take a Bass Pro Shop to build and develop can happen, where different communities would choke off the opportunity at the development phase.  Working in the background as one of Ohio’s most powerful senators, George Lang is bringing those same sensibilities to the entire state of Ohio.  And he’s doing a great job.  Whenever I go to Columbus to talk politics, the word about George is that he stays focused on his Business First Caucus and doesn’t get wrapped up in much else.  He is applying the West Chester model, which he helped to build from the start to Ohio in general.  The Ohio Senate listens to him, as does the House, and he has the ear of the governor in a healthy way.  You don’t see George running for every microphone to broadcast everything he does.  When I took a few pictures of him at the opening of the new Bass Pro, he was a little shy about taking credit.  But I know the details behind the scenes, and he deserves much credit.  And that’s also why I’m so supportive of him over these many years and continue to be.  George understands how to support just enough government to make it functional.  And takes away the flash of temptation for it to grow into a monster.  And everywhere George has been, his fight has been to keep government small and manageable.  Bass Pro is just a recent but obvious example.  And it was great to see it happen.

Rich Hoffman

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