Category: Novel

The Best Option for Dry Fire Practice: Having a great relationship with your firearm

Not to take anything away from one of the most incredible people in the world, Tommie, the owner of Premier Shooting in West Chester, but I am excited to report on a great new dry fire technology that many people may not know about. I mention Tommie because she told me about her exciting new dry fire range at Premier, the latest craze in shooting, for a good reason. Much of the time, dry firing involves a laser in the gun instead of a bullet and can be measured against a target by some electronic method. It’s becoming more common to use a smartphone for dry fire action. More sophisticated dry fire can be utilized like they do at Premier. There is still nothing like live fire with a real bullet striking a real target. But dry fire can be a great way to stay proficient with a gun without all the expense of firing live ammunition and can be every bit as enjoyable. Well, I have found that practicing for my Cowboy Fast Draw events a wonderful invention sold by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association called the Gunslinger Mark IV laser targeting system that I finally treated myself to, and I’m in love with it. It has been around in the fast draw community for several years but has only recently been perfected to a near-perfect system, as shown in the video above. I can’t think of anything better than this as a dry fire option for people looking for a home dry fire solution to their shooting needs. Practicing with one of these dry fire systems makes the range time much more valuable. I’m certainly not saying gun enthusiasts should replace range time for dry fire time. But that dry fire will make that range time much more useful. 

As I say all the time, especially these days, it’s essential to have a relationship with our Constitution, specifically the Second Amendment. Some people lose touch with the Constitution because they live in areas where they get used to concessions to utilize Constitutional rights in favor of collective need. For instance, in urban areas where it’s almost impossible to shoot every day in the backyard, it’s hard to maintain a relationship with your favorite firearms because they stay locked up all the time. One of the things that I like most about Cowboy Fast Draw is that it allows me to have a wax firing range in my workshop that makes it possible to shoot every day. When I want to fire real lead bullets, I go down and see Tommie at the range. But it’s not possible to shoot every day for me, because of time really, so having a range in my home makes it that much more practical. For many years now, I have enjoyed going into my shop and shooting at my strike plate range. But, for me, that wasn’t enough. I want to shoot while sitting in my reading chair and watching movies and football games. So I had been looking to get one of these Mark IV laser targeting systems, which essentially does everything my strike plate range does, except fire actual primers. Firing live fire rounds in the house and having wax bullets explode all over the living room just was not possible. But with a laser, I can shoot all day and all night long, as much as I want without the expense of using up rounds of ammunition. 

This particular unit is unique because it was invented by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association for the specific problem of fast fire and the need to register the hit in thousands of a second. Much dry fire activity is specific to just hitting a target and seeing how you do from shot to shot. The added element of speed is something special. Whenever the laser hits within the 8″ circle on the target system, it picks up a hit and measures it within fractions of a second. The light blinks three times in practice mode to let you know that your shot is coming. Then the light comes on solid and counts the time it takes you to hit the target. I not only use my target system for fast draw for all types of target shooting. I shoot from 30′, 21′, 15′ down to 5′ like I did in the video, up close so that the camera could pick up the gun and the hit in the same frame and still see the indicator. Even better, the unit is free from an internet connection, so nobody is snooping around on you while you are target shooting. It’s free of internet control, leaving target shooting the personal relationship between you and the practice and nobody else. Other types of dry fire where the smartphone is involved are giving vast amounts of information on all of us to some data collection company. So while convenient and neat, there is a cost to the technology. The Cowboy Fast Draw Association people make the Mark IV advance the sport. So, it’s a trusted source of shooting applications that makes using the Mark IV a much better experience. 

Best yet, the Mark IV Laser system allows shooters to have that daily relationship with their guns. It takes away a lot of the taboo that politics has placed on guns over the years and will enable users to use their firearms more for sport than just self-defense. Practicing with dry fire lasers has the feel of shooting baskets in the driveway. Shooting is a sport just like basketball or football—even golf. But until dry fire technology evolved to the level it is now; it wasn’t possible to practice with firearms virtually anywhere at any time of day. With the Mark IV, as I showed I was using inside my RV, shooting can be done anywhere. Even in a McDonald’s parking lot in Vail, Colorado, while you are waiting for the grandkids to get a Happy Meal and use the restroom. And the system is so reliable that it works perfectly every time. Once you have one of the Laser Training Cartridges that ignite the laser and allow the shot to fire down the barrel, you can shoot all the time, with the only cost being batteries for the cartridge. The total cost of the whole setup is around $800 for the laser and the targeting system and can all be purchased from CowboyFastDraw.com. I buy from them all the time, and they are always good about delivering high-quality items. I even recently ordered from them on New Year’s Eve, and they fulfilled the order that very night. They are like dealing with the way America used to be, always attentive to the customer’s needs, and competent. So overall, I can’t recommend one of these dry fire units more for all the reasons I mentioned and more. The best thing about it is that it takes shooting into the realm of every day and allows shooters to become much more proficient with copious amounts of practice than they could get otherwise. And making better shooters with much more handling only helps everything, from Constitutional consideration to the advancement of shooting sports, because more people can now participate. There is no downside, and for shooters everywhere, knowing that something like this is out there is something that could be life-changing in a good way.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Democrats Own The Crime Spikes in America: Yet, there is something more sinister happening than just stupidity

Even though it’s an election year and Democrats everywhere want you to forget about their defund the police movement, the crime rates that we are seeing today are entirely their fault. The amount of lawlessness present in our current society is incomprehensibly reprehensible. When I was a kid, I thought you could go to jail over stealing a pack of gum. Now, you can sell drugs, smuggle people over the border, rob your neighbor and steal everything they have, and expect to get away with it. Places where there isn’t much concealed carry, have seen crime rates spike, vandalism, rape, abuse of every kind going through the roof. Gangs are flourishing, just as the cartels of Mexico are. And on a global scale, every type of criminal, even political ones, is thriving like never before. Criminals created these policies of no legal enforcement, and they are not motivated to change their behavior, except to trick voters into keeping them in office so they can do more damage. But don’t think for a second any of this is by accident. No, what we are seeing with this decriminalization of criminal conduct is a more powerful attack, long-planned. From the Soros-backed district attornies to the empowerment of the drug cartels to harass good people like some villains from an old western, the real target has always been our concept of constitutional law in America. All Democrats, to some extent, especially if they call themselves progressives, desire to destroy our idea of a constitution and collapse it into something reinterpreted by new forces of a criminal syndicate operating out of the United Nations. So when they wanted to defund the police, they meant to destroy America at its core of constitutional law and that oath that binds us all together.

Now I’m not one of those people who cry at the thought of a “thin blue line.” I have always had a wary eye toward law enforcement and an even more scrutinous opinion about military service. I am not a fan of “service” to something “bigger” than ourselves. That type of terminology is just more rhetoric from the Bibles of collectivism. The political spectrum we are all told is essential isn’t even on the scale of what the Anti-Federalists who gave us the Bill of Rights were ever thinking. They would be apocalyptic at the level of Federal control they see today.   For instance, the political scale of fascism on the right and communism on the left is entirely wrong, yet nobody in our media gets it right. Even Tucker Carlson on Fox News and Sean Hannity talk about our society in terms of that scale, trying to stay “fair and balanced” within it. While preaching about our “leaders” all the time and where they are on that scale, they still salute fallen soldiers and cops crying over their role in the “thin blue line” and feel they must answer to where they are on that scale, to the right, left, or center. But in my world, it’s all on the left. Fascism is a concept of the left; Hitler was a socialist. None of what the modern media calls the “political left or right” is what is in our Constitution. Our way of law and order in America isn’t even on the scale of what the rest of the world is doing, which is just another form of attack from global forces at the American way of life. 

Just because a cop comes into a Waffle House at 2 AM with a gun on their hip is not a call to worship for me. Under a corrupt administration, that may be my next enemy. If we agree to serve the Constitution, we have common ground. I will be armed too, and a gunfight right then and there would not be to anybody’s advantage because we at least want the same type of society, governed by our Constitution’s rules. But if politicians come into power and try to force changes in Constitutional law, like what we have seen with Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, then that cop might become the new enemy. Federal troops might be good guys under the Trump administration, but those same armed forces may be the enemy breaking down your door at 6 AM with the media truck filming from down the road under Biden’s DOJ. So when a bunch of soldiers comes into that Waffle House at the same hour, all looking for a nice omelet, you won’t see me going over and thanking them for their service. Instead, I would keep my eye on them, weary of their intentions because I might not like who is giving them orders as soldiers following orders. A system never has a higher priority over individual will, and that is what we do when we blindly worship the “thin blue line” or a flag-waving soldier. They may be friends at a Fourth of July parade. Still, they can turn into a menace in a moment over whoever controls the region’s politics, whether they adhere to Constitutional principles or whether they want to get rid of them for something new entirely. 

And that is the actual target radius that Democrats have been caught on with these spikes in crime. I will say that we need police, and we need the military, even if we must keep our eye on them at all times and always keep our own guns nearby in case things go wrong. But the attack on our American Constitution is an attack on the idea of the pronoun “I.” The concept of individual ownership, of one’s own life, children, wife, house, and car. By unleashing a crime wave upon America, the real target is the idea of self and to surrender that self to the blob of collectivism. That even the rich person is equal to the homeless person. The drug addict is privileged to the big screen television of the rich person who has led a clean life, worked hard at a job, a family, and other material possessions to show all that hard work. The Democrats want to erase that measure of work, the possessions that a person acquires over time, and to make it so that the incentive to do so is pointless. And in that way, we would give up our American way of life and begin to accept something else designed at the United Nations. That is what they are after; it’s not that they are crazy. Their attack on America is purposeful and long-planned. Their target against us is in destroying the concept of any form of self-possession, such as “my thoughts” or “my work.” Before Democrats and communists worldwide can ever have a collective-based society, they must remove the pronoun “I” from American culture.

For those who have traveled worldwide, you might instantly recognize this problem when away from America’s shores. The concept of “I” is much removed from daily conversations. Instead, the idea of “We” is much more prevalent. That is undoubtedly prevalent in China, India, and Vietnam. The concept “we” is the center of their society. And increasingly, we see this in Europe as well. And Democrats in America are intent on bringing it to America, and that means attacking the Constitution of our law and order society that protects all ideas of “I” and “My” and replacing that emphases with “we” and “us.” That is where the law enforcement trick comes into place because what are they in service to? We honor police officers and military troops not as individuals but as sacrifices to a “greater good,” a system beyond oneself. So just as in the discussions of the political spectrum being fascism on one side, which might include police brutality, and overly-centralized state-run communism on the left, the entire measurement is focused on a sacrifice of the self to the consumption of the whole. The soldier is no longer a representative of the self; they are now embodiments of a larger body for which they are but “one.” Do you see how they played that little trick? And most everyone in society has fallen for it. So this is a problem far more significant than just defunding the police and seeing crime waves ensue. That was part of the plan all along. It’s part of the Democrat’s desire to eliminate the concept of an American Constitution altogether. And it is there were the many divides of our country start and end. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

Atlas Shrugged is a Good Place to Start to Understand Today

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

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

My History with Atlas Shrugged

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How To Make a Two-Party System Work: We are a Republic, not a flea-bitten “democracy”

We are a Republic

Every time I hear some political ignoramus say that we need to “save our democracy,” it is like someone scratching a chalkboard. All this “dagger into democracy” talk is as stupid as stupid gets. We are not a “democracy” in America; we are a “republic.” We are a government “of” the people, not “by” the people. But we are taught in every way of life imaginable that everything is a popularity contest, especially in our public schools. That majority rule, and if you are not in the majority, then you will never rule. Well, when we talk about the majority, we are talking about every drug addict, every sex-starved lunatic, every illiterate fool, ever degenerate imaginable. If we only consider popular elections by a majority, then always the dumbest will rule the smartest, and our society will indeed be equal, equally deficient. So it is no wonder that people get frustrated with politics when they see the system not working. They show up once every four years and vote for some people, and ultimately, those people let them down, then they get discouraged with the two-party system. At the same time, the media drives home the point they learned in their public educations, that democracy is all about the popular rule and that the only way to achieve fairness is to punt everything to a much more centralized government to sort out. This is especially true now where people can see that the party system isn’t working for them, Democrats are off doing the work of outright communism, and Republicans seem to be fighting Trump, a natural outgrowth of the Tea Party movement. People who don’t pay much attention to politics are obviously frustrated because, for some reason or another, they thought they could show up and vote every so often, and that would be the end of it. The world would just carry on and work.

But what I say to all those who want to disparage the two-party system, or who get upset when parts of their chosen party look bad and don’t represent a majority of the people associated with that party, is that the time to work out those elements is always in the off-year elections. For instance, right now, in the early months of a New Year, 2022 is the time for the philosophy of the Republican Party to be worked out in the trenches. The primary season is upon us, and that is when candidates battle each other for the general philosophy of the party. I would say that the system works great as a two-party system so long as people participate. You may not get everything you want in the candidates. I’m hardly ever happy with where things are, but if you don’t participate, then your point of view will never get a seat at the table.   After all, this is what’s going on in the Republican Party right now and what Democrats have continued to fail to match. The news analysts think that Trump is an extreme version of the Republican Party when he is a natural outgrowth of the Tea Party movement that has become more involved in party politics starting at the central committee levels, voting in primaries, and other off-year activities. The establishment types aren’t happy about it, but that representation grew over time from the Tea Party into MAGA and the American First Policy Institute. Democrats have incorrectly assumed that Trump was just an extreme right-winged version of the establishment, so they have tried to counter with their own version, where the Biden administration is now, representing the radical progressives, giving them a voice they have never had before. The progressives took this admission as a mandate, and as a result, they have over-extended themselves.    

To a political outsider not participating in these processes, and looking at presidential elections as the only ones that matter, they will see disfunction because the system is not working the way they were taught, through popular vote, only every so often. But in a republic, we are a nation of laws, not the mob. And those laws are created during off-year elections, not presidential elections every four years. Right now is the prime time to work out the general philosophy of a political party, and if you are not engaged in that debate, you should never be surprised when you are not represented in the final product. But even if you do participate, there are other people involved, and their minds have their inputs, so what you end up with will ultimately not be 100% you.   But at that point, you can’t just pick up all your game pieces and cry like a baby and leave. You have to continue to fight it out, to push for your ideas, and let come what may. That is what a republic looks like. Politics is not supposed to be nice. It is supposed to be contentious so that only the best ideas survive into law and policy. The whims of mankind are meant to be tempered with time and a lack of tenacity. If you want a friend, get a dog. If you’re going to be the master of your own universe, stay at home and never go outside. But if you want your republic to function, participate. When people disagree with you, strengthen your argument to win them over or have your ideas crushed under the weight of analysis. But don’t think for a second that your vote is a one-and-done kind of relationship at the ballot box. There is a lot more to it, and our republic requires people to participate all the time. Not just when it comes time to vote. 

China keeps talking about how efficient they are, and of course, big bureaucrats in Washington D.C. culture want to have the same kind of control that communism gives to those countries. They want to rule by administrative state, so they throw gas on the fires all the time about the follies of our current political process.   Of course, when the government can just tell people what to do, it’s a lot less messy for them. China’s present argument is that “American Democracy” is too messy, too slow, and does not serve the “people’s” needs. They would love to see an end to the two-party system. They love to say things like, “we’re putting daggers into our democracy.” They want to plant that seed and watch it grow into a change state from a capitalist nation into a communist one. If they can convince voters that the system doesn’t work, they may be willing to throw it all away for something that does. But it’s not our republic that is failing; it’s the people participating. Because of their lack of effort, the strength of the two-party system doesn’t get fulfilled the way it should, and the people who end up in charge are the worst because they were the only ones who showed up.   That is clearly the problem with Democrats. Republicans had the Tea Party, and the establishment is very unhappy about their continued presence, but Republicans have a much better party as a result. But punting to default and saying that none of it works is just a falsehood. The only thing not working are people who have been taught wrong from the beginning what their proper role in government always was. And how much influence they really have for the future of our “republic.”

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Jared Schmeck is Just the Beginning: Americans are better than anybody in the world at sticking it in the eye of authority

Jared Schmeck is a real American

Of course, the Democrats support the filibuster change in the senate. Biden knows he didn’t win the election and that none of the Democrats will win anything in the Midterms. Democrats are not the majority in America. They know it, and voting proves it. They can only hide their extreme minority opinion by cheating in elections. So for them, it is a nail in their coffin to contemplate tighter controls on future elections. They have convinced us to open up the voting dates and voter ID parameters, but that has proven to be a disaster. And after 2020, of course, voting rights will have to be much more tightly controlled. There will never be another election in America where the entire nation openly accepts the results.

Democrats have been pushing their luck for decades on vote cheating, and this time they just went too far. A certain amount of cheating in places like Philadelphia and Detroit were give-ins that we put up with to get along with Democrats. But never again, after what happened in the middle of the night, where “someone” stopped vote counting in five critical states after Vegas had called the race for Trump around 10 PM on election night, will our society ever go back to what it was. When we all woke up on election day, we were told that Joe Biden was going to win and that massive leads in Pennsylvania would be erased for Trump and that we were going to like it. Take it, or take it, the media told us. We had no other choice. Our country’s corporations had taken over our government, and they were letting us know that we had no choice but to go along if we wanted to get along. Because they didn’t care really what we thought about it, they were taking our government from us.

That’s why it didn’t surprise me in the least to hear Jared Schmeck tell Biden on Christmas Eve, “Let’s Go Brandon.” As incompetent as the Biden administration is, and to not screen their calls any better than they did during a call to promote Santa Clause, Trump supporters got a different kind of Christmas present from a young dad and Trump supporter. The “Let’s Go Brandon” rally call has been fuming all through 2021 and epitomized the thoughts of a majority of Americans. More than 75 million people voted for Trump, more than any political figure in history. It all started at a NASCAR event where fans made television cameras nearby know their feelings about Joe Biden. Of course, the camera crew could hear what the crowd was saying, “F, Joe Biden.” But the news reporter stated on camera, even as we could listen to it for ourselves, that the crowd was saying, “Let’s Go, Brandon.” As the election results of 2020 and the panic over Covid continued, most Americans can see the con game in real-time because they are free to think about such things. Here was a group of people saying obviously one thing, but the media said that it was something completely different. So to reflect that paradox, among disenfranchised Trump voters, “Let’s Go Brandon” has become a thing to remember the ridiculousness and corruption of our political system in general and our media culture that is obviously controlled by a corporate narrative that thinks they are actually in control of our government through soft money, dark money, all kinds of money. And that our Constitution to them is meaningless. 

I think we all understand the problems of our government, but this illusion that the media has created over the years is kind of like holiday dinners where you put up with loved ones who may have fallen off the wagon over the years. Usually, our dealings with them are short. Once they leave, we don’t have to deal with them for another year, and everyone goes back to their own little worlds. That is how this massive corruption has managed to take hold the way it has. That is why all the cheaters of the 2020 election thought they would get away with it. Suddenly the undesirables weren’t just stopping by for Christmas dinner; they wanted to come over for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July too. They were sticking themselves into our lives in ways that crossed the line. And people weren’t happy about it. I thought hard about it after the election. I was so thoroughly pissed off that my wife and I packed up our RV and traveled the country extensively through the year. I was pleased to meet many, many, many people like Jared Schmeck. They were at every gas station, restaurant, and rest stop from Cincinnati to Idaho and all the way to the border with Mexico. My wife and I went to all those places in the heart of America to get to know if we still really had a free country to live in. If the people living in the country really still believed in the Constitution.

As it turned out, I wondered after all our trips if anybody had actually voted for Joe Biden. He certainly didn’t get the number of votes that the election results showed. Democrats had cheated massively, and they had been caught. And even with all their tightly controlled messaging, so many people hated Biden that spillover into something like that Christmas Eve Santa call with Jared Schmeck was bound to happen. There are millions of people like Jared out there. The media has tried to ignore them and cover everywhere that they aren’t. But, because of the incompetency of the lying Biden administration, that is becoming impossible to do.

I was listening to that call live. My home is a nerve center of monitoring whatever is going on in culture for people who know me. I usually have my reading chair in my living room that has four points of media coming to me at all times, not counting the large television we have there, which is always watching something from football games to movies. At that station, I monitor podcasts, videos through the computer, audiobooks, all types of information, all at the same time. Then in my gun workshop, I have an additional three inputs that are always playing. That way, I don’t miss anything as I move around my home. So I was listening to the Biden call with Jared as it happened. I even turned down the other inputs to hear it as it started to sound like something that was about to fall apart for Biden.

When it did, of course, I laughed pretty hard for a long time. Not only was it funny that the Biden’s were clueless and incompetent even to allow the call to happen in the first place, but that the spirit of America was very alive at that moment. Even with all the media manipulation that is going on, the censorship, the threats from the left toward violence, Americans can stick it in the eye of authority better than anybody on planet earth. Here it was happening in quite a spectacular way on Christmas Eve, a year after the misery of the 2020 elections made it look like all was hopeless. It was far from hopeless, and we see that in people like Jared Schmeck. The media wants to think of him as unusual. But he’s not. Actually, I learned this year that he is pretty common, more so than all the Democrats put together. And it is that which they know too, which scares them the most. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

No More Lockdowns: Unlike before, people now know that government doesn’t have the power

No More Lockdowns

I have been asked by many dozens of people over the last week of December 2021 whether or not we would have lockdowns again due to the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus.  What made things considerably worse for people was the decision of the Sixth Circuit Court to overrule the Fifth Circuit over the OSHA decision on Biden’s Executive Order making vaccines mandated.  All that happened around the same time that Biden had a nationwide address to talk about what the administration was doing about Covid spreading, panicking everyone into wondering if we were going to go through 2020 again.  So I’ll say here what I’ve told all these other people personally, no, we won’t be going through lockdowns again.  Now, if you live in a blue state or a blue city with some radical progressives making the decisions, you will see them try.  Democrats are polling terribly everywhere they are these days because they have been forced to pull off the masks they have been hiding behind for many years.  Now that people see what they are up to, they are running in the opposite direction.  The greatest thing to have come from the Trump presidency has been this pressure on progressives to show what they have always been about against a backdrop of pure capitalist endeavor.  I think people needed that lesson, and we are all better off for it.  But the most significant thing that happened, which I have watched happen over a great many years, but never better than with Trump, is that our population has learned about the American Constitution and its powers to limit government.  Now that people can see why that is important, they are fans of the Constitution in ways that will prevent further Covid lockdowns over a sustained period.

Just for review, there is no legal authority for a centralized government, even under emergency powers, to lock down our American society.  The planners of Covid assumed that people would trust their doctors more than they trusted the government, so they came up with Covid to attempt a global Great Reset of all capitalist economies into centrally planned ones, and many governors in America fell for it hook, line and sinker.  They weren’t exactly what you might call “constitutional scholars.” Hence, it was easy for communist health directors to take what the World Health Organization said, run by China essentially, and apply it in a centralized way in their states.  We certainly saw that behavior in Ohio with Mike DeWine.  He led the way for all the other states in America to go total authoritarian and break constitutional limits, all in the name of an emergency.  The government is not allowed to do any of that, even under a crisis.  Over the years, the government has abused this premise several times under provisions of the “greater good,” such as the New Orleans hurricane from several years ago, where the door-to-door arrests and gun confiscations were conducted under the umbrella of “safety.” So naturally, since it worked back then and these government tyrants took note, they were going to try it on something more significant and more far-reaching, convincing people to give up their constitutional rights under emergency conditions.  That is how the Covid approach was formed, and when they were able to trick President Trump into buying into the concept during an election year, they were sure they would have success, which they did get. 

But they only had success because people didn’t know their rights.  People could have told the government to go to hell from the very outset of Covid, but people gave the government the benefit of the doubt.  But I said it back then, and I continued to say it through the government made “plandemic” that there was no constitutional construct that government had to tell businesses when they could open or close or shut down.  The government made a move to centralize its authority, suspend constitutional rights, and attack elements of capitalism outright without having to justify themselves to the public. They were in love with this new ability.  And people followed for a while because they really thought they might die of Covid and that the CDC might actually know what it was talking about.  It turned out they didn’t know what they were doing, or if they did, it was malicious intent from the start.  No attempt by the government to stop the virus with therapeutics.  Their only remedy was a vaccine or nothing and to social distance for some ridiculous period to supposedly alleviate the pressure on local hospitals, which was never a problem, even in the height of the lockdowns.  Every court case that went to court in Ohio challenging DeWine’s lockdowns of the state economically were defeated in court, and they will continue to be defeated because they were never constitutional to begin with.  But the trend was seen by all; the government never did have the authority to go door to door and arrest people, like they have been doing other places in the world that don’t have a constitution as we have in America where the government has limited rights.  So the government has attacked our businesses through rules and regulations that they have controlled to show power over the Constitution, which is precisely what the OSHA challenge is all about over vaccine mandates. 

Biden’s timing was meant to put pressure on the Sixth Circuit Court panel of three to punt the case to the Supreme Court in the wake of the Omicron variant that was ravishing the news ahead of the Holidays.  But people are not biting on it.  The news has been hitting the public flat.  People are tired of the Covid talk, the masks, the lockdowns, and the nonsense, and they are finally pushing back because now, unlike before, they know their rights and just what government can actually do to them, which is nothing.  The government has already overstepped their authority and are in trouble of their own.  Not immediate trouble because many of these court cases take a long time to settle.  But ultimately, they will look foolish in court, and the rulings will go against the tyrants, as they have with Government Mike DeWine in Ohio.  But even more than before, companies are reluctant to follow government mandates because it kills their labor force.  A company of any kind isn’t much of a company without a workforce, so now that people leave their jobs and go to other places to work, the government has much less control over the companies themselves.  Before, companies only listened to the government out of fear of breaking the imposed rules.  But the greater fear that companies have is losing their workforce to another company that doesn’t have so many stupid rules. In that way, government power, even sidestepping the Constitution, has been ripped away from them, which is a good thing. It’s been scary to see that they would even try, but the results have shown us all that our Constitution works very well if only people would follow it.  It’s better late than never, I suppose.  But to answer the question of whether we will go back to 2020 lockdowns, I would answer again, no.  The government cried wolf, and people learned the nature of the threat, and they will never listen again.  And that may be unfortunate because trust with the people has been broken forever in this little insurrection by the medical community connected like crack addicts to government funding.  And they will never see that level of trust from the public, again, which I think is ultimately good for us all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Mike DeWine and Joe Biden are One in the Same: It’s all about Trump in Ohio

Vote for Jim Renacci

It is way beyond coincidence that Joe Biden and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine did precisely the same thing in reaction to the Omicron Covid variant making its way through America presently.  Both progressive executive branch personalities applied federal troops to assist with what they say would be crowded hospitals due to a surge in illnesses.  And, of course, both of them are wrong.  It is a sad state to say that the highly liberal Joe Biden and the worst president in the history of our republic are just like that so-called Republican Mike DeWine, but that is the case.  They are reading from the same playbook, which leaves me to drool over the primary election in May of 2022, where I can’t wait to cast a vote for Jim Renacci to primary DeWine.  Ohio would have probably done better to elect a Democrat for governor because at least we would have known what we were getting instead of this old establishment tyrant that emerged under Covid.  DeWine was a disaster as governor, and the costs are so enormous as to what he cost us in our state that we will still be talking about the damage decades from now.  After the much-criticized speech by Joe Biden in response to public pressure to say something about Omicron, the thick plot of corruption and malice was evident to anybody with eyes to see it.  Mike DeWine was never a republican.  He was always a progressive to complete communism.  How do we know?  Well, when a governor sets up a system where he decides what time a restaurant must close or whether or not we can attend church, we can know that we have the wrong guy in public office as they are obsessed with central authority any way they can get it.  And thankfully, in Ohio, our legislature took that power away from him.  We must remove him and replace him with a Trump Republican, Jim Renacci. 

Ironically, and I don’t see how anybody could think of Jim Renacci this way, many people think he’s a RINO too.  Well, I know Jim, and he’s no RINO.  I am fully in support of Jim Renacci without any reservation.  People have been asking me why I’m not supporting the cowboy hat-wearing Joe Blystone.  After all, he’s probably more my kind of guy.  I like Blystone a lot.  Not for governor this time around, but I could vote for him for any number of positions.  I think Jim Renacci gets the RINO label because people know he’s wealthy, and they assume that corruption comes from that wealth.  I see Renacci as a business guy like Trump, who is entirely in the Trump corner, and it will take that to beat the DeWine machine in the primary.  There is no room for a weak-kneed approach on this issue.  Getting rid of DeWine is a mandate we must all get behind.  The fight we are fighting is against hard-left Democrats.  Mike DeWine has obviously been on Dr. Fauci’s inside tract of authority thinking for a long time. Otherwise, he never would have hired the abortion supporting Amy Acton as his chief health director, which essentially ruined Ohio during Covid.  DeWine was always on the progressive side of things, and he showed most recently just how much so being entirely in lockstep with Joe Biden.  But there are many Republicans who still think DeWine is a conservative, and they will vote for him in the primary.  Whoever runs against him will need something significant in their corner, like a Trump endorsement, to pull off an upset against the machine. 

If I were Joe Blystone and wanted to help do something good for Ohio, I would get involved in the Renacci campaign.  If it’s a matter of wanting to be governor of the state for the sake of some name recognition, well, that’s another thing.  But if Joe wants to help Ohio, he would get behind Jim Renacci and support the campaign to beat the DeWine machine, the real villain.  Many would say, why not do it the other way around.  Why not have Renacci support Blystone or some other independent-minded challenger?  Well, it’s because of Trump.  Trump is connected to Renacci in a big way.  Few candidates in the United States can call up Trump and get his attention as Renacci can, and it’s essentially the only way to generate the kind of votes it will take to beat DeWine in the May primary.  Blystone certainly won’t win against the machine on his own.  There are not enough Republican voters who will crawl out on that branch without some massive effort to generate participation.  Primary voters are not the same as those in general.  They tend to be the type of people who give to campaigns, and over the years, lots of people have given money to Mike DeWine, and they are going to be slow to admit what a terrible investment it was.  When it comes time to vote, Trump will have to get involved to generate interest in voters who usually don’t vote in primaries. That’s the only way to beat DeWine.

I’ve met Trump on many occasions.  But one of those was when Renacci was with him.  That is actually how I met Renacci is when he was with President Trump coming off Air Force One.  I am 100% sure that Trump will run for re-election in 2024.  I am part of the America First Policy Institute, so I am seeing all the work going on behind the scenes getting ready for the new social media company Trump is getting ready to put out, and what kind of positioning will launch AFPI influence into the 2022 elections and then setting up 2024 for Trump.  Trump is a winner.  He will not leave this life, allowing what happened to him and his supporters in 2020.  He will burn down the whole house of progressive cards if it takes that to win again. I’ve seen it in his eyes. I’ve seen the same thing in Jim Renacci’s eyes. I’ve felt it in handshakes with both people.  I know their hearts, so it is up to us to put the right people in the right places for what is coming, not necessarily what we have seen.  In the next 12 months, the political landscape will change dramatically, and the best person poised to make the best of it is Jim Renacci.  There is room for people like Joe Blystone in this new world.  But the game for governor means we must build a team of Republicans.  Renacci knows the game and can pull them into his camp under a Trump endorsement.  And Renacci is independent enough to appeal to Blystone voters.  Renacci proposes to govern like Ron DeSantis in Florida, which we can all get excited about. 

I’m looking forward to pulling the lever for Renacci.  I don’t think it will be an issue, but this far out, there seems to be a lot of people on the fence still, which I would say, look at Joe Biden.  That is the enemy that must be defeated.  Mike DeWine is just like Biden. We have the power to do something about it right now, to remove one of these detrimental political characters and send a powerful message to the political establishment.  Renacci is not an establishment person, no more so than Trump is.  What makes Renacci particularly good is that he doesn’t need the money or the job like Trump.  He just wants to do something good for the country and use his influence to do it.  It would be my advice to understand the strategy and get behind Renacci because it will take everything we all have to knock off Mike DeWine, even with all the problems he has brought to Ohio. It’s a numbers game, and while many people complain about DeWine, they don’t typically vote in primaries.  We need a way to make them want to vote in this one.  Splitting the vote between political activists in the minority in a primary will only help the Joe Biden’s of the world, like Mike DeWine.  So vote for Jim Renacci, and let’s make history in 2022 as Trump launches his ambitions for our benefit.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Intellectual Capital: What Ray Dalio and other billionaires miss in financial portfolios and quests for freedom

Intellectual Currency

There are many kinds of currency in our society.  We tend to focus on financial currency, and our governments emphasize that measurable standard because it’s easy and obvious.  But many currencies are instigated to measure value.  So when I criticize people like Ray Dalio for all his Chinese investments, or George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerbucks, and many others, it’s because I don’t have a lot of value for the way they measure currency.  Most of the people I know, people I associate with, are millionaires or more.  I know what they did to get the money, I don’t think of making money as being hard, and it’s easy to see the faults of their life from my perspective because I value a different kind of currency in life.  Because they think of finance as their most important measure of wealth, most people believe that a billionaire is at the top of our pecking order in society.  But I don’t think that way at all.  I think money is easy to make, and I make what I need to get through a day or a year.  I see those types of people as an evolving group, and they are not as free as I need to be in life because with all their financial entanglements come claims on their time and energy, which I find objectionable.  Making a million dollars is not hard.  Just do something that people want to pay a million dollars for, and you’ll have it.  No, there is a lot more to currency than just financial, and for me, the most significant measure of value in human scale is what I call “intellectual capital.” 

My oldest grandson has a currency that he invented that lets me know that he had a good time visiting with me.  He allows me to buckle him up in his mom’s car when he leaves. That’s his way of showing value for our visit without getting all mushy about wordy exchanges.  When a wife grants sex to a husband even though she may not feel like being poked and prodded due to the stresses of life, it’s usually to express appreciation for a nice lawn mowed, a car fixed, or a paycheck deposited into the bank account, one less thing to be stressed out about.  Sex is a kind of currency in a marriage that has value and promotes a healthy economy under the roof of a house.  Humans have many ways of generating currency and showing that they are willing to pay something to get something that everyone agrees is of value.  In the video above, I tell a little story about a very beautiful woman I know who is married, but she’s always on the lookout for male attention. She’s not really interested in men for men’s sake, but she does have a love of exotic cars.  She loves Lamborghinis.  And she has traded her womanly traits with other men who have bought her a few of them.  What her husband thinks of these cars in her driveway is a good question.  But people work the currencies of their lives in their own unique ways depending on their values.  So when it comes to politics, we must deal with all the kinds of currencies there are, not just the financial ones.  And if we could point to one thing that is the source of all corruption in politics, our value for politics is not the same as our politicians have.  They measure things in financial capital, looking for more intellectual capital from elected officials. 

So, when its said, “well, you’re not a billionaire.  Who are you to criticize Ray Dalio?  He does a lot of good in the world, gives his money to lots of charities, makes a lot of people wealthy with their stock portfolios, and is a generous man who writes books to share the wealth with others.” I say, yes, he makes a lot of money and shares it with others like some global grandparent.  But there’s more to the story, he has invested in China at the expense of America and is perpetuating a global system of government that erodes American sovereignty.  The values of that American sovereignty are not measured using financial capital but of intellectual capital.  Our right to think, do, and say what we want in our lives and to produce GDP based on our vast imaginations and intellect is what is harmed by people like Ray Dalio.  Those types of investments don’t show up well on a stock portfolio.  But they show up in mysterious ways to financial planners blind to those measures when they count the product that is made, money.  People like Ray who work strictly with financial capital often miss the ingredients that make money.  They know how to measure money once it is made.  But they don’t really understand what makes money to start with, which is intellectual capital. 

Most of my life has not been built around financial portfolios or banking relationships.  I view the making of money as a secondary thing.  What is valuable to me, and what people often are willing to pay for in regards to me, is my intellectual capital, my portfolio of ideas that have been built by a lifetime of experience in thinking outside the box.  There are talks of boycotting people like Elon Musk, an intelligent guy, but if China needs a massage, Elon must give it to them because he requires their car batteries.  Suppose some billionaire must take up climate change as a political position to keep government out of their pockets with excessive taxation. In that case, they are stuck uttering things they don’t believe so that they can stay in business.    The point of the matter is that our current political movement needs to understand that the battle is fought not in financial capital.  Governments and mobs have found ways to capture financial capital and to manipulate all of society based on their ability to steal it.  But for me, I purposely don’t have millions of dollars in the bank.  I could put millions of dollars in the bank tomorrow, and so could anybody who has developed their intellectual capital to such a degree.  But the world’s governments cannot steal what’s in my head.  They can’t steal my thoughts.  They can’t tax what I have invested in to put knowledge in my head. What’s in my mind is mine, and that is the wealthiest attribute a human can have.  Once people understand that, the power of government loses all its ability, and they will wither in front of us like dried leaves in autumn.  The purpose of this story is to express to you, dear reader, that the way to beat these oppressive forces is not to play their game of financial capital. Instead, stick with intellectual capital.  It’s all valuable, and to my experience, intellectual capital is far more beneficial.  It can make millions of dollars.  But it can also do much more, which is what real freedom looks like.  It’s not just property rights and physical inventory that give power to people.  It’s what they think, what they know, and how they apply it to wealth creation that genuinely matters.  Ray Dalio and all the other billionaires secretly know this, and they are always in service to those who can think of new ideas, which makes them inferior in every way humans measure value.  And those, my friends, are the rules of the universe.  Use them to significant effect and maintain your personal freedom accordingly.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How to Defeat the Administrative State: Why being free is profitable

How to Defeat the Administrative State

I wrote my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because of the necessity in business and life in general to defeat the administrative state.  One of the most significant objectives in business cultures is to decentralize their operations and break down the silos that various departments often isolate themselves with tall walls of bureaucracy.  Most of the world is suffering under some form of administrative state.  When governments want communism, for instance, they want an expansion of the administrative state.   When people say they want to be freer, they want to have less restriction in their lives of an administrative state.  So it was my goal in that book to teach people to break down their limitations without destroying their organization by learning how to deal with decentralized administration and value the input of individual effort.  It will remain for quite a long time; the most significant problem humans have is their desire to create administrative states. Yet, their personal needs to function without them is what all life strives for.  The defining problem of Lean Manufacturing is to decentralize business operations with de-siloed methods.  But it never works well in America because, in Asia, people need less of an administrative state due to the nature of the people to submit to an authority figure, since they have always been accustomed to worshiping a king or emporer throughout their societal development.  That is why communism might appear to work in China, whereas it would never work in America because people will not follow directions from a centralized planner.  They might pay lip service to such instructional flow down. Still, Americans will always sabotage their central planners where in Asia, they individually accept their place in the scheme of things and follow directions in a decentralized way.

Decentralization, therefore, is the goal and the trend of all future societies.  How successful can an organization be if the administrative state is small and without teeth of authority?  I explain in my book why embracing decentralization of authority, there are more opportunities for success than in the slow, terrestrial administrative state filled with mind-numbing bureaucrats.  For instance, I like to use football metaphors, and the best teams on the field are those most decentralized.  If players have to look to the sideline for instruction from their coaches after each play, then coordinating all that activity in the face of constantly changing circumstances moment to moment while confronting the variables of an opponent, the chances for error are much greater. Instead, what the coaches should do is prepare each player between games for every circumstance, then once on the field, they can adapt through their onfield leadership on how to deal with the challenges they are dealing with.  For instance, coaching becomes much easier when a team has a great quarterback because you have leadership representation in the huddle, and audibles can be made much faster depending on the kind of defense presented.  That is the same in all things in life; if we wait for a centralized planner to tell us what to do, the opportunities for success in life, whether for the individual or a social group, are minimized and perhaps lost altogether.  When innovation and productivity are significantly reduced, people tend to be much unhappier, including people who function as members of the administrative state. 

One of my most common sayings is that I’ll trade my Black Belt for a gunbelt all the time.  In Lean Manufacturing, which uses terminology from oriental martial arts, the American perception of gunfighting is much more effective.  Where the martial arts of Asia are mostly a defensive fighting mode, not usually displayed for an attack on an opponent, such as a centralized authority, the American gunfighter showed traits where they could function as agents of justice even when the legal system was decentralized from the backing of a big government.  The frontier sheriffs such as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp were able to bring a sense of justice to developing towns in the Wild West through gunfighting that was unique in the world.  Never before in modern history, modern being the city-state’s development, did a nation form under the blank slate of natural human autonomy.  This is why to this very day, the political left, communists, socialists, even major corporations tend to seek sympathy for the American Indian, as they were soundly defeated during Westward Expansion.  They like the tribal Indian with all their administrative state, adherence to the gods of nature, the village chief, and social hierarchy formed in communal life.  When really, what we learned during Westward Expansion was the alignment of individual goals to the task of necessity.  For instance, President Grant made it known that there was personal wealth to be obtained in the Black Hills, which inspired many hungry individuals to risk it all in pursuit of opportunity.  When a great leader can align the needs of a business, or a nation toward an objective without imposing an administrative state in the way to slow everything down, great things can happen and did.  The centralized administrative state, the Indians, could not fight the decentralized frontier settler.  One was motivated by preserving a centralized authority. The other was driven by individual gain.  This is precisely the problem of our modern times with centralized authority for all kinds of reasons trying to pin down a society with the fear porn of Covid.  Americans pay lip service to authority but do what they want.  Other cultures where Covid was designed are quick to adhere to centralized planning, which ultimately fails because the administrative state is too insulated from reality to make the proper decisions in crisis management. 

When people look at the events happening to them right now and fear a global takeover of the “elite” of the “Davos Crowd,” I tell them not to worry.  The fight is not about force or even intelligence.  The administrative state will always have the same problems; they will always be too slow to solve issues in real-time as problems arise.  Yet, due to their desire for the safety of group affiliation, most human society seeks to create an administrative state as their first primal instinct. We’ve built our entire education system, our political system, our businesses, just about everything we do around the maintenance of an administrative state.  America was formed by people trying to get away from the overregulation of an administrative state. At the same time, the rest of the world suffers under much less personal wealth because they have been slowed down too much by an administrative state and its massive, slow-moving bureaucracy.  When centralizing order, such as visiting the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, regulation gains are at the expense of freedom and innovation.  That is why we all hate going to the BMV.  They are slow and uncompetitive.  Yet to drive, we all have to go to them and wait in the long lines because the government does what government does to their time frame.  That is always why our public education system designed by people like John Dewey doesn’t work, and it will never work.  We are teaching people to be members of the administrative state when the trend of the world is to be more decentralized.  So what people most crave in the world, even if they aren’t consciously aware of it, is to function successfully in a decentralized state, whether in their places of business, their neighborhoods or even within their families.  And it is our modern task to teach them how to let go of the burdens of the administrative state and function more as individuals, making nations great, businesses profitable, and lives much, much better off.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

Jim Renacci picks Joe Knopp as a Running Mate in Ohio

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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