Category: Organized Labor

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

Lakota is Off to a Great Start

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I Love Corruption: Knowing the nature of people is worth more than the wealth of the measure

Corruption is Good if you Capture Human Behavior

Personally, I love corruption. There is a chapter in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, called “Money is Not the Root of All Evil, It Reveals It,” that deals specifically with this unique way of looking at the world. Corruption is caused by the insecurity of a person, or a group of people, in their ability to produce. A person lacking corruption and is confident in their ability to produce will not seek shortcuts to success because they understand that the opportunities for which money is generated are always available to them. Whereas the cheaters trying to scam their way through each day feel they will only get a few open doors to financial opportunities in their lives, and they will bend their ethics to step through those open doors. Now all too often, those open doors are traps set by other people for the opportunity to take whatever value someone else has, and the whole game can seem very treacherous and bloodthirsty. But the value is in the money, which then reveals the content of the game’s characters. Once you can see and measure what people will do for money, you can then know everything you need to know about them and turn their efforts toward the success you want to see happening. Corruption shows what kind of people are playing the game, and knowing who is corrupt and who is not is very useful in playing the great games of value. There is a lot of evil in the world that would not be seen if we did not have the value of money to measure it and witness what people will do to get their hands on it.

I tend to view many things in life from the perspective of Poker. The religions of the world have tried for centuries to figure out the motives of mankind and to contain ambition behind otherworldly rules of conduct that, like Santa Claus, might get you into Heaven if you are a good little boy and girl. When religion doesn’t work, we turn to governments to regulate behavior, and the fear of being put in jail might keep us all honest and trustworthy in our interactions with each other. But what these methods essentially only do is to push corrupt behavior deep down and out of sight. It essentially makes all of society like a Thanksgiving Dinner with a family that doesn’t really like each other; when we pass the corn, it’s always very civil and polite. While behind everyone’s backs, there is always plotting and scheming going on. But at the table everyone is polite. That is what we generally have in society and why we are so shocked when we discover that corruption has been happening. Like how shocked many are to learn that Dr. Fauci has been a corrupt administrator in government health for most of his career. He can hide his corruption behind the façade of social rules and conduct. But when we study what he is willing to do for money, or how money moved from government to government employees as him acting as the broker for funding, the need for power is instantly recognizable, and that behavior tells us a lot about the people we are dealing with. The measurement of money reveals a lot about the people trying to possess it. The most corrupt people are the most insecure about how the value of money is generated. People least corrupt understand that money is produced from the value of production. But those naturally lazy and not wanting to produce in life will have all kinds of insecurities about their ability to acquire money and will jump easily at every opportunity to become corrupt to get it because they don’t think many such opportunities will come their way in their lives.

It really comes down to the question of what we want to know about people and if we want to really know it. Governments would like to believe that human behavior can be controlled through fear, such as fearing the law, fearing the power of government, or fearing the opinions of others. Religions believe that good conduct can be controlled in society by fearing what might happen to you in the afterlife. And if only you might listen to them, then maybe you might have everlasting life. Instead, to my eyes, a good poker game tells you everything you need to know about people, and a good player can control what everyone at the table is doing and thinking based on how big the pot gets. Poker is a uniquely American game that is born out of pure capitalism, and it’s actually much more moral than we have been led to believe by the same forces who today want us all to fall into centrally controlled socialism. Playing Poker reveals a lot about the characters playing the game to acquire the total sum of the pot bet between game rounds. The good and honest player will be willing to toss away a bad hand and play again in the next round. The corrupt player will try to cheat and stuff cards up their sleeve to pull out when the pots are significant because they fear they might miss such an opportunity if they don’t cheat in some way to make the conditions of the game more favorable to them. To my eyes, knowing such information about people is much more valuable than in the value of the money itself. Money is just a measurement of value. But what people will do to have it is far more critical. 

So it is in that way I see corruption as a good thing to see because it tells you who you are dealing with. The rules of society might make the preacher look like a bastion of Heavenly summation. But when alone with children of the congregation, they might be abusing them all in the name of God. Or the politician might seek legislation to provide good conduct in social interaction while they are taking money from a donor to do something voters don’t want. But the temptation of money makes it hard to turn away from. The social face may look like an outstanding citizen, complete with power dress and nice shoes. But what goes on in the politician’s mind is another matter, will they take shortcuts to get the money, or will they hold true to constitutional principles? Are they worried that they only have a few chances in life to make wealth for themselves, or is every day an opportunity to hit the jackpot and they play the game for the joy of it, knowing they will have plenty of chances for success because of their character? These are the fundamental ways to understand social behavior, and yes, corruption is just one more measurement of a thriving culture. If we have a society with a lot of corruption in it, we obviously need to change something to inspire different behavior. But we can’t delude ourselves into believing that the rules of mankind might encourage good behavior. Instead, we must understand that we must first see it with some kind of measurement and act on that knowledge. Pretending that corruption isn’t happening because we refuse to measure it is not a way to solve problems. Half the battle is in knowing, and when we have money to measure corruption, we can then see a lot that is true about the health of our society, which I find extremely valuable.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The End of the Democrat Party: Beating Klaus Schwab and the globalists by destroying their Trojan Horse

The End of the Democrat Party

I wish it were still up on the internet, a radio show that I had done around 2017 when I predicted the end of the Democrat Party by the year 2021. The more we analyze what has happened since 2020 politically, that Covid has hidden from the world with a new kind of government made chaos, the more evident that Democrats as a legitimate political party are a thing of the past. It’s gone. That much was even more apparent when Biden gave his presser this past week trying to throw off the disguise and put it on Republicans when he asked, “what are they for?” As if politics demanded that representatives be “for” something in a perpetual change instead of doing constitutional law business. That lost puppy look in his eyes said everything and was consistent with my previous statements. The Democrat Party was done. They had cheated, lied, and manipulated their way into a few more years of life, but as a party, they represented only a globalist attack on the sovereignty of America. They were only the next War of 1812, where billionaires used these remnants of a political party to infiltrate our republic and try to turn the keys over to Claus Schwab at the World Economic Forum. Europe has been jealous of America since the beginning and has tried to let the air out of our tires any chance they could, and they still are clearly with the efforts at the Great Reset, which the Covid crises was clearly the Trojan Horse they were using. Running and hiding from a virus behind masks and social distancing is not the same as treating the virus with known fixes, such as Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. They never wanted to fix Covid, they tried to use it to attack our country and the world in general with the Great Reset, and in America, the Democrats were their means to an open door. If you have not seen Glenn Beck’s outstanding show on the Great Reset, I’ll include it below for your education. 

The Democrats, as I had been saying, were done, and they seem to know it. They needed to collapse the American system ultimately to hold power, and that hasn’t happened. Constitutional law has thwarted the intentions of the Davos attackers and their many billions of dollars of investment, which is all that has propped up the Democrat Party presently. But essentially, we no longer have a two-party system. We have one party, MAGA, led by Trump. Then we have remnants of the past, purchased politicians who have become millionaires in office to keep their mouths shut and open the door to Schwab and his greenie weenie attackers from Europe and Asia. On that old radio show, I further said that the Republican Party would split off into two factions to become the new right and left. The liberals would continue with President Trump, while the more conservative types would become the new Republicans. The political spectrum has shown a country well right of the current center. The media cultures of New York, Washington, and Los Angeles refuse to acknowledge this information because they would be an admission that they are not representative of our social norms. But the result of the last several years is the massive government-sponsored election fraud—the collaboration with Big Tech to destroy the Bill of Rights. The global disruption of Covid to provoke the World Economic Forum Great Reset, all these things had taught average Americans about the nature of the attacks into their lives, something that before was only regulated into conspiracy theory. And there is no going back from all that now. 

The Trojan Horse Attack by Davos

The most telling element of the destruction of the Democrat Party is their bench; they have no youth that isn’t radicalized, socialists. When Joe Biden’s polling numbers are as low as they are, paralyzingly low, they are the kind of low that you get when you have a popular election and the Democrats cheated and tried to prop up this dead old man with a stick up his caboose, and people see what’s going on. Even traditional Democrats are turning away from him because he doesn’t represent their intentions. Joe Biden is all about the Davos crowd, the United Nations, and Chinas intentions to take over the world.   Now a year into his presidency, not even Democrats approve of him. Independents are looking for options. There is no way for Biden to recover because he was not elected by the people making judgments now. It’s like cheating for the big test. You get the grade, but then you can’t do the job because you don’t know the information. Within the decade, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and many of the prominent characters of the Democrat Party will die off due to old age. Hillary Clinton thinks she might get another chance at the presidency, but she is old too. There aren’t any spectacular 40 and 50-year-olds who can step in and carry on the party philosophy. Because the Democrats are the ones who don’t stand for anything, and they have not developed a bench. Their plan all along was to destroy America into a global United Nations-driven government before they lost their power, and that clock ran out on them. Republicans, on the other hand, have lots of personalities beyond Trump. When he’s no longer wanting to be in politics, great Republican minds from 50 to 20 will carry on the political needs of a representative Republic, and that’s the most telling element. 

The Democrats are desperate, they went all-in on this mess, and they have been caught. They may control the legal perspective at the moment because they control all the houses of congress; they are attempting to gerrymander congressional districts to grab more air before they drown, but the real signs of trouble for them are in their bench and what they stand for. People have had a good taste of what they stand for and don’t like it. Democrats stand for inflation, illegal immigration, drugs, abortion, centralized government that gave us things like Covid. It has been a stark reality for moderates to deal with, and they are currently turning to Trump. Eventually, Trump will become the new liberal party. People like myself will find representation within the Republican Party that is more constitutionally conservative, more Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and less John Adams centralist. But to surrender it all to Klaus and the Davos gang of billionaire infiltrators behind Big Tech and many other industries who want to rule the world, Americans have seen enough, and those plans are melting before everyone’s eyes. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to fight the incursions on a day-by-day basis. But like the depth of bench from the Democrats, the Davos attackers don’t have a Trojan Horse into America without the Democrats. So if they don’t survive, Davos and their intentions won’t either. And that is something that is good news for all those who are newly concerned about it. My predictions from the last decade are right on time. Seeing where the world will be in a few short years, the unthinkable isn’t so farfetched. And I think we will find a world that works much better in America for which the rest of the world can then follow. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

Never Underestimate What Power Hungry People Will Do For Power

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

The IRS Has Turned Laziness into a Virtue

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why Our Constitution is Worth Fighting For: The Supreme Court does its job, somewhat

Understanding and Defending our Constitution

When I first started this blog, I had in mind something like what formed this country, a healthy debate on the nature of our Republic in the form of what we know today as the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers. Back when we were trying to figure out how to have a proper government, some of the founding fathers would contribute essays to the local newspapers making the debate on what the federal government should look like. This process went on for quite a long time. What we know of today as those books is essentially a collection of those essays that formed the constitutional convention and would include our Constitution and, eventually, the Bill of Rights. I’ve never been a big fan of Alexander Hamilton, even though the town I live in is named after him. He’s too much of a big government guy for me. I associate much more with the Anti-Federalists. But to give Hamilton credit, we needed a reference point to settle the Articles of Confederation, which was not sufficient after the Revolutionary War to run a country. I think the debate to form our American Constitution is one of the most advanced processes ever to form a government in the history of the world, and the results paid off. I keep both of those books next to my reading chair and refer to them constantly, just for fun. 

Those books gave me the understanding to handle many complicated problems over the last year or so, everything from election fraud to this latest problem of the Biden vaccine mandates. It was more than just a little satisfying to see it all blow up in the Biden administration’s face this past week of mid-January 2022. With the filibuster intact in the Senate, the Democrats have no chance to change election laws to keep them in power in 2022, which they had to have. They can’t win without cheating, just as they did in the 2020 election to get rid of Trump. When all this started back during that election, remember what I said. Don’t freak out. Let the process run its course. Trust our constitutional system even though it is evident that the Biden administration and Democrats, in general, wanted to get rid of the Constitution. Evidently, the Davos crowd and the other globalists worldwide had no fundamental understanding of our Constitution, nor did they care to learn.   As Progressives, they fully intended to move beyond our Constitution and the great work that the Founding Fathers did to form the United States. Their game was to accelerate things so fast that the courts would never catch up to the aggressive actions to overthrow the country, which the Biden clan have been attempting to do. As things would get hot, I would refer to those books for the many thousands of times that I have before, and I could see how it would end up. Our Republic was designed to handle just these kinds of problems, and it was working to my eyes. The proof came on January 13th around 2:45 PM when our Supreme Court issued a strike down of the OSHA vaccine mandates Biden had attempted to pass through executive order. 

I think it has been a precious lesson to watch how everyone behaved during all this mess. In my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I feel relieved to see that my opinions were not isolated into some bubble of conservative thought born out of midwestern politics but were highly relevant in corporate America across the world. The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers could probably be applied to every small village in Africa or South America. All over Europe. Everywhere. It’s not just a set of laws that we have in America, but the foundation of a functioning republic that can function over vast distances that makes it an incredible work of philosophy surpassing in my mind any of the works done by Rome, Greece, the Indus Valley, Egypt, or any of the Dynasties of the Orient. Never in the history of the world was there such a proper set of laws and order to establish the best government possible to the minds of humanity than what is talked about in those books. I’ve read them all, and there isn’t anything better than the documents that formed our Republic. And so long as we had a Supreme Court following those ideas, much of this Biden tyranny would be eliminated. The originators of Covid never planned for our Constitution, and it shows. When it was announced that the Supreme Court had made a 6 to 3 decision against the Biden Executive Orders, the pride I felt made a lot of all this pain worth it. Because not only had it been horrifying at times, but we’ve never seen our system tested like this before, especially from domestic enemies, and it had held turning theory into reality. Thank goodness Trump had three picks for the Supreme Court during his one turbulent term. It’s probably the most important thing to come out of the Trump presidency. 

Because of my love of those books, I was more than familiar with the constitutional challenges that worked at all levels of politics and really rattled the cages of people with powerful positions. I can’t say that I was ever apprehensive that the rule of law would not hold. But at the rate of change coming from the Biden administration, his masters in the United Nations and China, and the donor class, which is different in many cases, the main weakness of the Constitution and our Republic in general is time. Things are meant to take a long time in our government, to keep the breaks on during hot human sentiment. China brags about how fast it can do something with centralized authority. Democrats drool at the power of the centralized state because that’s how they want things to be in America, more like China, where a mob of administrative tyrants can do and say whatever they want. In America, it takes a long time to sift through the legislative process, and if the idea survives, we would consider it a good thing. But it’s the rushes to judgment that we always want to put the brakes on, and that is what has been assaulted by our enemies recently, especially after Trump left office. The speed of our innovation comes from free people, which is the key to everything. Not the government, so bureaucrats have a tough time getting their minds around such a concept. When the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers were written, and our Constitution was formed with the Bill of Rights to follow, all this was figured out, and now we have the results of the greatest nation on earth to prove it works. And now, even under great assault, it has operated under very tenuous conditions, and that is something we should all take pride in. Of course, the fights are far from over, but a big blow occurred in that Supreme Court decision that will reverberate historically for the next century. It was an easy case for them to decide on, can the Federal government compel health decisions, and the answer was always no. But the big-government types had more intrusions in mind to follow should they manage to make that Biden executive order stick. And now those big global plans are blown out of the water. There will not be a global takeover of America from the Davos crowd or anybody else without some form of physical assault. And in a country full of guns, that option isn’t a good one for them either. Our Republic is still standing, and now more people than ever are empowered to fight back, and it makes my love for those books even that much more powerful, fueled by a pride few in the world could understand. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Show Business of Sheriff Jones: When it comes to H.B. 99, Thomas Hall offers a solution

Allowing Teachers to Carry Guns

At the heart of the problem, Sheriff Jones illustrated on his WLW November 18th diatribe against Representative Thomas Hall’s H.B. 99 was this long-established problem of whether or not more public sector employees are a solution to gun violence in schools or a hindrance. There are a lot of guns in Butler County, Ohio, so school shootings are pretty rare, and there is undoubtedly a direct correlation that liberal politics doesn’t want to admit to. Even Sheriff Jones himself is a supporter generally of concealed carry. He has told me that it’s great to have many first responders in the community to stop criminals at the point of a crime. But, Jones is also the head of a police union and symbolizes strength among all the public sector unions. And it is there that he politically turns left every time. He comes from a generation where they wanted to believe in the system of government that we have seen now has let us down time and time again. Yet, he is still a stubborn defender of labor unions even when they show themselves to be trouble. Saying all that, there haven’t been many school shootings in Butler County. There was one in Madison, Twp., not that long ago, and it was Thomas Hall’s father who was a school resource officer who ran the shooter off the scene only wounding four people, not getting a chance to kill them when the attacker fired into a cafeteria one day seemingly unprovoked. To say that Thomas Hall cares about school safety is an understatement. His bill H.B. 99 was meant to set basic training requirements for school boards to plan to so that they could allow teachers to be armed in the classroom, to be those critical first responders when and if a school shooter presented themselves as a menace to the public. For many mysterious reasons, Sheriff Jones was against the bill and made an absolute embarrassment on WLW attacking Thomas Hall for many reasons that no conservative would understand. But Jones has done that before. 

I was pretty disheartened to learn firsthand that Bill Cunningham was not a real conservative. My history with Cunningham goes back for several years, all the way back to 1996 when I had paid Cunningham to be the spokesman for our “Take An Axe to Our Tax” t-shirts that we were using to promote tax cuts during the Bob Dole campaign that year. I was supposed to come on WLW to talk about the promotion, but my segment got bumped because Willie decided to do a strip show that night, where he brought in live strippers to dance nude during the show. The producer offered me to do my segment during that mess, and I had to decline because it just wasn’t something I could be a part of. Later I learned that Bill Cunningham plays a conservative on his radio show, but he wasn’t very conservative. He was the Stephen Cobert of radio, playing a conservative in media, without really being one. I learned around this time that Sheriff Jones, who was frequently on with Cunningham, was much the same way. He played a conservative in public, but he has many big government ideas in private. He’s great if we are talking about law enforcement. But when it comes to social issues, he shows himself to be very liberal, which is why he and Bill Cunningham have always gotten along so well. I understood the show business aspect of the radio work, but I thought of these people as the real deal until I learned firsthand that they weren’t. 

Sheriff Jones Attacks Thomas Hall For Petty Reasons

In 2013 Sheriff Jones and Cunningham came out in favor of the Lakota Levy, which raised our taxes in monstrous ways. It caused so much trouble in our community that we haven’t had a levy since because we never needed it. We didn’t need it then, but Jones worked with the Democrat Kathy Wyenandt to pass the tax increase. We didn’t speak for about five years when finally we broke a little bread together in the middle of the Trump administration. I thought he had been doing an excellent job for Butler County and representing us to the Trump administration. But I wasn’t too shocked to hear him revert to the kind of liberalism that he uttered again with Bill Cunningham using Lakota as a kind of launching point for his resistance to arming teachers in the classroom and for disparaging the very conservative Thomas Hall personally for his position of empowering teachers to add another layer of protection. For Jones, he wants school resource officers or prohibitive training that would make it so difficult for anybody who wishes to even to carry a gun in a classroom that it might as well not even be a law. But Thomas’ bill empowered school boards to set the maximum limits themselves, depending on their need, and Jones felt he needed to sabotage the bill through the public airwaves and the political career of the young representative himself. 

My argument in favor of a more private-sector solution, as opposed to a unionized employee, is due to people like Jones himself. When it comes to the cosmetic stuff, Jones is a great Republican. But when it comes to legislation, he’s a big government guy that’s always talking about compromise with the other side that wants to bury us all. I think it’s an age thing, he and Cunningham are from the same generation, and they thought the big Democrat politics from the early 60s were going to work, and they never really changed their point of view. We have seen times where school resource officers like Thomas’ dad run off shooters while under fire. But we have also seen some who panic, as the resource officer in Florida did, never engaging the shooter and allowing lots of carnage in the meantime. People panic, and cops, even with their many hours of training, panic too. Sometimes they get so much training that they can’t adapt to a unique situation. Sometimes they lock up. They passed the test on paper but can’t apply it to reality. I like the idea of cops in schools. But I want a teacher armed with a gun to be the first responder. And I like the idea of a teacher being so comfortable with a gun that they accept it as part of their lifestyle, practicing every week for the rest of their lives. Not just some bureaucratic training period that may or may not be enough. 

I always wanted to believe in Bill Cunningham as a conservative, just as I always wanted to believe in Sheriff Jones. But with them, most of their public persona is a show. And that is the same with police in general. Having a cop in the hallways of our schools may look nice. It might scare away some potential shooters. But if a shooting actually happens, I don’t believe any public employees are full proof and will behave appropriately under pressure. I prefer mitigation to their service if they get scared or misstep themselves when danger presents itself. Sheriff Jones, the big government guy from Butler County, believes absolutely in public service. He has been a public servant all his life and always will be. I still think he’s generally good for our community so long as it’s mostly a show we are putting on, and things aren’t getting too real. Yet, after the way he treated Thomas Hall on WLW, where he turned to the show to attempt to destroy a person he endorsed just a year earlier, I would never trust an employee like him in a school without some extra measure of mitigation, a teacher comfortable with a gun, to protect kids when they are under an assault from bad people. That is, If we ever fully get back to school because all these lazy union employees don’t want to go to work using Covid as a cover for staying home.   And what will we do in the future when the school resource officer, unionized and terrified of Covid, calls off work the day there is a school shooting? If we rely too heavily on them, we are bound to get burnt by the general laziness of all government employees. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Old Yeller: The fight between Thomas Hall and Sheriff Jones

Why Is Sheriff Jones Going After Thomas Hall

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

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

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

Thomas Hall Responds to Sheriff Jones

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

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

Old Yeller

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

Rich Hoffman

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