Category: Organized Labor

Corporate Selfishness: They don’t respect our time, or money

They Don’t Respect our Time

It’s not enough to talk about the Constitution as it applies to the government and the people who elect it. One of my concerns about the purpose of my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is to more appropriately define the relationship that corporations have with society and government in general. This has essentially been a problem since the Jackson administration, where Cornelius Vanderbilt first exposed the cracks of corporate power in the years that followed. Now, of course, I’m not a believer in heavy regulation, and I do not think the government can manage power well at all. So they are certainly not capable of controlling corporate governance and shouldn’t even try. By nature, they always need money, and corporations all too easily buy them off with donations, which is why most of the corruption we see these days is happening. Corporations do not care about the Constitution. I have never been in a business exchange in all my years where business people suddenly said, “oh, that might be unconstitutional.” They simply will say, “well, if people want to get paid, they’ll put up with it.” That is why Biden attacked the vaccine mandates the way he did. The American Republic is most vulnerable through its corporations rather than through Constitutional mandates, so this is a long-time problem that needs a very modern solution. I have started to tackle this need in my book, and I’m sure many discussions will spawn from the continued necessity. 

So it is in that context, I say, especially among the new tech companies, that corporate America does not respect the people they do business with, and that needs to change dramatically.   It is a good thing that all companies should cherish to have a customer. But, corporations, whether it’s McDonald’s, Disney, network television, Wal-Mart, etc., have evolved over the years under government protections to disregard the customer experience. With more and more technology emerging, they have really come to abuse their relationship with consumers. And consumers have accepted this abuse by default because it’s coming from every direction so fast and furious that we haven’t really taken the time to understand what is happening to us. This is most obvious in the complete disregard of our personal time and freedoms concerning our corporations. Corporations, by their nature, are like only children; they assume they have exclusive access to the attention they want without considering all the other elements that are competing for the same time and money. For instance, McDonald’s isn’t thinking about the time and money that P&G is committing to new shampoo when it comes out with a new fish sandwich for the season of Lent. But the consumer only has so many hours in the day and so much expendable income. So when all these various elements seek selfishly to consume every waking hour of a customer’s life, there are lots of adverse effects that cascade off the experience that has a negative impact on the nature of our government in general.

For instance, I’m a Call of Duty player. I’d play it a lot more if I could, but I sleep about 7 hours a day these days. The rest of my 24 hour day is carefully planned in 15-minute increments. I do not have “free time.” I have lots of managed time, but I do not have empty time that is filled by random behavior. So I maybe get a half-hour a day to play Call of Duty which I consider a luxury. Now when you are in the Call of Duty world, or the platform of PlayStation in general, they make it so that you could easily spend 24 hours a day playing their game and their game only. It is quite a culture of game players, and I can see why many people who want to be good at it would easily stay home and play that game all day, all night, for seven days a week. There is enough content to really just live in the Call of Duty world. No wonder our employment numbers are so low now that the government has taught people that they are willing to pay people to stay home. I look at the number of people playing Call of Duty with me whenever I am playing and think a lot about all the lost productive time spent on that game. Sometimes, if I worry about something and can’t sleep very well, I get up at 2 AM and play a few rounds, and there are always thousands and thousands of players in the queue ready to play any game I pick within the Call of Duty environment.   But it gets even more complicated than that. Call of Duty is just one game out there; many other games are just as popular, such as the Madden games, Fortnite, and many others, all that have their game bases filled with people willing to spend their time and money on those products. But, time in a day is not infinite, so there is a management problem that we have to deal with as a modern consideration. And the corporate influence is committing the same problem they always do. They assume that the consuming public will put 100% of their time into their product in the same way that an only child expects their parents always to be available to them. 

But, while we are trying to find all our passwords to all our media accounts, and playing all these games, and are under pressure constantly to update our media accounts and to read all the legal agreements with each one, people have no room to figure out the origin of Covid, or the FBI tampering in Michigan with the Whitmer case, or the paradox of Ray Epps and the FBI attempting a false flag on January 6th, as they usually do when the government needs to make a political case beneficial to them, there is no time for people to give to these subjects because they are too worried about what their password is to their Diseny+ account. Or their bank is changing their account number because they are doing a system update. And at work, people might have an account for Microsoft Teams, their inventory systems, their clocking systems. Everywhere people turn these days, there is some technological incursion for their time that is not being managed, hurting the American family and their productive output. I would say that the solution is not more regulation, but is more like I say in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. The way to punch back at corporate selfishness is to hit them where they genuinely care to protect, in their self-preservation. Right now, they assume that consumers will always be there for them whenever they decide they want them. But by applying constitutional concepts to even corporate culture, as it should have always have been from the start going all the way back to the Jackson administration, many of these modern problems could have been alleviated. Consumers could still be consumers, but they would be more than that to the world of corporate America. And that’s what’s missing now, is that people are people who should be respected first and foremost, starting with their time and money. Because just as every only child must learn at some point, they are not the only things in the world that matter. And to truly be balanced in the world and good, they must learn to deal with the rest of the world respectfully and with excellent quality.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Monopoly on Violence: Elon Musk sees it, and soon will the rest of the world

The Government’s Monopoly on Violance

Elon Musk has said it in a couple of interviews toward the end of the year since Time Magazine has made him “Man of the Year,” that government has a lot of problems. He thinks that government should be a referee on the field but not a player in the game. And he has continued to say that one of the biggest problems with the government is that they have a “monopoly on violence.” I first heard these comments from him during a Wall Street Journal interview at a yearly think tank kind of thing they do in Washington D.C.  Then again, shortly after that, at a surprise sit down with the Babylon Bee, the online satire website. Many of us have been saying things like that for a long time. Elon Musk is obviously having an evolution as he runs his two major companies, Tesla and SpaceX, with the challenges of government regulation and global commerce that is trying desperately to move toward Chinese communism. The difference is that Musk cannot be canceled for saying what he does because he is at the front of the train on virtually everything. Actually, at a recent Joe Biden EV Summitt, Musk wasn’t invited, even though Tesla is undoubtedly the most important player when it comes to the electric car market. But instead of it looking bad on Musk, it blew up in the face of Biden, like everything does these days. So for Musk to say things about the government that are consistent with Tea Party positions over the last decade is quite a thing and certainly an indicator of things to come. When people like Musk are critiquing government correctly, many mainstreamers want the overflow of his money who will by default see things his way.

And isn’t that the heart of the problem with the government, that government has a monopoly on violence? That is precisely why they naturally are inefficient in everything they do because they never have to worry about someone calling them out as the big bullies. Or at least, that’s what they have assumed for a long time. That is why they feel they can start riots all over the country during 2020, trying to use racism to blame the Trump supporters for the unrest they created, but their real intent was to remove President Trump from office. But then when people went to Washington, a quarter-million people, to hear Trump give one of his final speeches and the frustrations spilled over into a mob at the Capitol building, the government felt it could arrest the participants and hold them in jail for some undetermined time ignoring completely any due process along the way. They also thought they could shoot Ashley Babbitt for no real reason and that there would be no recourse for their reckless actions. They felt they could arrest the participants of the January 6th, 2021 demonstration without any real just cause because of their monopoly on violence. In that case, they could have arrested people in all the mobs previously that were incited by the government, including on Inauguration Day in 2017 when President Trump was sworn in. The damage to Washington D.C. and other places was much more severe on that day, but as we have seen over the last several years, the government picks what it wants to enforce and abandons all laws when it’s not convenient to them. 

Then we have the FBI, which I have been talking about for a while now as one of the most corrupt law enforcement branches we have these days. They are obviously radical from top to bottom. They are not only corrupt at the top floor of the FBI in Washington. The revelations in the Whitmer case in Michigan prove that several FBI agents were involved in a set up of the Wolverine Watchmen, where several agents had penetrated the group and were trying to inspire them into criminal activity. Like it looks, they did on January 6th. The ideas for violence weren’t coming from the militia groups themselves, but from the FBI trying to plant ideas for violence to cause an action that they could then arrest people for entrapment. The corruption in the FBI is at the top level, the middle level, and certainly in every field office.

I know people who are in the FBI. I also know people in the Secret Service. Over the years, many people have worked for me who move off into these fields, and good for them. We always need people to do these jobs; like Elon Musk says, we do need referees to help keep the game honest. But we don’t need the government playing the game.   And when it comes to law enforcement, a badge doesn’t make a good person. Many people who have left me for some federal job I wouldn’t trust with a box of rocks, it’s not that they aren’t good people or were good employees. Yes, without good leadership around them, they go corrupt quickly, almost every time. I would never permit them to arrest people on fake FISA warrants in the middle of the night. What I have heard from the FBI, especially regarding their actions against President Trump, does not surprise me. And for what they have been caught in at the highest levels, you have to logically conclude that they are doing much worse where they never thought they’d get caught. 

Corruption in federal law enforcement, even localized law enforcement, comes from one common source when the government thinks that they have a right to inflict violence on you. Still, you are never allowed to give it back to them, so we have created a corrupt legal system. When power is given to anybody without some measure of regulation, that power will undoubtedly go to their heads. One of those employees I spoke about who used to work for me became a local cop. He was always good for me; he was a model employee. But without me, he spun out of control quickly, and soon he was pulling over carloads of young girls and scaring them with threats of jail and traffic tickets that they didn’t want their parents to find out about. So he and his fellow officers would force the girls to perform oral sex on them to get out of trouble. And it worked most of the time until someone finally came forward and reported what had been happening. By nature, no matter who it is, authority over others will corrupt everyone. The best measure against it is to remove any monopoly of violence. In our brilliant constitutional republic, we do have a measure of addressing that very issue, the Second Amendment. The only reason we have any sense of justice in America is because of gun rights. The government would have gone wrong beyond repair years ago without those gun rights. What’s terrible about these last few years is that the government has gone further in corruption than ever before because of the Trump election of 2016. They were so insulted that people would vote for someone like Trump that they have turned toward their monopoly on violence to commit some significant constitutional crimes, including what they have done with Covid. We will be sorting out that mess for many years to come, but the crimes were, and continue to be, reprehensible. But good things are happening, and when people like Elon Musk are where many of us have been for a long time, positive changes are on the horizon. And in this case, talking about the problem is the first step in fixing it. We no longer have the assumption that we can trust these government authorities. Left alone, they are prone to corruption at every level, and it is from there, we must take action to correct it in the future.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Don’t Forget to Watch, ‘Don’t Look Up’: In it, Hollywood shows why they are terrified of you

Watch ‘Don’t Look Up’

It was about a year ago when I sat down on my Rumble account and read off to the audience the 45 Planks of communist goals from the excellent book The Naked Communist. Many people at that time and for decades before were confused about the nature of our government and what they were really up to, going all the way back to the Department of Education during the Reagan years. I’ve been talking about these things for years, there was a time when I was a frequent contributor on radio stations and television, but like many of the modern Fox News personalities who now find themselves on alternative networks, like Newsmax, Real America’s Voice, and One America News, I was one of the first to be shadowbanned and ostracized because I saw too much and knew the truth long before anybody was really ready to admit to it. I even did some work in Hollywood during those years and quickly learned that my Cincinnati politics was not something any of them were willing to deal with. They all thought that if they controlled all those planks of communism listed in that book from 1957 as global objectives, they truly would rule the world. And in many ways, what I have been warning them out of kindness is coming true now that we are in 2022 and the midterms are coming up. I even noticed it while watching the U.C. v Alabama Cotton Bowl game on New Year’s Eve; the world that all these corporate types who took over our branches of government thought they were going to get is far from where real Americans are. Even though communists have taken over so many of our American institutions, they have not convinced Americans to accept communism. That was most notably obvious in the new Netflix film with some real powerhouse actors, Don’t Look Up. 

Don’t Look Up is something worth watching if you have a Netflix account. Anymore, I tend not to like Netflix. It’s primarily progressive material that does not represent what I’m interested in watching.   But I keep it so I can see what the other side is always thinking about, and Don’t Look Up is an obvious mirror to Hollywood and their obvious frustration that the 45 Planks of communism from The Naked Communist have not worked out the way they thought they would. The continued failure, which I have observed up close and personal among these media cultures, is the belief that culture is formed through art, not that art reflects life. When art is produced, for instance, out of the political or business realm, it is never effective. But when art comes from the realm of myth, well, then you can have life-changing circumstances that occur. Progressivism, socialism, communism are all products of the realm of politics. The MAGA movement and now the America First Policy Institute approach come from the realm of mythology, the core of American belief. There isn’t anything that any political class, business glass, or subcultural bubble can do to stop it. They don’t understand it, they have no desire to understand it, and their only reaction to these mysterious forces is to shut out people who challenge them, so they don’t have to face the music of their dismal failures.  

That is essentially what Don’t Look Up is, with its powerful all-star cast of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and many others is a mirror to Hollywood culture and its failure to wake people up to what they consider the impending doom of a Trump America. Meryl Streep essentially plays the President of the United States as Trump was but as a female version. It was almost a Saturday Night Live kind of hatred for Trump and his supporters that was an obvious mystery to Hollywood culture in general. In the movie, a giant planet-killing comet is headed for earth, and two astronomers work hard to let everyone know about it before the earth ends. They go to the President and get no significant reaction. So they hit the media culture and find that nobody in the world wants to hear about a comet that will end life on earth as the extinction event nears. The movie is essentially Hollywood perplexed about Trump voters and a culture that produced Trump as a candidate. Their blatant hatred of that culture seeps into every frame of the movie. I was perplexed why a major Hollywood project like this film, which was well funded and well-directed by Adam McKay, was going straight to Netflix. The reason was timing. Hollywood still believes that they could defend the Biden administration and the Climate Change objectives of the United Nations if they can get this message to Americans before it’s too late. For the director, and the actors involved, Don’t Look Up was a satire on reality, kind of like a modern version of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. But to the Netflix executives and the producers of Don’t Look Up, they have political hopes that they can rock the world with their silly little movie and change the nature of human beings in general. 

I say that last part out of personal experience, in talking with these types of people where they live and eat. I know what books they have read, what they learned in college, and how they speak at their parties. It’s communism that they have wanted because they are insecure by nature.   They lack identity, so they are actors because they need other people to give them identity. I thought all the actors in Don’t Look Up were fantastic in their roles. After the first act, I thought the movie was very well directed. The last part of the film went off the rails too much, almost like a desperate basketball team down 11 points with 1 minute to play and trying to full-court press and foul their opponent hoping to catch up while there was still time. But I was OK with it because essentially, the haters of America were showing their hearts in this movie. It was extremely revealing in just how scared they are of the rest of us, the majority of America who has not been seduced by communism even after all they have thrown at us. In so many ways, Don’t Look Up was an admission of failure and a desperate plea for another chance to convince us that communism is the way to go. People who wanted Trump and still want him as President are just stupid and can’t see the science of climate change, Covid, or the need for a global communist community run by China. Don’t Look Up pretty much says that very thing when the characters are frustrated over nobody in the world wanting to listen to them about the impending comet even when they could look up in the sky and see it for themselves. The entire movie was written and produced from that famous Santa Monica, California view of the world, a phony caricature of progressivism that has looted off the hard work of those who founded the area and are now inhabited by spoiled brats who have the philosophic grounding of a sliced potato in a garden of weeds. I would highly recommend the movie not for the reasons they want you to see it, but for all the reasons they don’t because it shows the cards of the political left going into 2022 and shows just how scared they are of the upcoming elections. And that is a wonderful thing to watch.

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

The Stupidity of a Billion Dollars for Tri-County Mall: Its bad behavior that killed the shopping complex, money can’t fix that

A Billion Dollars for Tri-County Mall

Believe me, I want Springdale, Ohio, to succeed. My idea of going into the big city when I was a kid was going to the Tri-County Mall and the surrounding areas. They had everything there, and I have always loved it. When I was first married, the Forest Fair Mall opened just down the highway at Forest Park, and it had all kinds of exotic stores and places to eat, along with a movie theater. I thought I was in heaven. I raised my family in these malls, and I would love to see them stay alive. But I think the city council of Springdale is smoking crack if they think voting to spend a billion dollars on refurbishing the Tri-County Mall into a mixed-use development is going to work. It’s enormously stupid and is doomed to fail, and they should not do it. Instead, they need to understand why those malls failed, why all those stores and restaurants left, and make changes to their communities. Because if you don’t change the behavior of a community, throwing money at it won’t improve a thing. Instead, money is made in all economic activity because of behavior. Behavior is not changed by money. Behavior makes money. Bad behavior destroys money. 

From Springdale’s point of view and that of Forest Park, they blame Liberty Center’s success a few more miles north along I-75 for their demise. That state-of-the-art mixed-use community is a real treasure, and it’s where I go these days when I want to go out on the town. I love Liberty Center. It’s great to go see a movie. Eat at a nice restaurant. It has a traditional mall environment, and it also houses an outside mall area that feels like a downtown kind of atmosphere. But you know what it doesn’t have, thugs walking around with their pants half down acting like they will beat up all the customers. Liberty Center is privately managed to get rid of scum bags and losers when they threaten the positive shopping experience of the guests, and they do. They don’t put up with gangs of kids hanging out at Liberty Center, which is why the shopping area is doing well. That is also what destroyed Forest Fair Mall and Tri-County Mall. It wasn’t the change in box store status that came with online retail shopping. It was more that moms found it easier to shop for things from their living rooms rather than go to these malls where young people hang out and misbehave, dropping F-Bombs as they walk by and acting like they might be raped at any moment.  

This isn’t a racist thing; as much as progressives would like to make it so, it’s a behavior issue. When I was young, Tri-County and Forest Park were considered great places to live. Fairfield, which was just next to Forest Park, was voted in Playboy magazine to have some of the most beautiful girls in the country. I went to church in Fairfield. I dated lots of girls from Fairfield and Springdale. I used to be a driver for some of the old Cincinnati Bengals players after they retired, and they lived in Forest Park. I would take them home to their wives in their nice Forest Park homes. Those cities were family-friendly and full of economic prosperity. But as liberal politicians moved into their city councils and mayor positions, they brought many progressive ideas, which we all talk about now. But I was pointing all this out 20 years ago, and the writing for the decline was on the wall. The more liberalism moved into Springdale and the Tri-County area in general, the more that families moved out, north into Liberty Township, West Chester, and Mason. The smart money is left to get away from the bad behavior of progressive politics. And that same story could be said in just about every city that has seen its wealth leave, dropping the value of their communities to derelicts, government addicts, and substance abusers. People do not enjoy being around lousy behavior, and when they see it, they avoid it with other options. That is what killed Tri-County Mall and much of the retail in that area. The local government failed to protect their families by allowing bad behavior to move in and take power with some woke view of the world from a progressive perspective. 

Putting a billion dollars into the same bad behavior will not succeed in Tri-County. Case in point in Over-The-Rhine in downtown Cincinnati where Vine Street repurposed itself to give the illusion of a safe space. The problem is, the surrounding areas are still hives of gang activity and bad conduct up and down Liberty Street and around Findley Market. Instead of crime happening on those streets, gangs like the Glacier Gang follow millennials back to their homes in the suburbs of Sycamore Township and Mason and rob them there. It’s not something they are talking about on the news because they are afraid that people might stop going to downtown Cincinnati for a night out, but it’s a real problem that always stifles economic growth. Bad behavior kills the making of money. 

Oh, I’m sure people reading this who are in denial will say that such judgments are “racist” or are coming from the mind of “white supremacy.” Well, I’m none of those things. I would tell anybody who wants to know to interview any mom-type outside of the I-275 loop and ask them what they think of Tri-County. They’ll say openly that they don’t want to get robbed, raped, or groped because many moms over the last decade who have shopped at Tri-County Mall have been harassed in some way by gangs of youth who didn’t respect the shopping experience. Was getting raped an exaggeration on the part of the moms? Maybe, but it’s how they felt while going to the mall, so they instead turned to online shopping to avoid the threat altogether. Then once Liberty Center opened, they went there instead or made the drive over to Kenwood. With that said, Liberty Center has its own problems. It needs a government bailout as we speak because it’s not hitting the targets it needs to financially. Much of that is due to the changing market of box stores compared to online shopping. It’s a challenging environment these days under perfect conditions. But then-Governor DeWine of Ohio shut down the state economically, which hurt Liberty Center immensely. They still haven’t opened their playground there over liability concerns. The government often gets in the way of positive economic growth, which is undoubtedly the case at Liberty Center. 

To show how stupid government can be, just think of the Springdale City Council, knowing all I have said here but refusing to admit to themselves because of their progressive politics that somehow a billion dollars of investment will change anything. Who in their right mind will invest in a restaurant or store in this new complex knowing that the people who will be giving them money will likely bring trouble with them? And who is going to live in these new apartments? People who don’t care about getting their cars broken into? Or harassed as they are walking down the sidewalk with a gang of kids playing rap music out of the trunk of their car and selling pot out of the front seat? No, you can’t put lipstick on a pig and pretend it’s a flower. It’s still a pig, and until the government puts value on good behavior in their society, they will always see a loss of revenue 100% of the time. It’s a fundamental law of economic activity which progressives choose to ignore. But it certainly doesn’t make it any less relevant. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Mythic Realm: Understanding Elon Musk, Bob Iger shortcomings at Disney, the Build Back Better disaster, and why communism always fails

The Mythic Realm

I could actually write a book just about this topic of the Mythic Realm. Still, recently, an opportunity came up professionally where I had to talk to many political people and business people in the same Christmas setting.  I was near a whiteboard so I could tell the story of what I put on the video here contained.  The subject was a bunch of things that flow together to my eyes.  But to the groups of people, they understood some of it, but not all of it, because of the bubble concept that I explained in the video.  Most people all their lives never leave their bubbles of understanding, and I don’t look down on them for it.  I see it as a natural condition of the human race.  But when the topic of Elon Musk came up and all that he was up to, and understanding why Build Back Better is such a bad idea, or the vaccine mandates for Covid are so destructive, the answers to all those questions are often outside of the bubbles that people live in.  So I put together this little video to explain it to people who want to begin understanding some of these kinds of things, such as where economic power comes from.  It’s not the Political Realm or even the Business Realm.  All economic activity comes from the Mythic Realm, and it is there that we should always focus on creating more!

I also put in this article the WSJ interview with Elon Musk in its entirety where he said that the Build Back Better concept should be “deleated.” As I explained, Elon Musk is more shaman than industrialist, even living in a state of depravity to stay authentic to himself.  To my mind, our American society should be producing hundreds of Elon Musk types instead of a few here and there.  When I think of Elon Musk, aside from his tamperings with the political and business realm, I think of people like Thomas Edison, Tesla, the actual man, and Albert Einstein.  What people call genius, they say such things because, from their point of view in one of their social bubbles, the ideas from the realm of myth seem so extraordinary.  But really, it’s all point of view.  What always matters is the Mythic Realm because it is there where all ideas that generate all economic activity are created, which then cascades into all the organized elements of society.

I provided in the video an example about the aviation industry.  Where Prometheus came from stories about building fire or Indian legends about Thunderbirds who could fly, the idea for flight came from the human imagination in thinking what could be.  Then along came the Wright Brothers, who converted their bicycle profession into the first functioning plane.  From there, the political realm instantly saw the benefits, decided to utilize the airplane during World War I, and created rules and regulations for constructing airports, parts suppliers, and general aviation functions.  Then, of course, the Business Realm figures out what companies need to form to meet the world’s growing political need for airplanes.  And from there comes the Cultural Bubbles of all the individual companies that started making airplane parts and the workers who inhabit those cultures.  The exact trajectory of thought could be said to emerge from the auto industry, smartphones, everything that we consider economic value.  When I talk about intellectual currency, this is what I’m talking about.  Financial currency is needed to flow in the political, business, and cultural realms.  But intellectual currency is required to feed the Mythic Realm, and without that position, nothing new in economic energy is produced.  Therefore, the goal of our society or any society should always be to make more Elon Musk types, or even George Lucas, who created Star Wars.

I always talk about Star Wars because, as a kids product, it does a great job of creating ideas in the Mythic Realm among people in our society.  There was an excellent interview with Bob Iger from Disney, who is stepping down now as CEO.  I think he did a pretty good job stabilizing Disney as a company, but his problem was that he spent his entire time as CEO in the border between the Political Realm and the Business Realm, where most CEOs and CFOs think all the real value is.  But when it came time to make more Star Wars movies, he was lost, and what he made was a bunch of corporate woke garbage.  The fans became angry at Disney because the new films and books were made by a guy who was obsessed with the titles he held.  He made a mistake almost all corporate people make, putting their imprint on something that flows out of the Mythic Realm, but that they never understand the ideas. They end up smashing them into the bubbles of business culture, assuming that everything will just work out.  But it never does.  That is why Elon Musk tends to disparage titles in these companies and offices.  In the Mythic Realm, he likes to have all the executives close to where the action is.  As a modern company, Disney does OK if it sells the fantastic work created by people like Walt Disney.  But because they live in their corporate bubble, people like Bob Iger are paralyzed to do anything new, much like the Chinese suffer from their centralized communism. 

This is essentially why socialism and communism never work because they insist on an old aristocratic European view of the world that never figured out these things.  I feel I can talk about it because, really, for the first time in mass culture, we have a time where we can look at all these elements as an entire whole.  I read so much and from so many different sources that it is evident to me.  I don’t know that such an understanding of social constructs would have been possible 100 years ago.  But with the benefit of hindsight and great modern examples of success in the Mythic Realm, we can see these things clearly now.  When I shared these insights with that large group, they all seemed to have an “oh my gosh” moment, so it seemed like a practical thing to discuss.  When we want to understand the world around us, whether it’s Build Back Better, Star Wars success under Disney, Elon Musk and his quest for Mars colonization, or the intricacies of why capitalism works better than communism at managing society, understanding the Mythic Realm is the key. I’ve said for years that despite all my interests, I appreciate nothing more than mythology because what humans do better than any other known form of life is generate imagination, and therefore a change in circumstances directly derived from the mind.  No matter what someone thinks about God, it cannot be questioned that the purpose of human existence is to use the imagination to continue expanding what goes on in the universe.  We are not so insignificant as a species to assume that nature rules over the minds of humankind.  But that humankind is part of nature and the ever-evolving process of creation which the universe craves.  And once you understand that, everything else makes a lot more sense.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Best Thing I Received for Christmas: Todd Minniear in Liberty Township

I Got Todd Minniear for Christmas

Another question that comes up always after Christmas, mainly out of obligations of small talk, is what did you get for Christmas?  Was it all worth it?  Did you have a good Holiday?  Well, for me, this year, I did have a great Holiday.  But it wasn’t just family gift exchanges that I enjoyed.  Just a few days before Christmas, at the Liberty Township Building just down the road from my house, Todd Minniear was sworn in as my next trustee, one of three.  He is the product of a series of off-year elections where constitutional conservatives were targeted for election to either replace liberals or offer a more conservative candidate aside from the ones traditionally provided.  For me, it was quite a nice Christmas present to have Todd give me a call and invite me to his swearing-in, which I went to and was greeted there with a kind of class reunion from the various campaigns of 2021, and it was nice to see all that hard work come to some positive culmination.  I say it all the time, if you want a good government, then put good people in it. Don’t just sit on the couch and hope things work out alright.  Either run yourself for an office locally or support someone who wants to.  After the Trump presidency, that was certainly my story where obvious political shenanigans to remove him from office took place.   The audacious behavior of the national establishment is something I’ve seen plenty of times locally, over thirty years.  And the election of Todd Minniear, a constitutional and freedom-minded purist, was a significant achievement in my community and was a sign of things to come nationally. 

Another thing I say all the time to just about everyone I speak with is, “don’t be a victim.” Never allow yourself to be a victim in the story of your own life.  Those people we put into elected positions in our republic are never supposed to be our “betters” or some useless member of an aristocracy.  They are there to represent us.  But that’s not the way the political class views that relationship.  Often, they get into public office for the attention of it and the power that follows by having their hands on the levers of rules and regulations that govern our lives.  In the case of a local trustee, the question is often, “can I build a new pole barn on my property to hold my classic car.” The politicians usually will reply, “but think about the lowered property values of the community.  They don’t need to be penalized because you want to protect some gas-guzzling old car that should be on the junk heap, according to the United Nations.” They don’t say that they often work to protect the interests of those who give them campaign donations to keep them in power instead of representing all the community’s people all the time. I’ve been involved in politics in some way or another all of my adult life, and I have seen all the kinds of corruption that can come out of it, all the ugly stuff.  And I understand entirely how that corruption comes about and how to fix it.  The solution is to follow the Constitution of the nation and our state.  If everyone did that, things would work pretty well.  When politicians get away from the constitutions and bring their personal desires or biases to an issue, that’s where corruption starts.  

I don’t think any politician gets into a public office with the idea of becoming corrupt.  They get that way because they lose their way while solving problems.  Corruption starts to eat away from them once they get off the constitutional script.  For instance, I have several very close personal friends who are politicians.  People like George Lang. I’ve known George for a long time since he was a trustee in West Chester, well over a decade ago.  We bonded over Tea Party ideas of small government and the novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.  George has a habit of giving that novel out as a Christmas present at Christmas time.  He believes in the ideas in every aspect of his life.  Even though now he is an establishment figure, he is still the same person.

Because he is a big-time senator within the state, many people assume that politics has made him corrupt.  But I know personally, it hasn’t changed him at all. He’s still the same Atlas Shrugged-giving guy.  We might remember when Paul Ryan was also an Atlas Shrugged fan, but when Mitt Romney wanted him to be his VP, all that Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand stuff was tossed away so that they could become the next power player in congress, eventually becoming Speaker of the House.  Some people can handle the pressure of public scrutiny, and some can’t.  George can; Paul Ryan couldn’t.  Power has a way of altering people into the most profound things in their hearts.  George, for instance, at this Todd Minniear event, was pressed about several projects that involved tax money distribution.  His answer was a classic George Lang line, and he didn’t just say it because I was there.  It’s what he says all the time to everyone, “don’t give the government or me any more tax money. We’ll just spend it.  Keep your money. Our job is to take the barriers out of your way to living a good life.” 

I’ve watched several good politicians like George Lang get elected into more and more positions over the years.  And at that Todd Minniear swearing-in, several of our Lakota school board members newly elected were there as well, more parts of a future solution.  Locally, I’ve always looked to West Chester to ensure more small-government ideas found their way to the trustees.  My friend Mark Welch and others there have done a great job of keeping the government’s small and business engagement very high.  It is the model of what should be happening all over Ohio.  And if we can primary Mike DeWine as governor of Ohio and replace him with Jim Renacci, we’ll be able to do great things in Ohio.  But Liberty Township is where I live, and the trustees there have always been Republican, but more of the Paul Ryan type, and not so much that of George Lang.  At the start of the election in 2021, I didn’t think a freedom candidate like Todd Minniear could find his way on a Republican Party that was still much more like the Republican Party nationally of 2012 and not so much like the Trump Republican Party of 2020.  But Todd won with a solid majority, and he had a tremendous amount of people show up to support him, which is unusual at these kinds of events.  And as I stood there watching Jennifer Gross, our member of the Ohio House, swear in Todd, I could see where our country was headed.  And it made me very happy to see.  All the hard work that goes into these kinds of things was certainly worth it.  For those wondering about it, I would say that doing such things is some of the best Christmas presents you could give yourself.  Often there isn’t much personal satisfaction in politics but putting the right people in the correct positions at the right time through a vote is one of the most rewarding things anybody can do in a healthy republic.  And in Liberty Township for Christmas of 2021, I can say that seeing Todd Minniear sworn in for public office was the highlight of my Holiday season. 

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

The Importance of Family Gatherings: Don’t surrender the youth to chaos, destruction, and progressive attack

Its All About the Youth

I’ve been to several family events this year and have noticed maybe more than usual that nerves are frayed.  The stress of the news, or more specifically, the summation of political beliefs played out on the world stage of the present, is a bit too much for people, and they want to talk about anything but the conditions of our times.  The small talk at family gatherings that might only happen once or twice a year has been, “Hi, how’s little Billy. How’s he doing in school?  Is he playing in sports?” That kind of thing.  These days there is a lot more to it.  It might go something like this, “Hi, how’s little Billy?  Oh, Billy is now Beth because he identifies as a woman.  Well, how’s school?  Oh, you had to pull Beth out of school because of the mask and vaccine mandates and homeschool he/she.  Oh, he’s a girl now, so he can compete in female events in sports, and he’s winning everywhere.  Well, I guess that’s nice.  Pass the gravy.” Small talk obviously isn’t enough for the trouble of our times and the old rules of engagement, in not talking about religion or politics just isn’t enough anymore.  And I don’t think it should be. Instead, what is needed in these family gatherings isn’t more passive acceptance of the world around you but leadership.  If there is one thing that young people need more of now than ever, it’s leadership from their elder statesman.  That doesn’t mean they’ll be excited to hear it or that they’ll hug you for the advice.  But someday, they might thank you for it.  Whatever the case, we have a republic, not a damn democracy, and the success of that republic depends on the intelligence of our society.  And that intelligence cannot have a chance to grow if the older people do not show leadership to the younger generation.

I do not go to family events looking for trouble.  I don’t impose myself on anybody, anywhere, really.  But, I think I’ve wanted all my life to be the age I am now, someone who has lived a lot of life and has some experience to share with people who need more experience in life.  And I think it is disingenuous not to be the most authentic person you can be as a role model for those young people.  After all, isn’t that the meaning of life, to come into the world, experience life in all its variables, and get something of a guide of how to go about it from the previous generation?  I think if we are being honest that we can say that one of the most detrimental introductions of progressive thought over the last century has been this ridiculous notion the youth is all that matters as we turn our elders out to sea to be processed and erased into the soil that grows the next batch of crops.  This approach ignores the wisdom that older family members can provide to the youth, leaving them to seek their direction in life from government figures and worthless celebrities and ultimately their own personal downfalls.  Life and its condition are all about the decisions that young people make for themselves given all the countless options they have, and they do need help to see what decisions are good or bad. 

It always pains me to see young people making the same bad decisions that have been made since the beginning of time.  The young flower of a girl, for instance, who is fully in bloom.  All the little bees out there want to pollinate her.  She shows up with a new bee every year during this period, each time with a new tattoo, another year of smoking cigarettes out of sheer rebellion to how she was raised, and body piercings reflecting the Earth First primitivism that they are taught in public schools these days. They expect you just to sit there and not say anything because nobody is supposed to be judgmental, especially older people who have already lived their lives.  When I see this kind of thing, I feel a need to say something about it and do it.  Yes, it causes trouble, but I keep getting invited to these family things despite it.  The kids need guidance and told that they are going through a temporary thing.  Once some bee pollinates you, and you start popping out kids, and age starts wrinkling up your skin, nobody will want to be around you for those reasons anymore, and if you don’t have a developed intellect, you will be in deep trouble.  Alone and thrown away in the world, nobody who loves one of these young people wants to see that.  A life ruined by bad decisions early in their life.  So I would propose that the rules about talking about religion and politics at family gatherings during the holidays were made up by the same idiots who made up the rules for Covid and put Joe Biden in office.   They didn’t know what they were doing, or maybe they did, and wanted the opportunity to ruin the lives of the youth to destroy our nation from the inside out.  Either way, leadership is always needed to be our authentic selves.  To give those kids an opportunity to make better choices in life by imitating you.  So the worst thing you can do as a leader in your family is to follow the rules of some social tyrants who want the destruction of America, starting with the family.  Part of the maintenance of a republic isn’t just in voting and picking good candidates as representation.  Often, it begins at the family dinner table during holidays. 

It is OK to have the youth mad at you, especially if you have given them contrary information to the flow of the political universe that is coming at them through popular culture.  Many of the rules we all follow over family gatherings have proven to be much more destructive than the Biden administration, and it’s time to stop following those rules and give young people something better to follow, even if it causes great conflict in them during the process.  The purpose of family is to grow people into productive lives of fulfillment, and dancing away from conflict is a sure way to give them the wrong impression that government or popular culture is more powerful and influential than that wiry uncle at the dinner table or bombastic grandparents. They always seem to have a new story to tell.  Character is more important than following some social rules that have been imposed on us by people who want what’s worst for us and that if we’re going to see a resurrection of what’s good in our country, it starts in our families, not at the next Trump rally.  It would be my advice to all, even more now than ever, to not shy away from telling kids not to drink.  Not to do drugs.  To not get stupid-looking tattoos that will make you look like an idiot when you are older, which is most of their lives from 30 to 80.  To pay attention to politics and to have an opinion.  And that if they have a penis, not to compete in women’s sports.   Let the girls have the trophy, compete with other men; otherwise, the victory doesn’t mean anything.  They can roll their eyes and be upset.  They can hide from your judgment.  But you know what, they’ll thank you later.  Your advice may be the only good advice they will ever hear, so don’t hold back on it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Joe Manchin is No Hero: Build Back Better is an attack from foreign powers

Build Back Better is an Enemy of America

We are not lucky Joe Manchin put a stake in Build Back Better, for now.  Build Back Better is not American; only communists and socialists would think that Build Back Better was a good thing.  It was written to the left of FDR’s New Deal, which I think we still need to get rid of.  People are now addicted to the services of social safety nets that the New Deal created. Still, to get to a constitutional republic again, these methods of socialism from progressives have to go.  Build Back Better was so radical that it was essentially a stake in the heart of America in every way it was conceived, which made our enemies, both foreign and domestic, very happy.  There are so many things wrong with Build Back Better that I could go on all day into what they are.  But in essence, Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia, said on Fox News that he was a cold no vote on the bill, which destroyed any chance of it passing in 2021.  And because of his stand, Joe Manchin has been considered a hero for saving the republic.  But I’m not willing to go there.  Joe Manchin is still a Democrat, and that says to me that he’s still dangerous.  All Democrats are dangerous, and I would say they are enemies of our republic because they always seek to undermine the constitution.  I have not yet met a Democrat who is OK with our constitutional law.  Sure, they swear an oath, but most don’t believe in God anyway, so what they say is often useless.  No, Joe Manchin was just doing his job, listening to the people who elected him, and that is what we must thank, that we have a system of checks and balances that worked under the most strenuous tests.  And for that, we can breathe a sigh of relief a bit.

Honestly, I think Elon Musk did more to kill Build Back Better than Joe Manchin, although it wasn’t covered to the same extent.  When politicians saw that Musk wasn’t going along with Build Back Better, they were encouraged to take a stand.  After all, Musk is one of the billionaire class that so many people pander to for campaign donations.  So when Musk suggested that the Build Back Better plan be scrapped altogether, the media was perplexed.  They asked him, “don’t you want the electric car service stations all over the country?” Musk simply replied, “delete it.” Musk knows that the kind of society he wants, one that puts over a million people on Mars within a few decades to set up a colony, will not be a centrally planned communist one.  Musk, over the years, has learned to be more libertarian as he has run several successful businesses.  Reality says communism and socialism do not work when trying to grow something.  And no Mars colony will work unless it is infused with capitalism.  There are opportunities to create a new market economy with space, and parasites like the progressives in America have to be removed from the process to have a chance of that happening.  The best way to build infrastructure is with private investment.  Tesla is doing quite well without the government these days.  I was in Wall Drug in South Dakota recently, and guess what, in the middle of the Badlands there, with minimal infrastructure anywhere nearby, they had Tesla charging stations set up for customers to use. I’ve seen the same kind of service stations at Disney Springs in Orlando on the top level of the parking garage there.  Nobody needed Build Back Better to build those, the market needs of Tesla did it on their own, and Musk understands that, which is why he publicly came out against the European socialist plan of Build Back Better.

There is still this nasty business of how Build Back Better came about.  Think about it, Build Back Better from what?  The capitalist collapse after Covid 19 when the world’s governments allowed a bioweapon funded by America and built in a lab in China loose so that central planner medical people could stifle economic activity and kill the flow of money into collapse.  Then once the failure occurred, those same governments using a “Great Reset” could then Build Back Better, which is a coy way of saying, build back with socialism and communism.  We shouldn’t be looking at any Build Back Better legislation in any form because the people who want it was in on the attack against American capitalism.  Instead of Elon Musk building Tesla charging stations at Wall Drug in South Dakota on their own, they want to gain power over where those charging stations are and attack the infrastructure we currently have centered around a gas economy.  All that is entirely unacceptable.  We should be putting everyone attached to Build Back Better in jail for what they did, not thinking of them as patriots of any kind.  Anyone involved in such activity can only be considered a domestic enemy.  Joe Manchin sees the writing on the wall for 2022, and that is not a place a guy like him wants to go. 

After my travels in 2021, West Virginia is a far different place from the North East, where progressives reside everywhere.  But I’m not even sure that there are many progressives even in the New England area these days.  West Virginia is Trump country. I’ve seen Joe Manchin on stage with Trump in West Virginia, so being associated with killing coal mining jobs there and oil is not a good move for the West Virginia senator.  To twist his arm as Chuck Schumer thinks is possible, or Joe Biden is not in the deck of cards.  To impose on West Virginia the socialist views of the East Coast, especially the socialists of the Beltway, was never a real option.  Likely, Joe Manchin isn’t the only Democrat against Build Back Better.

Democrats from Red States do not want their name next to this bill to help because people will be angry with them.  This is why we have a representative government, a republic, not a damn democracy.  In a democracy, the majority rule, and in the Beltway culture, that majority is only the political class, as they see it.  They don’t think of constituents, but only when it comes time to get elected.  They think they can sucker constituents during every election cycle with lies and marketing.  But Build Back Better is life-changing, and people would not be able to forget about it.  It would leverage itself into their lives in destructive ways, and these politicians know it.  Joe Manchin would never be able to live it down in West Virginia.   That checks and balance are how our republic is supposed to work.  We have to have a republic that decentralizes democracy from the rule of a culture like the Beltway, where politicians lose track of themselves in the smoke-filled rooms of strip joints and sex parties.  A place where lobbyists have more power than the voters.  No, in a republic, the voters still have control, and it is that power that kept Joe Manchin from losing his mind.  We shouldn’t be thankful. It’s the way the system was supposed to work. Instead, we should question those who tried to push through Build Back Better now that the safety valve of our republic has triggered the alarm and let us know that domestic enemies are attempting an economic insurrection and hiding it behind do-good policies to unleash outright communism and destruction for all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business