Category: Political Theroy

The Losers of Lakota: Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer are the keys to the bank vault the teacher’s union wants to rob

Let’s just say that the election for the local school board members at Lakota has been a miserable experience for me. Not because on the Republican side of the voting selection there aren’t good candidates. There are, Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn are very good candidates whom I am sure if both are elected together would represent us very well on the school board against a hostile teacher’s union that is always looking to wreck the budget we all supply that school with our hard earned tax money. But along the way, doing research of all the positions for all the other candidates, and the people attached to them, it has just disgusted me. That would of course be the plight of Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer. Julie is currently on the board. Ray lost his seat a few years ago and now wants it back. Both Ray and Julie are part of the budget deficits that I have complained about over a decade so I have never been big fans of them personally. But it has only been until this election that I did any real look into the quality of their positions, and what I have learned by asking lots of people, and reading lots of things is that they are just complete losers I wouldn’t hire to wash my car. They are far worse than I thought they were, and it has been depressing to learn.

Looking at all these candidates the way I would in hiring for a new position for some important job, which a school board management position is, it is clear that Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray shouldn’t be anywhere near a job consideration due to their severe ineptness as people. No wonder they are such bleeding-heart liberals. They can’t afford to be anything but, and that is not doing any children in the Lakota school district any justice, which angers me considerably. They should have respect for the rest of us to not waste our time. Now, for me, Julie Shaffer lost me a long time ago when she and I debated school topics on WLW radio. Back then the school board was Joan Powell’s and she was building her little coalition of liberal union suck asses and Julie was part of it. Electing a school board is to hire representatives for the taxpayers to negotiate on our behalf. Not to be stooges for the labor union which already is well represented in school board activities. They don’t need help. But the way Joan operated until she stepped down a few years ago was to be a stooge and Julie was part of that culture, which is why everything operated as a deficit. Of course she couldn’t debate me on anything anywhere, in public forums, on the radio, anywhere, so Joan, Julie, the previous school superintendent along with many mad mom Lakota socialites tried an early version of the “me too” movement on me with the help of the newspaper reporter Michael Clark. I’m still angry about that and likely will be for the rest of my life. It showed me just what lowlifes these people really were who were spending massive amounts of money that we give them so recklessly and maliciously. I can handle people who come after me, which Julie clearly did, but in so doing she showed what she was really about. After the last levy since they stopped asking for money at Lakota due to declining enrollment, I haven’t paid much attention to her or the school, so Julie has been off my mind pretty much. However, after the last debate done this year for this election I was reminded just how bad for the job that she is and to be honest I am embarrassed that she even lives in my community, let alone sits on the board representing me as a decision maker. I saw her recently at Sam’s Club in Tri-County and thought about confronting her about things I had learned about her bad behavior regarding extracurricular Lakota events that were quite embarrassing, but her husband was with her, so I left it alone. I don’t want to be the guy that destroys her family. But I wouldn’t vote for her for anything if there was only one name on the ticket.

And she’s the good one. Ray Murray I have learned is even worse than she is.

Ray Murray I always thought of as kind of the Juan Williams of the Lakota school board. I disagreed with his politics but thought he was a nice enough guy to not run through the ringer. He’s a neighbor of mine, he lives close to me and I see him around. My wife likes him a lot and always has. But I kept hearing things about him from people around the community, especially the business guys that Ray wasn’t such a good guy. Well, I had no reason to think otherwise until he threw his hat in the ring for another run at school board then heard his alarming comments at a recent public forum regarding budgets and his views on transgender politics. So I followed the leads where they went and sure enough found out that Ray has drugs in his past and that he has had some serious financial problems. I don’t want to embarrass him; people go through things in life. Some of those problems were years ago, but some were quite recent. If he wasn’t running for school board, I might slide a $100 bill under the door so he could buy lunch, but I sure as hell wouldn’t elect him to a managing position of millions and millions of dollars at Lakota. He was part of the problem before, and knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t give him the keys to a demolition derby car. I sure wouldn’t let him near my wallet. He obviously has a hard time with money, and we’d be crazy to put him anywhere near some. His comments at recent Lakota school board debates are just the tip of the iceberg. He is a walking financial disaster. Look him up on Courtview for yourself at the Butler County Clerk.org site. You’ll see what I mean.

Then there is the reporting, if we had decent local reporters, we should know a lot of these things. Honestly, a local blogger who is busy with millions and millions of other things shouldn’t be the one covering these stories. I’m not even talking about the partisan angle, which from my point of view, the Journal News reporters, well all the Cox Media people are deeply in bed with all the progressive activism that is going on all over southern Ohio, and they sit on stories that might make their people look bad. A lot of this information about Ray should have been covered by them years ago, and maybe if it had, we wouldn’t have had some of the very contentious levy battles that we did, which was very costly to the community. Their coverage has been and continues to be disingenuous to the community who would like to read their articles but have learned that they can’t trust the content.

I will be glad when the election is over because I simply don’t like seeing and hearing from these losers as much as I have over these last several weeks. These people have not been representing me as a voter but have been serious partisan hacks hidden behind a mask of bipartisanship which was always a complete lie. I’m not sure we can believe anything that comes out of Julie Shaffer’s mouth and certainly not out of Ray Murray. I’m not even sure he ever lived in Chicago at this point, let alone was a cop as he has been saying. I was so disappointed in him that I just stopped looking to confirm. The other topics I learned about left me sick. Its nice that we have some options in this election and we’ll see if people show up and actually vote. However, the process up to this point has just been a disgusting look into a bunch of losers at Lakota who should be hiding in the cracks of society instead of being placed on a pedestal. But of course, those who want to steal from us want a key to the door of the bank vault, and for them, Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray are the incompetent stooges who would let them in and to take everything and then some, then ask for a levy from the tax payers to refill the vault. That is the game that has been going on for a long time and the more you learn about the whole thing, the angrier anybody would get about it. And that’s certainly where I am at.

Rich Hoffman

 

Bipartisanship on the Lakota School Board is a Fantasy: Why being a Republican matters when managing money is the objective

One thing that is very obvious, especially this time around within the Lakota school district, and specifically Butler County, Ohio is this complete falsehood that any school board is a non-partisan entity sacrificing their time and energy for children. Wrong! School boards, especially the one at Lakota, are extremely partisan and they want to appear that way so they can get elected in Butler County to anything, due to the conservative electorate demographics that are required. When board members past and present like Ray Murray, Julie Shaffer and many others declare that there should never be an “R” or a “D” next to the name of a school board member they are wearing a mask of falsehood meant to deceive us all. They want to project that school boards giving children an education is “bigger” than politics and that people like me are trying to divide our community with partisan bickering. They are liars, and thieves, and no better. I would go on to say that they are scum of the earth because of their deceitful nature. School boards are nothing but partisan because of the liberal element that comes with every government school due to labor union membership. You can’t accept as an endorsement the school labor union but not the endorsement of the local political party and expect to make a case for neutrality on it, which is precisely what those two idiots have been doing.

Think about it, during this election season which ends on Tuesday November 5th 2019 we have continued hearing about this big budget surplus from Lakota of over $100 million, and rising. Ray Murray and Julie Shafer have been critical of the Republican endorsements of both Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn because in their view the school board is a non-partisan collection of community members, yet they were proud to get the endorsement of the LEA labor union. Julie will even say that she is a registered Republican. Well, all those statements are is a trick or treat mask. The labor union wants those two losers (Julie and Ray) on the board to make contract negotiations easier for them as Lakota blows a ton of money on a $200 million long term facilities plan entailing rehab, renovation, and replacements of buildings and much more which is not in that 5 year forecast that everyone has been beating on their chest in regards to that $100 million surplus. Believe me, the liberals on the board, wither or not they call themselves Republicans or Democrats already have that money spent, which is the cause of this emergency prior to the election for proper school board members.

Finally we have a choice to get a three vote majority. If either Ray or Julie get elected, that $200 million project is getting greenlit and that $100 million surplus is gone. If voters stay home that night and don’t vote, the endorsed labor union candidates will get elected and this chance to safeguard the budget will fly right out the window and it won’t take but a short time for us to go into another levy fight. While its true, I’d rather think about other things than this stupid Lakota school issue, because honestly, I’ve never been a big fan of the work government schools do with children. If we are going to have a big, giant black hole of a government taxation agency programming our children into liberal propaganda, then at least we can elect a school board to manage the money with true Republicans who are fiscal conservatives, or at least can read a balance sheet and understand what the treasurer tells them.

I’d rather not dig into the lives of these people, and I call them losers for a good reason. Especially the more I learn about them. Between Ray and Julie, I’ve heard enough. I didn’t have a very high impression of them before this election, and now that we’ve been through a few months of campaigning, I’ve learned enough to be disgusted by them. I have no question that they are liars and completely inadequate in managing any sum of money. Julie Shaffer may be a registered Republican, but she doesn’t vote like one. She is clearly one in name only, and she want’s to keep that mask on to even have a shot at winning anything in Butler County, just like her predecessor Joan Powell and the many others following in her wake who have pretended to be Republicans only to turn into big, sloppy liberals. You bet it matters what political party they are affiliated with, that’s how we measure their basic values and getting the respect of a political party enough to get an endorsement means a lot.

As I’ve said before, school board members are our representatives to protect our interests. How can they do that if it is the enemy of our interests who endorse them? And yes, the teacher’s union is the enemy of our interests. When they negotiate for the next union contract in a few short years the leaders of the teacher’s union aren’t thinking about the kids, they are only thinking of making more money and if they don’t get it, they will threaten to strike. They won’t care one bit if the kids don’t have a classroom to go to or if they are serving a good example as adults while they negotiate with the school board. The teacher’s union want weak people to negotiate with which is why they are endorsing Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray. None of them want Lynda and Jim on a board together, you can bet that because they will vote no against a lot of liberal ideas the teacher’s union wants to do with our tax money, such as implement transgender bathrooms while they blow through that $100 million surplus like gambling addicts at a casino.

The only reason anybody would say school boards should be non-partisan is because they want to wear a mask to hide their true intentions behind. Julie is no conservative and Ray Murray is even less of one than she is, and they don’t want to talk about it because they want a chance to get elected. By making politics a non-issue they can continue to deceive voters into thinking it doesn’t matter, or placate them to stay home on election night while the vermin of the teacher’s union go out in droves and vote for losers so that their next contract negotiation is in the bag along with those $200 million facility improvements that nobody is talking about yet, quite on purpose. Are those harsh words, is it fair to talk about the character flaws of Julie and Ray during an election for a silly school that sticks its nose in our lives in very intrusive ways, all the time? You bet your ass it is. These are nothing but robbers who want to steal money from the rest of us and I get tired of them lying to my face, and to the rest of us. Where is Julie going to find $200 million for those facility plans if she can’t even find her pants? I can promise that the endorsed Republicans on the board, especially Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn would never be involved in such embarrassing situations, you know why? Because they are Republicans, real ones. That’s not to say that they are made of the robes of Jesus, but they are pretty much what they say they are, even in social situations. The politics of any candidate matters and there is a reason the LEA wants people to wear the masks of bi-partisanship—it’s so that they can rob the bank of Lakota and hold our kid’s hostage while they steal from all of us. And if that sounds harsh, I would argue that its not harsh enough.

Rich Hoffman

Pot Smoking and Ray Murray: The school board candidate who wants to shoot teachers if they have a gun

The Ray Murray I knew back in 2011 was nowhere to be found at the VOA Miami University debate on October 22, 2019 for potential school board candidates. I always thought Ray was a nice guy, but the person speaking at that event sounded like a drug induced lunatic. Suspicious of the things he said that night it became clear thereafter that there was a good reason. Under Case Number 0000477720 Ray looks to have been convicted of possession of marijuana and had to serve a year of probation. After seeing that, I would normally doubt that such a report would be accurate. So I checked it with two different sources and, after watching him in action and looking scraggly and worn out in ways I wouldn’t normally associate with him, there is good reason to believe it and then some. He sounded like a guy on drugs as he opened the door to scrutiny by talking about his years as a Chicago police officer and a champion for transgender politics. He painted himself for an election to be a virtuous person, but reality has something else to say.

Here is the problem with electing people with serious issues into a budgetary position, once they are compromised, whether it is in several broken marriages, drug use, being a cop and being scared of being shot at, people like that tend to side with the worst that our society produces. While its fine to feel sorry for them, and if they find meaning in life in a church by becoming some definition of a pastor, we should cheer them on for recovery. But we should not sit them down and ask them to control a budget of nearly $200 million while sitting on a cash surplus of over $100 million. If we did, we should expect all that money to go up in smoke just like any other pot smoking loser. Compassion is one thing, endorsing failure with elections however is something else.

I would go further and say that anybody who does drugs of any kind, even drinking is a cause to not vote for someone onto a school board. And Ray isn’t the only one guilty of this kind of scandalous behavior. I would say that his partners of liberalism on the school board have done far, far worse. Should we talk about it, well let’s just say, we don’t want to embarrass their children, although I would argue that honesty dictate that we should. When we vote for someone to represent us on a school board, or a trustee, commissioner, representative, senator, anything, we need to know what we are voting for. If we decide we want to vote for flawed people, then that’s fine. We shouldn’t be surprised when those flawed people get bad results, but at least we know what we are voting for. If Ray needs help with drugs, lets get him help. But that doesn’t mean we should put him in charge of millions of dollars.

Compromised people tend to look for redemption in public acts, which is why a lot of liberals are dangerous. People like Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer are so compromised with embarrassing things that they have done in their lives that they are looking for redemption with elected office, and they are using taxpayer funded resources to cover their weaknesses. Because they want compassion for the ways they have lived their lives, they are quick to support topics like transgender policies so that they can hide in the crowd and get redemption. They vote in favor of the teacher’s union because they need a cover story of friends to hide their own weaknesses behind with a big banner above their heads stating that nobody is perfect, lets show some compassion for the downtrodden. That sounds fine coming from a church pew on Sunday, but in the world of money, finance and education, it has no place. People who live their lives clean and don’t drink themselves into oblivion or smoke a bunch of dope to forget about all their problems in life, should be in charge of things and have the public trust. And if they get caught doing bad things, we may not blast them out of a cannon and forget about them. We may give them a second chance at life, but certainly we wouldn’t elect them to a board to handle a multimillion-dollar budget.

Being likeable isn’t the same thing as being logical and cool headed when tough decisions need to be made. One thing that must be considered when we are talking about school board candidates that have shown mental instability, and drunkenness and smoking pot or elements of both conditions, is that upon election we give them a badge to get into any building within Lakota. If they are depressed about something who is to say that some drug dealer selling them a bag of pot won’t get a hold of that badge and use it to get into any school building on a rampage of violence, the kind of potential tragedy that we have all been talking about. What was it that Ray said at the debate, that if a teacher had a gun, he would want the police officer to shoot the teacher? Yes, that’s what he said, does that sound like a person who has it all together? Yet his only answer to the problem is to trust the system, yet what if one of these loose cannon school board members ends up drunk and passed out somewhere and someone gets a hold of their badge so they can get into any school? No matter how much we spend on security, you can’t prepare a school to defend stupid and reckless behavior on behalf of the school board members.

Many think its hip and cool to have pot smokers and drunks on the school board. But its no wonder that they always seek institutional support because if something goes wrong, its likely going to be their fault and they want to always reserve the right to hide their faults behind good intentions, such as transgender support and spending that $100 million surplus on give-a-ways to keep anybody from looking too deeply at them. Of course, the teacher’s union wants compromised people on the board of education, because it makes it easier for them to defeat the board upon contract negotiations. When we elect school board members, we are electing our representatives. The teacher’s union has their representatives and they stick together. We elect ours with these elections, so why would we want to vote for anybody who has a union endorsement? We shouldn’t. Then we must ask why the union is endorsing them. Well, the answer to that is that they think they are easy to beat in contract negotiations. If you are the teacher’s union, would you rather go up against a tough business person like James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor, or some dude caught with pot or a person who can’t hold their liquor in public and ends up in compromising positions, all too often. The answer is obvious.

Its not wrong to want to help someone like Ray who no matter what has gone on in his life is at least getting up and trying to do better each day. But when there are problems managing marriages, money in his personal finances, and with substance abuse, then why should we think he can protect his badge from some malicious personality, and to protect our budget surplus. He’s ready to spend all of that $100 million over a 38-year period and to shoot teachers when cops come to a school during a mass incident if they have a gun. Ray might be a good neighbor and a nice guy to go to church with, but he clearly has trouble understanding money and cannot take a strong position on ethical decisions. Being one of the misfit toys out in the world does not make him a good representative of our school board. And feeling sorry for someone is not a qualification to make management decisions.

Rich Hoffman

Everything You Need to Know about the Lakota School Board Candidates of 2019: The Teacher’s Union is ready to steal $100 million

It’s not my favorite topic in the world, but locally, the school board race for Lakota in Butler County, Ohio is a great opportunity for improvement, or a projected, unmitigated failure. And in a lot of ways, how goes things in the Lakota school district, the rest of the country follows, due to the amount of money that is involved and the situation involving government employee unions and the overall position of the Trump administration during a second term not yet resolved. There is over $100 million of surplus in the Lakota budget that the teacher’s union is licking its chops to get a hold of, and they are up for a contract renewal in 2021, and they have picked their candidates in this one. They want the budget novices Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray to be the winning votes during those negotiations and have supported them during this election. So, I have provided the full video of the recent Miami University VOA Meet the Candidates debate which was very well done I might add, so that voters can make up their own minds about this upcoming election. The differences between the candidates couldn’t be more obvious as presented here in the format totality.

Obviously from that video Lynda O’Connor has a lot of experience and is business friendly. I’ve known her for a long time and after sifting through the smoke of political theater have come to trust her with millions and millions of dollars of budget. So much so that I have felt I didn’t have to cover everything little thing that Lakota has been doing, instead looking more at national and international issues involving the Trump administration. But local issues will always be the core of what we do in our republic. The quality of who we vote for regionally has a direct impact on the national elements so we should never take our eye off the importance of local elections. And for that, Lynda certainly has my vote. And so does James Hahn. This is his first time running for the school board of any kind and he was obviously a little nervous in the video. I know him as well and can say that he’s a lot more comfortable with a balance sheet involving vast sums of money than either Julie or Ray is. I actually know all of them well at this point and without question Lynda and Mr. Hahn are the far better choices, especially for the many millions of dollars that are at stake.

Ray and Julie both will say in interviews and in those latte sipping formats with other voters that they don’t care about endorsements from either political party. Yet they are endorsed by the teacher’s union at Lakota and those members are very active on Facebook and other social media networks pushing for these two big spenders to be on the board so they can have easy access to that $100 million. Its like a bank robbery being planned through an election. The money is sitting there in the vault and the union plans to break into that safe to take it by electing union insiders onto the board and taking away fiscal conservatives like Lynda out of their way with a simple vote. It’s an off-year election so voter turnout will be typically low. The union members and their families will show up to vote for the pillaging of that surplus so that is what is at stake in this election, theft, or protection of that $100 million surplus.

It was in that video which I referred to earlier in another article that Ray Murray had said that it would take 38 years to spend that much surplus money, so to his mind, why not spend it and give it to people who need it. He was speaking just like a bank robber in the Old West preparing to loot a town for the plights of the poor and downtrodden. Only I’m not so sure that Ray Murray is the good pastor of a church that he says he is. Without question Ray is a likeable guy full of charisma, but so are a lot of bank robbers and other types of villains. If they can get something out of you without things getting messy, of course its better for them, and I would contend that is precisely what Ray is up to. I don’t think he’s as stupid as he’s acting in that video. If he and Julie get on the school board together, they will give that surplus money to the teacher’s union that has endorsed them and we’ll have another very contentious school levy in 2022 which is not that far off.

Of course, we have a choice at this point, we could elect James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor, (both of them) to get a third conservative vote on the school board to protect that money. It would be like hiring extra security at the bank so that looters couldn’t rob the money. Jim doesn’t need to know much as a first-time board member, he just needs to understand money, which he does. The debate itself didn’t go too far into these issues because it wasn’t meant to. It was a nice surface community thing that was meant to be a softball game so to be in the realm of Ray and Julie’s comfort zone. Conservatives never look as good in those types of debates because they tend to talk over the heads of common voters. The details of such large budgets require smart people and both Lynda and James are, but such a debate format doesn’t want to show how smart people are, only how compassionate, giving, and likeable they can be which feeds straight into the union narrative for their looting scheme.

It was a nice event, the debate, but I did notice something that was unusual about those types of events, before the narrative went down the rabbit hole on transgender bathrooms, guns on teachers—or rather the lack of them, and how we would never spend that $100 million surplus in 38 years. At the beginning of the debate there was no pledge of allegiance to the flag. I’ve been going to these kinds of events for many years and there is always some sort of acknowledgment to the flag of the United States. But not this time. Lynda and Jim are trying to bring to the board of education a conservative presence to protect the budget surplus that we currently have at Lakota. And they are also trying to create a friendlier business climate to steer away from the extortion tactics of the past by Lakota against potential investors. And they are both flag waving Americans. But as the board is now, Lynda is outvoted 3 to 2 and Lakota like all public schools is controlled by the very progressive America hating teacher unions. And the evidence was clear in that debate by the absence of the pledge of allegiance. Thieves don’t honor the structure of the bank of the investors. They just want to rob it and to use the money for their own efforts. And that is what the teacher’s union at Lakota wants to do with Ray and Julie, elect them so that the surplus will fall into the hands of the robbers. And to hell with the American flag, and the conservatives of Butler County who live in the Lakota district. They are counting on everyone staying home on election night so that they can sneak into that bank and take that $100 million without firing a metaphorical shot and enriching themselves in the process at all of our expense.

The question is, will you let them?

Rich Hoffman

Vote for O’Connor and Hahn to Lakota School Board: It isn’t about being nice, its about being effective

The value to a person like me of the Lakota school system is in how little they take from the community to offer their free baby-sitting service. I think we are in a time where the college myth is no longer relevant, that we understand the cost of a liberalized education is very detrimental to young minds. But a lot of parents could care less, they just need somewhere to park their kids for the day while they do whatever they do. And if there are sports programs, they can play the lottery with their children by hoping that they may get a scholarship to a college and save them some money. That’s my opinion of the public education system which might be bleak to many, but its my observation that, that is the essence of it, so in my view, it needs to cost the least possible. The real figures that make up a good community are the businesses that create the desire to move into an area. The school that happens to be there benefits from the quality of people who are drawn to the businesses of a region. It’s a really broken system that measures all the wrong values, so while we all figure out the future of public education, we need a bridge from here to there that has smart people managing the resources so we don’t end up with the kind of mess that we have had at Lakota during the last decade.

At the recent VOA Miami University Meet the Candidate night which took place on October 22nd, 2019 I attended to provide coverage for those who couldn’t be there, and video of the event is provided here. I see this work as a kind of public service. Feel free to watch the videos and make your decisions on the candidates. For me the unquestionable choice for school board in this upcoming election is James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor. Lynda has been around for a while and knows how to manage the board and keep Lakota in a win column so that they don’t scare off potential investors into real estate as a deal breaker. I don’t think Lakota is a lure, not in the way public school used to be. Other factors certainly are a greater part of the decision-making process. And that’s where James Hahn comes into play. He’s a business guy and would provide Lynda and the current board member Todd Parnell with that critical third vote to keep the district running well with the massive amount of money that we do give them.

Much of the talk from that debate night was what to do with the massive $100 million surplus that Lakota is operating under. I filmed many of the questions and answers but was out of the room away from the camera when Ray Murray proclaimed that it would take Lakota 37 years to spend all that money, which was astonishing. I’m sure somebody in the room filmed that comment. But the gist of the night was that Ray and Julie Shaffer were nice people who just didn’t have a clue how to operate in this tightly controlled Lakota district where business owners have actually stood up for themselves against the extortion tactics that public schools often use to get more money in their pockets so they can throw it at the teacher’s union. Looming in the room around that event were many of them from Liberty Township and West Chester. Sure, everyone shakes hands at the end of those things and gets along, professionally. But the resentment of the game is a clear dividing line and since much has been said over the last decade about the negative ways Lakota has interacted with that part of the community, it is clear that the skills needed are well beyond Ray and Julie.

What’s different now as opposed to even a few years ago is that “just pay more money for the kids” isn’t enough any more for public schools, and at Lakota that is especially true. There are lots of psychological problems that make people do what they do, and as I often refer to strong supporters of government schools as rapid animals with their minds soaked into delusion as to what the school can actually do for their children, what everything eventually comes down to is money. Lakota has plenty of money that they are taking in. The question is, what happens to it? Without a pro-business school board who knows how to read a balance sheet, that $100 million surplus will be wasted on everything and the board will come back to the community asking for more money in a few short years.

Nobody wanted to talk about a school levy, obviously I was there for everyone to see, and many members of the old No Lakota Levy campaign were in the audience also very visible. Without question that changed the course of the dialogue a lot from pro levy discussions which of course the teachers and administrators always want to hear and centered on more fiscal responsibility which seemed like an oblivious concept to Ray. I am still astonished about some of the things he said during the debate. He may be a nice guy that is very likable but being likable isn’t a qualification unless the job is a Wal-Mart greeter. When we are talking about budgets ranging in the millions and millions of dollars, many times you want someone managing it who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about being liked. Quite the opposite.

Lynda O’Connor has come a long way in her years on the school board. I’ve always liked her but, in the beginning, I thought of her as another idealist who was pro education and would work the Republican ranks because of the regional consequences. But she has certainly proven to me that she is sincerely conservative. She also has a lot of hope in what can be done with public education and so long as we have that as the means of educating kids, she is the right kind of person for a job like the school board. James Hahn is new to all this, and that is great too. So long as he can learn from Lynda, his business experience will be a big help in keeping the business community close and part of solutions. The other two, experienced board members and part of what was the problem originally would be a disastrous pick.

Let’s face it, without opposition Lakota would not have that $100 million surplus. It wasn’t some miracle trick in accounting. Lakota has a good treasurer, much better than who was there before her. And I think the new superintendent is a good one. I’m sure he’d like more freedom to promote the brand of Lakota as more the center of the community than what it is. I don’t think its bad at all to be part of that anger. I see it as healthy. Nobody wants to read one more boring newspaper article about these topics from boring, fossilized reporters. They enjoy my work for sure, and I think giving it to them with an animated zeal is good for the decision-making process. Public school is a boring topic for those who have their kids all grown up and have moved away. They certainly don’t want their taxes to go up. They just want to enjoy their community, their jobs and a nice place to shop and go out to dinner on a Friday night. They don’t want to hear that Lakota has blown their $100 million surplus and is asking for more money because the school board mismanaged it. To avoid that fate, vote for O’Connor and Hahn. And make sure Lakota knows you are watching them. Because the moment you don’t, that money and much more will be spent, and we’ll have another levy. You can bet on that.

Rich Hoffman

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The Debt Clock at $23 Trillion: How the Trump “pro growth” plan is our only hope

A frequent reader here brought up an excellent point that has been bothering me regarding the amount of spending that we have in our government and our failure as a country to deal with the national debt which is presently almost at $23 trillion. I remember when it was only at $16 trillion and it was a big deal for the Republican platform, and clearly since Trump has been elected, it has not been a priority. Because there were essentially two problems that had been planted in American culture by those who wanted to destroy it for a transfer bail out into the United Nations, which was the strategy all along. The first of those problems was that we were borrowing at a high level to essentially chain us through regulatory compliance to the rest of the world who could then pull our loans and control us as a nation tossing out that pesky Constitution because as a nation we couldn’t afford to live up to it, and the second, we shipped all our jobs overseas so that there would be no way to pay the debt even if we wanted to. When Trump was elected his first method of attacking this problem was to stop the bleeding, which he has done. You can read the comment below:

When is he going to fight to lower spending? I like Trump for the most part. I love that he is pulling us out of Syria. But we cannot continue to spend like this.

Jason E Koslow

https://usdebtclock.org/

 

I hadn’t yet answered Jason because it required more than a five second answer, due to its very good point. If I know Trump the way I think I know him, which is quite well—I would venture to say that being an optimistic person that he is he plans to tackle this whole problem in the second term of his presidency now that the seeds for a great economy have been planted. And he plans to not do it by cutting, which many Republicans would think of as the first objective, but he wants to do it with growth. That is after all how he personally became a billionaire. In his mind, he plans to do for the country what he did for himself. Growth is the ticket out of debt, and he’s created the foundation to explode that growth.

Then you read his comments about why he couldn’t host the G7 Summit at his Doral golf course due to all the controversy and it brings to mind Jason’s point more succinctly. There are forces in the American government that are quite common, they persist actually into half the country that tend to vote for victimization representation in the form of Democrats. They don’t want to show off the potential wealth of America, they don’t want our billionaire president to show the world that he knows what he’s doing in building Doral. They’d rather the event happen in some government building with limited running water so that other countries not be so seduced by American capitalism. But for Trump that was precisely the point, to inspire more investment and that explosive growth that he has been counting on. And he was obviously disappointed in the small thinking of the press and the Democrats in general. Thinking small is not one of the things Trump has ever been good at and he has no desire to start now.

Under Trump’s next term which he has helped along with deregulatory practices and access to NASA, commercial space travel will become big business. Hyperloop transportation will become common language and the tremendous growth potential of his trade deals and bringing jobs back into the United States will contribute respectfully to the GDP. Then and only then will that clock begin to tick backwards and from my vantage point, it couldn’t happen soon enough. The great risk is that another year of this will put that debt up toward $25 trillion which is a major problem. That huge sum could be paid off with new space mining operations for rare metals. The amount of money that the commercialization of space could generate is stunning, and Trump is counting on those seeds to bloom to cover the debt. But he has to get elected first and for that to work, he has to protect what he has started from Democrats who want to torpedo it for their own future chances.

Which brings us back to why there is a debt to begin with. The Democrats wanted to crash the system, they set all this in place during the Obama administration and for Trump to stop it he would have to turn inward, which would have played into the hands of the Democrats who planted that seed long ago. It was their insurance policy for their own existence. What they didn’t count on was for Trump to come in and turn the ship around and for Republicans to stand behind his “pro-growth” vision. Trump trusts the innovations of the private sector even when they come from his enemies like Jeff Bezos. By getting government out of the way, the private sector could generate many trillions of dollars in additional GDP and that is the plan. But he can’t mess with the economy during an election year and start cutting our way to prosperity. We must grow. You can’t bring reality to people addicted to government services because that would end his election and the prospect for any future growth, so Trump is playing a big round of poker here, and he has a lot of chips on the table.

If it was anybody else, I’d worry. But the way that Trump handled himself personally during the 90s gives me the feeling that he can do it again with the American economy if he has our support. He certainly has my support. He has stopped the bleeding, now for part two, we must build up the blood. I would argue that an operating budget for America needs to be much less. But if we can turn the clock backwards with growth, well then, why not. I personally think there will be enough expanding market emerging in the 2020s to pay off our national debt and get to a positive position by the time we are settling people on Mars. But first the Democrats literally have to be destroyed as an opposition not just in politics, but to economic growth because for them the debt clock was a form of terrorism that was supposed to go off by now, only we elected Trump to bring back all our oversea business and to deregulate ourselves back to a growth based economy. I tend to think that one more election will do the job and free Trump and the supporting Republicans into launching those pro-growth initiatives. But we also must consider that the Democrats know all this and they are set to do anything to survive, and if they could destroy the economy in some way during 2020 to keep Trump from getting re-elected, then their debt clock becomes a driver again, and a means to destroy America and to merge it with a world management system. There is a lot of stake, and nothing that we can take for granted.

Rich Hoffman

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Hyperloop is Coming to India: How to prepare for it in your neighborhood soon

It’s been going on for a good part of the summer and is increasing in urgency now that India is going to be the first Hyperloop line built by Virgin Hyperloop One, but the roadshow for that same company has been soft selling the high speed next generation transportation system to Ohio, Pittsburg and of course Chicago heavily as the next logical step. Virgin Hyperloop One has taken their test vehicle which has successfully completed their testing just outside of Las Vegas and they are showing it off to various sites along the proposed path so that people can start to get their minds around the concept, because they are ready to dig dirt and built the thing. As I have been saying for a few years now, this is a game changing transportation system that will be well in place by 2030, but will start coming online in the 2020s with the first destination in India. The United States will need to embrace this concept so we can take the lead because this is the future, Pittsburg to Chicago roughly a half hour.

My job in these kinds of things is perspective, the future is certainly here and the desire for technology expansion is at the doorstep of the human race. How we manage it will largely dictate how successful it is, but the technology is there, billionaires with an imagination like Elon Musk who first came up with this Hyperloop concept not very long ago are coming up with the means leaving it up to us to figure out how to embrace the options. I personally think we have an opportunity to unleash hundreds if not thousands of Elon Musk types in the coming century and that a great many things could change for us all for the better. This is why I am against medicating children with hyperactive disorders, it’s a mistake because evolutionarily speaking, the speed for which young people are thinking, especially with the use of video games, is an evolutionary attribute that will help them live in that new world where such travel times offered by Hyperloop will really shrink the world in a good way.

I have also been suggesting that since Ohio is being considered as one of the hottest spots in North America for one of the first Hyperloops, that a Hyperloop station find a home along the I-75 corridor that is so explosive currently in the West Chester area—(hint, Monroe by the Outlet Mall). The ability to get around the world fast is the prime recipe for economic expansion and with a term 2 of the Trump administration understanding how the game is played and not having Democrats standing in the way of everything, this would be just the ticket. Speed is the key to growth, all growth in business sector measurements. The speed that we can extract information and do something with it, and the speed for which we can communicate with other people in collaborative efforts. And when dealing with supply chains, the speed that we can resolve issues up and down the line. A plane ticket is still an all-day affair, to visit a supplier in New England or the upper portions of the United States you can get there in a day, but the journey still takes most of a day with time zone adjustments taking entirely too long. Hyperloop will speed all that up dramatically.

We are becoming a faster world and the ability to think fast is the key. I would say that subconsciously we all understand this, which is why video games have been moving into our culture so persistently. I have been watching NFL football games lately differently with the understanding that the game is changing so rapidly due to most of the fans becoming so involved in Madden which is much more satisfying than just passively watching a football game on a Sunday afternoon. People don’t have time to waste on a 3-hour experience when they could do it in one and share that endeavor with friends all over the world through the internet. Consumers of the NFL product have so many other things to do these days, like watch a new series on a streaming service, or listen to a book through Amazon’s Audible, we just don’t have time to waste an entire Sunday watching two or three games like we used to, and those cracks are starting to show in the NFL business model.

People look at our 3% unemployment rate under the Trump administration and they wonder who will occupy all the new jobs that will be created by something like a Hyperloop. I would contend that air travel will still be important, especially internationally, and regionally. Hyperloop is a solution, but its still a fancy railroad, although if you have rode the monorail system in Disney World, Hyperloop would be more like that across a region of a country than just a train station that takes forever to get started and even longer in getting there. The speed of the Hyperloop makes up for the stagnant line that they present. Air travel will still remain important, and the competition should go a long way to bringing down prices with options, which is always a good thing. But who will do all these future jobs? Well, that answer is A.I. which is also coming along quickly. With birthrates being so low in the United States and places where birthrates are high, like India and China, matching economic growth to high population centers will require speeding up the travel and reach of people to ride the economic growth. But there are limits that artificial intelligence and robotics will have to fill.

Old timers will say, “well why would I want to get from Pittsburgh to Chicago in a half an hour with a few stops in between? Part of the fun of a journey is in getting there.” Well, those types of people can still drive a car or fly in a plane. But if you need to get somewhere, and this is certainly true for me, I don’t want to waste the time in getting there. I want to go do what I want to, then return back to my life as soon as possible. Such a transportation system would allow someone to live in Pittsburg or out in the country anywhere along Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, but to work in the city without having to pay the extraordinarily high cost of living of such a job. This would really help in the city of New York, San Francisco and even down in Mexico City. A Hyperloop traveler could live a thousand miles away from their job and make the commute daily without having to move to a dangerous city, or an expensive one choking on limited resources. It would then force cities to compete with the suburbs for safety, cleanliness, and other general quality of living measures.

How we embrace this technology will largely determine the kind of world we could have, but first we have to solve some basic problems regarding the temptation to retreat back to anarchy and to run away from growth because its too scary, or too fast. A fast world is harder to control from the vantage point of politics. As I said, a second term of President Trump would totally understand how to make Hyperloop travel in the United States a common practice within five years of this writing, almost as common as a highway system. But we still live in a world that thinks there something wrong with having the G7 Summit. Would we want world leaders to see how nice we can build something like a Doral or stay in some gutter? Our political left doesn’t want the expectation of something so nice, so they protest against it. They want victimization for their political ambitions and that is one of our greatest challenges of the modern age. The challenge is in getting people to think in that proper, “big” fashion, which to me, is a problem with a solution that is clearly in front of us that can be solved with just a few good elections.

Rich Hoffman

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Should we be Sad about Elijah Cummings: The death of an impeachment leader

It was a little weird that one of the leaders of the Trump impeachment push, Elijah Cummings died suddenly at the age of 68 just a few hours after signing subpoenas for the effort, and that it wasn’t the lead story for every news outlet. Not to suggest a conspiracy of any kind other than the story was seriously underreported. Cummings sat on just about every panel against Republicans for a very long time, and suddenly he was gone and nobody was really talking about it. It was nice that Trump made a nice statement about Cummings showing that he was clearly taking the high road. I can’t say I would have done the same. Regardless, I would have thought it would have been more of a breaking story than it was. Likely, he was one of the leaders of the Trump impeachment and now with is passing, a lot of wind went out of the sails of the Democrats, and nobody was all that happy about it.

I’m not one to spit on the grave of anyone, but I’m not at all an Elijah Cummings fan, not in life or death. Just because he died doesn’t suddenly make him a martyr for justice, he was a loser and a big government advocate that was attacking the way of life that America offered, and a real problem. The political left lost an important part of the chess board with the Cummings death and it should be understood that way. After all, we aren’t playing pattycake here, Cummings was trying to impeach our elected President, and I’m not happy about it. I don’t really care what his intentions were, it was the results that we should have always been concerned about and the sudden loss of him will be a serious blow to Democrats and their impeachment efforts.

Honestly It wouldn’t bother me at all if all the Elijah Cummings types, the impeachment provocateurs and general liberal protestors of victimization over productivity would go away in a similar way. I don’t like the way they view the world and I really don’t want to share my country with them. It has nothing to do with color, but of values. People like Cummings are in the way of an otherwise great country and all they contribute to a national dialogue is a lot of complaints. And rather than compete in the marketplace of ideas, when they can see they cannot win, they instead seek to impeach our President and attempt to take the rest of over a cliff to our own demise. So you won’t find me losing any sleep over his sudden death. I thought President Trump’s words were nice, too nice.

It’s not that Democrats ever really had a case for impeachment that causes some mild relief that one of their biggest advocates has now died, its that I just get tired of listening to their version of the world—perpetual victims helpless to think and do things on their own, leading people into worse lives than they might otherwise have just to prove a political point from their long standing points of view. A politician like Cummings was on television all the time saying the worst things, so its not unsavory to be a bit happy for the relief. Listening to Democrats is a real chore, their outlook on life is so bleak and painful. Like Cummings most of us only put up with it because we feel sorry for them, but to me, that’s not enough of a reason. If they are so unhappy, then they can just leave.

I don’t care what Cummings did for civil rights, or what he put his name on during his long run as a politician, he was a loser by all definitions of that measure. His thoughts and actions imprisoned countless people to the politics of his advocacy which ruined countless lives instead of helping them as he suggested. And in the end all he had to show for it was to try to create a case for impeachment that just stood in the way of doing good things for America. If his ideas were so good, then why was he trying to impeach the President during an election year? Well, because he and the other Democrats leading the effort had no offering that could compete with President Trump on the world stage. They were all small thinkers being overshadowed by the big think of the president and for that they had no answer other than to try to undo him, ruthlessly. How are we supposed to feel about his death? Relieved is the only word that comes to my mind.

It is possible to imprison people with a mode of thinking, and Elijah Cummings certain did that. The people who followed him were doomed due to his small thinking. Then to prevent that thinking from being challenged by competitive ideas, they sought to destroy that competition so that their loser mentality could permeate our society with lackluster effort and victimization. If another country tried something like that with us we’d call it a provocation of war. That definition doesn’t change just because Cummings was a person of color from the Baltimore congressional district representing the poor. What he was trying to do to the rest of us was pretty unforgivable. And the media knew it upon his death. Once the realization set in that he did in fact die, there were a few articles here and there, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of coverage that we’d typically expect. The world ticked on rather quickly on the Republican side and the Democrats were licking their wounds knowing that one of their champion impeachment advocates was no longer on that chessboard, and they didn’t want to think about that prospect.

Because other than complaining, the Democrats have no plan or ideas. They have no candidates to offer in this 2020 election to the point where none of the networks can offer them up in the horse race as a viable contender. All they have as they look at their options is embarrassment. That is why they turned to Cummings and his friends to impeach President Trump—because they know they can’t beat him in an election. And the rest of us are supposed to be OK with it all and just go about our business? No, I don’t think so. Cummings was a hostile agent intent to overthrow our nation into becoming something that looks more like Baltimore today, and that was never a potential acceptable likelihood, so people outside the Beltway didn’t want to hear from him. And now we don’t anymore. I don’t wish damnation of his soul or any ill will toward his family. But I won’t miss him, not one bit. It won’t hurt my feelings to turn on the television and to no longer see his face on it yacking on and on about his victimized status. He didn’t bring anything to the table that we as Americans should be considering. His arguments were bad, his views terrible, and with his low thinking he held down many more people than he ever could have helped from his office. And with his sudden death, maybe now they can be just a little bit freer.

Rich Hoffman

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Hunter Biden is a Loser: Giving the “Rich” a bad name as a typical government looter

My favorite part of the Batman movies is the wealth and justice aspect of the hero and how he uses his resources to do good in the world. A world that would otherwise be bleak if not for his efforts. That is the story of Bruce Wayne, a kind of modern Zorro, who did the same during the American expansion period in film. And so it was in the most recent story telling exercise of the Batman movies where the villain Joker was emphasized that my favorite character by far in that film was Bruce’s father Thomas, presented in the blockbuster film ‘Joker’ as the rich mean villain. Thomas was the kind of rich person that I understand, as most of the people I know best in the world are all rich and millionaires by status. They are not the villains that Karl Marx and his followers would make them out to be, they are examples of what people should strive to be. They are only villains to those too lazy to do the work of becoming one themselves.

Just like in real life, all rich people are not equal. Some make their money by working hard, smart, and better than their rivals. Some loot off those efforts and become wealthy by providing access to other people. So not all people making over $200K a year are equally part of the 1% that movies like the Joker seek to attack. There is no place in America where a room full of wealthy people dressed in formal attire watch movies together while the poor protest outside. That thought might exist on college campuses and liberal bastions of panic and anxiety, but they do not happen in America where everyone, no matter how educated, how poor, what their family name may have been, has a shot at success based on the merits of their life. Yet the very kind of people who are most demonized for their improper allocation of money are those like Hunter Biden who was the son of a powerful Vice President who was paid for access to the American government as opposed to Don Jr and Eric Trump. The Trump kids were put to work by their father to earn what they made where-as Hunter Biden was just a nameplate and leverage for the clueless Joe Biden and his power given to him by the most villainous means possible, political leverage of a fictional aristocratic brokering firm called the United States Government.

You can almost feel sorry for Hunter Biden who appeared on Good Morning America this week in an attempt to answer Trump’s criticisms of his family. Looking at his face and general non-verbal impressions, I couldn’t help but think “drug abuser” with his sunken eyes, and his timid personality. Not exactly the kind of guy a woman would want to marry if they wanted a reliable husband to cut the grass and bring home a steady paycheck to keep the refrigerator stocked. Hunter Biden is a player and now at this stage in his life he is looking over his back more than he’s looking forward, because everything he has done in life has been given to him, so he fears that someone will take it away.

But what would anybody expect from a father who looted from people his whole life and gained power because of the threats of his regulatory burdens that he could otherwise place. For Hunter Biden to sit on so many boards and be paid so well for them is an obvious payoff to allow those companies to function without the threat of a senator to leverage them for some loot like a pirate on the choppy seas of capitalism. People like Joe Biden don’t make things and do things to make their money, they are simply government pirates who steal from those who do, and that’s where their power comes from, in the regulatory power we give them as a government. Companies looking to mitigate their risks with intrusive governments solve that problem by putting the kids of powerful people on their boards to keep that regulatory burden from happening. John Kerry’s kid comes to mind as well, it’s a common practice in what we call “the swamp.”

The type of wealth that the Trump kids come from is earned and built. It doesn’t come from stealing from those who do things in life, but it is the type that comes from hard work and efforts at expanding the economy. When President Trump built his wealth, he used to put cash in the pockets of people like Biden to keep government away from his businesses, just like everyone else feels they need to do. But that type of wealth is far different than being paid 50K per month to sit on a board of directors and sniff cocaine all day with loose women to appease a senator who loots for a living. That’s a far different thing, you don’t see the Trump children just getting jobs on boards because their dad is the president. They made all their money before he became president. Him sitting in the Oval Office actually costs them a lot of money in opportunity cost. But they have decided that the long-term vision of the Trump name is more important than a few million more dollars from a foreign hotel deal.

Yet the question of wealth value is to demonize it all and to prop up the losers who perpetually come up short in life due to their low ambitions. In the movie the “Joker’ it wasn’t an accident that Thomas Wayne was confronted by a person who thought he was the illegitimate child of the billionaire while he was taking a piss in the bathroom. They could have framed the scene anywhere, but the filmmakers chose to do it in the bathroom in a vulnerable position for Wayne. Wayne was disgusted at the future Joker for all the reasons many people who work hard to overcome obstacles are when confronted with those who give in to anxiety, weakness, and laziness. The kind of people that Thomas Wayne represented in that Joker story do work hard and use their ambition to overcome obstacles, so they are naturally offended when some loser comes up to them begging for money and trying to use victimhood to extort resources from them through guilt or a threat of violence. They know that the way to appease those types is to put their kids on a board of one of their companies to placate the politics. In the case of Thomas, he was just planning to run for office and solve the problem himself, like the real-life Donald Trump did.

Trump was famous for saying that he would fire his own kids like a dog if he thought they were lazy, so he instilled in them a work ethic that is obvious to this day. They would be somebodies with or without their father being in the White House. But Hunter Biden would be a big time nobody if his father was not a senator for his entire adult life. That is the difference between a winner and a loser, and the value of the wealthy and the wealth acquired by a looter. They might both have money, but not all of them contribute to the betterment of civilization. But all are demonized by the Karl Marx anarchists and big government socialists who want everyone under their thumb for threat of reprisal. And for Hunter, that is why he is a loser. It’s not because he was unfortunate enough to be born into the Biden family, but because he was too lazy to build his own way, and instead rode on his dad’s coattails. He is rich, but he’s still a loser and everyone can see it.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump’s Illustrious Base: Why the President’s pull in Syria is a great thing

Several of the weekend commentators on Fox News seemed spent after a few days of President Trump’s efforts where they were astounded at some of the things he had been saying. Even Republicans were showing their frustrations as Trump was pulling troops out of Syria to let Turkey and the Kurds fight it out and allow the region to do what it needed to. America is the number one energy producer in the world, the global oriented despots can no longer justify such troop movements to “protect” oil in other lands. We have our own thank you, so why else would we send troops all over the world to stabilize other countries? Trump managed to piss off everyone, yet his approval numbers don’t seem to be moving no matter what anybody tries to do to him, which is mystifying all the dirty tricks that politics knows to play. So, both sides grudgingly admitted that Trump was playing to his base as if that diminished the efforts, and it is there that our present topic is concerned.

When I talk about our education system, and I mean the global education system, the teacher in the front of the room preaching about things from the vantage point of a democracy, where the many rule, it is quite clear to me that it has been wrong for the human race. It doesn’t work, and when the adults of our lives try the same tactics, they used in grade school to push people into doing things, it becomes embarrassingly clear that it was always the wrong method of igniting young minds to life. The headlines on Monday morning regarding Syria were that several Republicans were breaking with the president over troop withdrawal and that this was dangerous in the middle of an impeachment hearing that was set to doom the president with an official congressional witch hunt to remove him from power. President Trump seemed completely unfazed, even angry and this left a mystified reaction to his critics on both sides of the political theater.

We are taught in our grade schools that if you want to go further, then you can only get there by bringing other people along. That you can’t accomplish much as an individual, that the key to all power, prestige and truth can only come by holding the hands of other people. So, in that regard, the perception of power is therefor in how many friends you have, how many people you can get to agree with you, and even the validity of a thought is based squarely on how many people join your alliance. The value is in people and their buy-in to your concept. However, that is not how it is in actuality. For many people not skilled in leadership, they have no choice but to make alliances with the masses. They may not be the strongest, so they make peace with people who might beat them up. They may not be the smartest, so they must find a way to acquire information they are not capable of obtaining. Yet true innovation and leadership do not come from such places, and our education system should strive to make more people self-reliant in their thoughts and actions to build more leaders for which the world is starving.

Trump like all great people of instinct listens to people and measures their reaction to things, but he is able to make decisions as a self-reliant human being. The trouble with the Beltway culture is that everything was built as a “go further together” type of endeavor, so very few people do anything on their own, including using the restroom. “I have to go to the bathroom; would you like to come too?” That is the kind of world that our education system has created, and it is short of what reality requires. Trump is that type of individual who does not need validation for his opinions. He doesn’t need a bunch of generals to tell him whether or not we can get out of Syria. He can make that decision based on his observances. He doesn’t need the threat of impeachment to control him into the warm arms of his political party for support, because he knows he can beat both fronts. So why yield? They need him more than he needs them.

Our education system, and thus everything that comes after, our adult lives, our business conduct, our politics, philosophy, everything is built on the childlike state of needing the approval of our peers because as young people that is the only measure we have to learn from. However, a good confident person quickly learns that society can only go so far. The true innovators must go into the scary depths alone, because groups and their opinions are slow, and the weakest link then decides how far into the dark you can travel. The greatest treasures in life come from individual experiences and the leadership that comes after. The masses are always willing to follow the brave soul who goes into the scary places, so that they don’t have to match that level of insecurity. And that is the way the world works. Its not to take the strong and make them as weak as the weakest links, its to encourage more people to become stronger and more independent, and for those who never develop such a level, to learn to be a good steward as a follower, which most are happy to live with.

Those assumptions are why the Beltway types just can’t admit to themselves what President Trump’s base really is, they refuse to see it, even though it is right in front of them. That base is very powerful, and most politicians would dream to have it. The Democrats certainly don’t have it and they want it desperately. So, all they can do is criticize it. And older Republicans who have bought into that liberalized education system of everything must be done together is reluctant to accept the premise that the reason for the folly was so that the weak could feel part of the process. And when I say weak, it’s not so much a criticism as much as it is a reality. Some people are lazy, and not naturally intelligent. They lack the drive to become the most they have the potential to be, and that’s fine. They can be the followers, because the world needs them too. But they don’t have a right to cripple our existence so they can feel equal to the most ambitious, such as President Trump obviously is. Their hatred of him is not because of anything he did, but it’s because he has made it clear that he doesn’t need them and that is a very insecure position for them to be in. And they aren’t happy about it. But there is a base of American opinion out there who would support someone like a Donald Trump regardless of whether or not he was a Republican or a Democrat, but because he is a free person who can stand on his own reckoning. And that’s who we want in the Executive Branch. Not the politics as usual antics of poor education philosophies and group think. But the lone, solitary thinker who can act without the influence of institutionalized contributors. And for that reason alone, he will win again in 2020, and neither side of the political spectrum will understand why.

Rich Hoffman

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