Category: Progressive

2024 is Time for Harvest: Separating Good from Evil

As romantic of a notion as conspiracies might be, and they are, ultimately, many of the dark rituals to come from the following of astrology were related to the acquisition of food, such as knowing when it was time for harvest and preparing for the upcoming winter. And specifically to food supply, the production of wheat, and its use in the human diet. We forget these days just how stressful it was to wake up every day and figure out where your food would come from because food is an assumption for us in these modern times. It’s easy for us and in all varieties. But for thousands of years, right up until around 100 years ago, food was a very stressful problem, even for the rich and famous. So nurturing a good crop of wheat to the harvest was a significant undertaking, and it’s why such societies were able to make judgments of good and bad more directly because, literally, their food supply depended on value judgments just to survive. This is what the Parable of the Weeds is all about in Matthew 13:24-29 when Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.” Jesus essentially said to let the weeds grow with the wheat and not try to pull them up together; otherwise, you will destroy your crop in the process. Jesus was talking about tares, which are weeds, and specifically darnel, which looks like wheat during the early stages of growth. In this case, the best way to save your crop would be to separate the weeds from the crop at harvest time, not necessarily during the growth of the good wheat. And under such a metaphor, we can look at our times and say, “It’s time for the harvest.”

Can’t let the weeds sink roots

We have allowed a lot of weeds to grow in our culture, largely out of compassion, because we live in a time when perhaps we thought we could let everything grow together. That we could co-exist with evil and that demands on our survival would not be challenged. But that was incorrect. Instead, we have allowed many weeds to take over our gardens of life and now we cannot separate good and evil so easily. Like the darnel, evil looked a lot like good, and now their roots have intertwined together as parasites threatening to kill the host crop if we were to attempt to remove those weeds as they have been growing. And like the darnel, the weeds looked like the wheat we wanted, so we left it alone to grow, unmolested. This is the problem with having a society that does not cast value judgments on the wicked and estranged intellect. Letting a multitude of terrible menaces grow into a healthy society has destroyed our culture and stunted its growth outrageously. Of course, we took it for granted because we have lost touch with the necessity of using value judgments for survival. We have entertained this fantasy that we could all get along if only we respected each other’s place in the garden. Yet in so doing, we have only harmed what’s good and allowed what’s evil to perpetuate and grow in strength, leaving our only means of dealing with such a problem to a hope that everything might survive until a harvest.

We have a lot of darnel in our society

I would point to the year 2024 and the re-election of Trump as the harvest time of our present generation.  Of course, the weeds who have been surviving as parasites of the good will have great anxiety as the intentions of the harvest are revealed, the separation of the wheat from the weeds.  The darnel of our culture, which is vast and in many forms, knows that their time as parasites is ending, and they are naturally terrified.  After all, they are a lifeform too, and they were created to be parasites living off the good, to disguise themselves to even look like the wheat of our desire so that we might not know what they are until it’s too late.  Until they are in our schools teaching children to be transexual maniacs and sexually obsessed losers.  Until our national deficit is over 34 trillion dollars, with 1 trillion added in the last business quarter of 2023.  That drugs would be sought after to numb our minds from the terrors we see, that hidden tyrannies hidden in our technology would give us no peace in seclusion.  The war against good and evil would turn everything we thought we could trust into a pitched-fork devil of ill intent.  Everywhere we look, we see weeds, and it’s so bad that we can no longer tell what is good for us or bad.  We can’t know the wheat for the weeds because, at this point, everything looks the same.  We have not tended to our gardens; we have let the weeds deceive us into thinking they were wheat, and we allow them to grow and wrap their roots around the roots of our good crop, daring us to pull them and, in so doing, to destroy everything we value.

But it’s harvest time, time to pull up everything, wheat and all.  It will be a messy process, but our fields must be cleared in the aftermath.  At that time, the darnel can be removed from the wheat, and we can distinguish value from the parasites.  Because we have yet to separate the weeds from our garden early in the process, the field has become overgrown, and there are more weeds than wheat.  So we have quite a mess to deal with.  But once the job is done, we have a clear field, and we have determined the wheat from the darnel, separating the good from the bad, we’ll have a chance to start over.  We nurture our crops by keeping the weeds out of our garden before they wrap their roots around what we value.  Always after harvest, when we see our clean fields and a healthy food supply, can perspective begin to bring sanity to our concerns.  And when it does, we must protect our wheat from infancy and not let evil wrap around our values to feed off them for its sustenance.  The weeds must be pulled before they can ever take root.  That is why we must tend our gardens and have value judgments on the good and the bad.  We must get rid of the bad before it matures into a parasite that is dangerous to the things we value, such as a food supply.  It is also in understanding such parables that evil wants to eradicate the Bible from a culture so that we can’t tell the difference, allowing evil to grow unmolested.  Such an idea was always a bad one, and during this time of harvest, one that we should never neglect again.  The Bible is full of such wisdom and has contributed to all productive human cultures.  And we’d be wise to listen before it’s too late.  

Rich Hoffman

People Are Going to Cry For President Trump and Darbi Boddy When they are Gone: What will come after them will be much tougher

The world is changing whether they like it or not. They are not in charge

I don’t like the guys on the Showtime show The Circus. I have talked about enjoying that show in the past, but that was during Trump’s first run for president and the world was a much different place. These days, everyone knows what everyone thinks of each other, so some pretense of fairness is no longer needed, as it was back then. But I find that The Circus is a good political show, even if I don’t like the people who put it on. It accurately reflects the political tides of the moment, which was alarming to them when they interviewed Steve Bannon and tried to interview Kari Lake but couldn’t even get enough material to do a segment with her. Astonishingly, as knowledgeable as they are about politics, they are missing the signals going into the 2024 election. They do not understand the MAGA movement, as most people obviously don’t. And they were nothing short of stunned when they heard Steve Bannon from the Warroom podcast, who used to be a chief strategist for the Trump White House, so he’s no slack-jawed loser, tell them that Trump was a moderate in the MAGA movement and that one day in the near future, they were going to wish they had Trump back. There was a kind of stunned silence, even for them. There has been an acceptance that we live in a world where co-existence with evil was always going to be the case, and increasingly, there are people in the MAGA movement who are supporting Trump, hell or high water, for militant reasons that defy conventional politics, to put it nicely. I’ve said it since before 2015 when Trump came down the elevator of Trump Tower, and just about every day since, I want to run campaigns against Trump as a liberal because, to me, he will always be a New York Democrat. That’s the world I’m fighting for.

It didn’t have to be that way, which was my thoughts when essentially all the Butler County judges had to recuse themselves on the Darbi Boddy case, which is a screenshot of the future of politics.  There are thousands of Darbi Boddys out there, the school board member at Lakota that I have talked about so much.  The belief was that the established order would play games and prosecute her with some power over the law and order society and that everyone would bow down and kiss some ring of party politics.  That is exactly what is wrong with the Republican Party in the wake of Trump.  That the Koch Brothers and Fox News still think they have some power to steer people away from Trump, that people are so stupid that they’ll vote for Nikki Haley instead of Trump.  These are all people smoking crack and are way off the political trajectory of modern sentiment.  They aren’t even in the room of consideration regarding reality.  I tried to warn everyone about the Darbi Boddy case.  These days, some lazy attorneys hiding in the background who are looking for an easy negotiation with the next unionized labor contract by getting rid of politicians who might stand in the way of that task with threats of jail, or even worse, are over.  That kind of local political abuse of power is what gave rise to Trump and the MAGA movement.  There is no control that the system of before has over people.  They have lost it, by their own incompetence.  That is what Steve Bannon meant when he said about Trump to the interviewers of The Circus that not far in the future, they will wish they had Trump back.

Darbi’s case in Butler County should have never even seen a courtroom, and now it’s going to go to the Supreme Court, and an impartial judge will have to be selected, and the party politics that has stuck its nose in all this business has screwed things up.  Darbi Boddy certainly didn’t do anything wrong.  And the judges involved in this case knew that from the outset. Instead, they played along with some assumption that they were in control and had a right to abuse their authority for some view of the world that has long been outdated.  And that is among people I know, that they have an entrenched view of the world that is not represented by reality that they refuse to see beyond.  I could have told them if only they had listened.  But the same could be said nationally and internationally.  Most people who work in politics don’t understand.  There will be a day when Trump is no longer in politics.  Right now, Trump has broad celebrity appeal, and he has a lot of Democrats voting for him.  He has broken down the blue firewall by changing how people can support political candidates.  I like that Trump ran his White House as a strong conservative, but he is way too liberal for my taste, and I am sure there will be a future with people much further to the right than he is, that I will happily support.  Yet people who hate Trump, Darbi Boddy, and thousands of politicians who are rising in the wake of all this, who will run and win future political offices, are mystified by this process and are refusing to deal with reality, as they did in Butler County, Ohio until it was too late.  The world will move on without them because they were never in charge. 

And it’s true, in just a few years, most of the people who have declared their hatred of Trump and fought so hard to keep him out of the White House with every legal maneuver available to them, and then some, are going to wish they had Trump back.  They will not like a world run by the Darbi Boddy’s of politics.  The Lakota school district will wish they had her back, too, when she’s not there anymore.  Essentially, what we have in government are radical labor union types deeply committed to Marxism who are using old tactics of resistance to stop needed changes.  And our political system has kicked the can down the road all this time to reach this point where there is no more road.  The belief that elections could be controlled to protect the thieves looting off it is over.  And Trump is viewed among MAGA Republicans, like me, as being entirely too nice.  I think of Trump as a liberal moderate.  I see him as a Democrat.  He is far better than the other alternatives and committed to stopping kicking the can down the road. And I am very supportive of that kind of talk.  But for me, he’s not even on the conservative radar.  Once he is done with politics, I will expect people far to the right of Trump to occupy positions in the Senate and the House and at state and federal levels; I plan to see the destruction of the Department of Education and many other assumptions of labor-controlled government that have ruined our country.  Trump is just the beginning.  Over the next ten years, I expect drastic changes.  Like Darbi Boddy in Butler County, Ohio, everyone has choked on the chicken over just one person.  The political world hasn’t seen anything yet, as the recent Argentina election indicates.  This isn’t just an American thing.  But it’s a sentiment worldwide, and it’s not going back to how it was…..ever.  History will never let people forget. 

Rich Hoffman

The Jewish People Should Learn from History: Stop trying to appease evil

Never forget, it was the Hamas terrorists who parachuted into Israel, like a cut scene from a Call of Duty video game, and purposely assassinated innocent Jewish people just because they exist. Since then, the people who support Palestine, the original occupants of the land of Canaan that God decided needed to be eradicated for their sinful ways and given to the people of Israel, have been claiming to be the victims and have been calling for a ceasefire from retaliation.  They attack, kill, and destroy, then immediately ask for peace.  The Jewish people are one of the oldest people living on earth to this day, with a culture that has survived many tough times.  They are God’s chosen people, yet all their history, persecution of their very existence has followed them wherever they’ve been scattered to, to the ends of the earth.  So, to some extent, they have survived by appeasing all the bad guys in the world, and for Bible readers who study the ancient texts without a preconceived notion, Yahweh has become very angry toward the Jewish people for their weakness and apathy toward conviction.  It was a source of much frustration for God that the Jewish people sought to appease their persecutors so much when he would have rather had them slay their enemies without remorse.  And we see that now, even as Israel is under attack by terrorist groups sympathetic to the PLO many Jewish people in America are registered Democrats and support liberal policies that are detrimental to their very existence and feed the power of their oppressors.  Which is a very dumb idea.  It’s one of the reasons that such villains exist in the world: nobody stops them from unleashing hell upon it.  God would prefer the Jewish people to defend themselves as a group of people.  Not seeking to survive by appeasing evil with timid social values.

You might have seen that Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood types support Joe Biden with a big fundraiser hoping to get the old man’s campaign moving in a positive direction.  Spielberg used to be a great filmmaker, but not so much anymore.  Like many Jewish people, his politics have not lined up with reality, and it shows in him as a person.  Many Jewish people in Hollywood support Democrats and have made themselves part of the problem by essentially making peace with their oppressors in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.  It’s great to have an ancient connection to your past, but what good is it if your only means of survival is to embrace the bad guys?  It reminds me of the old stagecoach robberies where villains would get on a train with many passengers with a lot of money and stick them up.  I always wondered why people were so compliant and did so without fighting back.  Perhaps it’s because they believe material possessions aren’t worth dying over.  They think that they can always make more money or get more stuff.  So that their view of protecting their family is to do whatever they need to do to live another day.  My thoughts, however, are that when someone tells you to hold your hands up if you want to live, then that is the time that you pull out your own gun and defend yourself.  Appeasing evil strengthens their resolve and makes it easy for them to be evil.  This ties into a lot of God’s original problems with the Jewish people, as stated quite clearly in the Bible.  Why don’t people attack their enemies and trust that God will protect them from harm?  When God says to attack a nation and destroy it, do it, even if you are grossly outnumbered.  Trust God: he will take care of you. 

God was always frustrated with his chosen people because they did not attack, and they were always trying to appease the desecrators of their culture, such as the Baal worshipers who continued to corrupt them during their entire existence.  King Solomon didn’t just build temples to Yahweh; he built temples to other gods because he had thousands of wives and concubines who worshipped Baal and other regional gods and always tried to make them all happy.  It was about that time that God just gave up on the people and let Nebuchadnezzar have them through a vicious attack that oppressed the Jewish people for the next several thousand years.  If it wasn’t the Babylonians, it was the Romans.  Then, Islamic radicalism took over all the Holy sites from the Bible to essentially attempt to desecrate them beyond memory, and in doing so, tried to kill off the Jewish people entirely because the dispute was whether or not they should have ever existed in the first place.  What right did God have to give them the promised land, where the indigenous people were worshiping all these pagan gods and were considered the original owners?  Who was this God to come along and give their land away?  That is where morality comes into play and the right and obligation to pass judgment on the wicked and decide that a proper morality has more value than just surviving.  Defending the world from evil has more merit in Heaven than just giving up and appeasing evil so you can survive another day. 

And we see this same mentality in supporters of liberal politics, those who support Democrats in America, for instance, the Steven Spielberg types.  For them, the fantasy characters they created in Hollywood that did fight back represented the desire all people have to fight back against evil.  But then there is the ethical problem of saying, “It’s only money.  Give it to them so they don’t shoot us.”  And once that kind of appeasement has been entertained, Hollywood types like the Spielbergs of the world lose their audience because that’s not what MAGA Americans want their country to be like, appeasers to evil who don’t fight back.  That is the essential element of those against Trump.  To make America Great Again means fighting back against evil oppressors when so many Democrats and RINOs have decided that the best way to survive is to give evil what it wants, not to cast judgment against all the Jezebels of existence, and to make peace, not war.  Isn’t that what all the dope-smoking, communist hippies always said?  Going back to the movie Poltergeist, I always had a problem with Steven Spielberg putting that pot scene in the bedroom where the main characters were smoking a joint together.   No wonder the ghosts ran them off from their home because they were weak-minded losers.  But that was Steven Spielberg on a plate.  And that is why Hollywood isn’t what it used to be.  Like the Biden administration, which talks out of both sides of its mouth, not because it has any conviction but because its goal is to survive at all cost, the goal is not to fight evil, but to yield to it.  Even if it means appeasing the evil in the world when God wants people to fight against it, appeasing evil was never God’s choice.  Jesus came along and gave everyone an excuse to embrace peace, which has all kinds of Hindu elements to the approach that has only fed many villains in the world, appeasement, which has only encouraged them to rob more trains and take more people’s money without working hard to earn it for themselves.  And in that way, appeasement is the root cause of how evil spreads worldwide.  And when we look around at why there is so much evil thriving everywhere, it’s because we have too many appeasers who look to avoid conflict when they should be embracing it, as Yahweh always tried to convince them to do with his full support.

Rich Hoffman

An Amazon.com Pricebreak: A guidebook to capitalism to step out of the darkest period of American history

There is no shame in being good at what you do

I have had many of these over the last five years: super-secret meetings with people in the back of some restaurant or shooting range where people want to talk. Only this one was 30 or so people who were fans of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and they wanted a little private class on the subject matter. I get the secrecy; I think of it as enslaved people learning to read during the Underground Railroad Period. People want to learn how to improve themselves in a world that doesn’t want them to accomplish such a task. These people were Chamber of Commerce types and were concerned about other people knowing they were meeting with me because it was a social taboo. But I was happy to attend the event and give a talk, which everyone enjoyed. But during the Q&A section at the end I learned something from the class, that my book was being offered on Amazon.com for $4.59, which is practically giving it away. Normally, most of the sales that I see come from the publisher’s website, is $16.99. When I get the sales report, it usually has a long list with all kinds of prices shown, and some of the lower numbers I had thought were likely Kindle downloads. So, I didn’t pay much attention to them. But at this little seminar, a fan told me about it, and sure enough, the book was listed by Amazon at that very low price, so low that it’s likely cheaper than what it cost to make the book. Yet I wasn’t surprised upon hearing this; it didn’t make me angry. I think it was meant to make me angry, to be very insulting to me. But my reaction is one that I’ll share here: if you can get the book for a cheaper price, then I’m happy to let you know about it.

A pretty good price

I personally like Amazon; I get a lot of books through them. I also am a frequent visitor to bookstores all over southern Ohio, going as far north as Dayton and Columbus regularly to get books that I don’t want to wait for to arrive in the mail. I read three or four per week on average, so it’s a major priority for me to have access to new books. For books that I must have that afternoon, I go and get them at an actual bookstore, the old-fashioned way. And I prefer hard copies of books because I don’t like the bad guys out there to know what I’m reading or looking at on the internet, because I am watched by just about everyone who wastes time watching people. And the algorithms set against me are outrageously difficult, for getting visibility. I frequently get offers from IT people wanting to “fix” my foundation links because my Google score is so low that people searching for me don’t find me on the top picks because of all the blacklisting I am listed under. I typically say no to all those offers because most of them are likely the same people doing the damage, and they’d love for me to make it easier for them to rob the stagecoach. Amazon does not like me politically, and they’d love to make me feel that I’m at the bottom of a well nobody could hear me from. That is a common strategy for them, so I never expected a fair shake from Amazon. They offer the book because they are a prominent bookseller and want to say they offer such books. Even if they hate that people want to read from someone like me. So I put them out of my mind and never really took the time to see what they were selling my book for, or to check reviews because they set algorithms on their server against me that obviously were not encouraging. So, I put my mind elsewhere. The sales listings tell a different story, so much so that I didn’t even notice the Amazon pricing.

There will be a major shift in the economy over the next decade

The book has been out for a few years now, so I don’t read it every day. When I wrote it, I had been thinking about the contents for a while, but after Biden was put in the White House and Trump wasn’t there anymore, admittingly, I needed to take a break from the world for a few weeks. My wife and I took our RV out into the desert of New Mexico to escape Biden and the COVID protocols that were such a dark period in American history. I knew the economy would take a hit and that corporations had been seduced by this World Economic Forum view of the world and would need a guidebook out of their wokeness. So I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, applying my favorite sport, fast draw, with a genuine love of history. I enjoyed touring all the John Chism and Billy the Kid sites in Lincoln County during the winter of 2021, which had a lot of snow on the ground, even in that part of the world. It was a very revelatory experience for me, and it shows up in the book, which, looking back on it after a few years, is very good. Like I said, I read a lot. I have just finished a few books by Johan Norberg which I think are great, but they aren’t as good in my mind as my own book. Not just because it’s my book but because the contents are revolutionary compared to the large amounts of Marxism that have taken hold in all corporations around the world. I wrote the Gunfighter’s Guide to give people a weapon to fight against that trend, which turned out great.

A large worldview helps see things more clearly

The book as I thought it would be, has been a slow burn. It’s not one of those books that makes a splash and then fizzles out. When I wrote it, I was thinking of a book I love called The Machine That Changed the World, which is about Lean Manufacturing and is filled with many assumptions about a Marxist world without ever naming the beast. I wanted to write an antithesis to that which businesses could use to improve their situations without destroying their essential character. I have read many hundreds of business books, and most of them make it a point to declare their hatred and unfairness of capitalism, which is quite obvious in the Lean Manufacturing movement, which seeks to centralize power to the people and is antagonistic toward management, which is consistent with the labor union view of the world, which is always socialist in origin. In 2020, with Trump out of the office and the world on lockdowns, corporations thought the best strategy was to play along to get along. But after three years of the Biden economy now, people are looking for answers, and many of those answers only come from a source like mine, who has made it a point to declare the answers in spite of the social poison that wants all such voices to hide for their lives under a rock somewhere. My point was never to hide but to engage the enemy as they present themselves, like a gunfighter. Fight the villains in a dusty street and gun them down metaphorically for their intentional destruction of the world. And to be proud of it in the process. As I gave my presentation to that audience, I couldn’t help but reflect on how good the book was. I’m very proud of it; it has helped people who have read it and applied it. I don’t just reflect on the times of the gunfighters during American expansion but also look to the future with AI and improved technology. It’s more of an attitude than a reverence. But the world for the next few decades is going to move much more toward capitalism and away from socialism, and already many corporate leaders see the writing on the wall. And they were looking for a translation, so we were all meeting secretly, not for my sake, but for theirs. But if I learn of a price break everyone can take advantage of to get the book, I’m happy to share it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings in the least. I like seeing people getting it, finding inspiration, and achieving success. That is, after all, the best compliment I can get and why I wrote the book in the first place, for people to enjoy and be helped by. So the more people who have it, the better it is in my mind. And at that price, it makes it very easy for people. I can’t promise that the price will stay that way, but when I hear of a price break, I certainly will pass it along.

Diversity, equity and inclusion was always going to fail in business because it’s not rooted in real social value

Rich Hoffman

Disney Has Failed due to Woke Politics: And its never coming back

I told everyone, don’t say I didn’t warn you.  Disney stock is down, and it’s never coming back.  I have had many people who think they are competent to tell me that the company would bounce back and that all this political stuff was recoverable.  And my reply to them has been they were smoking crack.  Once a company like Disney loses the public’s confidence, it’s over for them.  This was the clear indication coming out of the Thanksgiving weekend of 2023, where their new film Wish was struggling to break 32 million when it should have been closer to 100 million.  It used to be that Disney would crank out movies like this that all made a billion dollars, but now, for the second week in a row, where Marvels also fell apart in a dismal way, the writing is on the wall for Disney and all those people who thought they should argue with me about the fate of the entertainment giant.  Like I have said now for years, “Go woke, go broke,” and Disney is.  What executive at Disney thought that by putting a bunch of girls in a movie and having them throw a bunch of magic around, people would show up and throw a billion dollars at it?  Because that’s what they thought when they put out Marvels.  If Bob Iger had listened, I would have told him that you can’t go out and buy up all these properties like Marvel, like Lucasfilm, then fire all the top minds, or isolate them from the industry because they were old white guys, replace them with female directors, get rid of all that toxic masculinity and replace it with a cast of women who don’t look like they could pick up a heavy box, let alone take on a universe of monstrous villains, and that it would all work out OK?  In the original Marvel movies, some characters appealed to young boys and even grown men, like Captain America, Thor, Hulk, and Iron Man; they had big muscles and were charismatic and funny.  But that Disney was going to get rid of all that and replace those tough guy characters with women, and people would love it?

Here’s a little secret, everyone: women don’t care about movies or stories in the same way that men do.  They want to find a boyfriend and snuggle up with him for two hours.  They don’t care what they are watching.  They certainly won’t be going out to buy tickets with their girlfriends to watch a superhero movie.  They want to buy pants and purses so they can go out and find a boyfriend, possibly a husband.  That is their biological inclination.  They want to see what kind of guys they are dating, and if they can respond to some admirable character in the Avengers, then maybe they might be worth a second date—maybe more.  However, Disney thought it had the power to restructure the nature of society and that their movies shaped society instead of reflecting it.  They bought the whole World Economic Forum view of the world to their detriment.  And here they are.  They put out a full slate of movies, such as the latest Indiana Jones film, which was a pretty good movie, that have all lost money.  But they have all fallen flat because people have lost their trust in Disney itself.  And once that happens, there is no way to get that trust back.  And it’s too late to start over.  It took 50 years to build that brand Disney had.  It only took a decade of commitment to Larry Fink and the gang at BlackRock to destroy it.  Nobody wants to see equity and inclusion in their movies.  They want to see bad guys get their butts kicked.  They certainly don’t want some girl power nonsense, boys or girls, women or men.  Disney aligned itself with the wrong view of the world, killing them.

I was pretty serious when I stated I wanted to take my kids to Disney World one last time.  I’m old enough to have watched several amusement parks come and go in my life.  LeSourdsville Lake, near my Liberty Township, Ohio home, was one of my favorites as a kid.  It’s a park now; the lake and all the rides are gone completely.  The same thing could quickly happen to Disney World, and I wanted to take my family there one last time before it all went away.  Many people think it’s too big to fail.  I would say that it’s too big to survive so many bad decisions.  They lost their focus on who their audience is and disrespected the public by feeding them this garbage and expecting to get paid for it.  Embracing radical political views of the communist orientation was a terrible business decision.  And it showed up in the parks.  When my family of 9 people were all riding Rise of the Resistance together, at the first ship you get into, they had a drag queen ushering everyone onto the ride.  It wasn’t very comfortable.  We had kids 7 through 11 with us, and they noticed the long black fingernails and the makeup on a man’s face and wondered what was going on.  I cracked a joke and told them that this was Star Wars.  It was a species of alien, which they were fine with.  But it was an uncomfortable diatribe for the adults with us, not just in our family.  A woman not from our family beside me inside the ship laughed when I said what I did to the kids, and she said, “I’m glad you said that.”  Her little girl looked up, smiling because it seemed like a reasonable consideration. 

The park attendance was noticeably down while we were there, which was OK with us.  Seeing so many fantastic creations on life support made me sad.  Disney cannot operate theme parks of that size without a revenue stream of movies making billions of dollars a year.  They have produced some good content on Disney+, but as I have said many times, like Ahsoka and the Andor Star Wars series, it was a little too late.  Trust is essential in any relationship between spouses, children, or families, but also with fans and the public.  When Disney committed to a Democrat view of the world and thought it had the power and audacity to shape society, they were misinformed.  They worked against the MAGA movement, which is more significant than Trump, and it has cost them now in ways that cannot be reversed.  And I didn’t want to see it happen.  I wanted Disney to survive.  I keep hoping to be wrong.  But I’m not.  I think it is very feasible that we will not know anything about the Disney entertainment company in the future.  It will only be a thing of our current time.  Future generations will not know them or care about them.  And there certainly won’t be a Disney World for them to visit.  Thank Larry Fink and the losers at the World Economic Forum for that.  They whispered into the ears of Bob Iger all this progressive nonsense, and now the destruction in their wake is more than measurable.  And it didn’t have to be that way, yet it is.

Rich Hoffman

The Danger of Masons and RINOs: What we learned from the Judge Edelstein case and how it’s being applied to Darbi Boddy

I didn’t want to bring up the whole Mason connection to the Butler County judiciary, but there is a pattern that has emerged that reminds me a lot of the case with Kim Edelstein, the former judge of Butler County who ran sideways with Judge Stevens. All this drama against Darbi Boddy, the Lakota school board member who has now had the legal brotherhood turning its wrath toward her through Judge Lyons, has brought all this to the surface. Because most people have an assumption of constitutional law protected by our judges. But we have judges who belong to all these brotherhoods, such as the Masons, who behave as if their international order superseded constitutional law. I learned much more than most people have the stomach for regarding some of these cases, such as why Judge Stevens let his assistant waste over 500 hours playing the video game Candy Crush when she should have been working, according to witnesses. After the human resource conflict between Judge Stevens and Judge Edelstein erupted into her moving to another county to get work, Butler County prosecutor Mike Gmoser called Wood County to pursue the case further. Now I like Mike, he has said to me that he’s a MAGA guy. But then again, so did Isaac Adi. A lot of mystery only makes sense when considering malicious intent. And the more you look, the more you discover that many of these people are seduced by the temptation to abuse authority. They care about power too much, and it’s evident that they are more interested in employing losers and malcontents instead of qualified people who might show them up. And to hide such incompetence they seek out these brotherhoods to protect them from public scrutiny. I want to believe in these judges, I know many of them, and I want to like them. But this antagonism against Darbi Boddy forces a lot of unsaid things to the surface which we must explore if we want honest government.

Most Masons lean toward political Marxism

It’s not a matter of conspiracy theory to talk about the Masonic lodges’ membership and the judicial activists’ desire to seek an alliance in brotherhoods. If you peel back the apparent layer of politics that most people agree on, when it comes to trying to understand the mentality of RINOs then you have to consider the desire of these people who call themselves Republicans to belong to collective-based brotherhoods, such as labor unions, and Mason Lodges, or even membership to the Eastern Star. These have been networking tools for gaining access to better jobs for a long time. And by the looks of things, Mason membership is a criterion for the legal profession, especially at the level of judges and prosecutors. This is a problem because these international organizations think of themselves as succeeding the American Constitution. That’s a long story in itself, considering that it was Masons that largely formed the American Constitution, or at least debated it. So many people don’t see a problem with it. But then again, when it comes to Butler County, Ohio, and Ohio, we know of several 33-degree Masons who hold public office, such as Judge Powers, and State Rep Scott Lipps of Franklin who were announced in the Journal News. Memberships are only necessary when they say something about the people who seek membership, which takes them away from their public duties should they decide to serve the public. At that point, what they believe can become very dangerous. And by all indications, it looks like it is by these means that we end up with what we call RINOs in Republican politics.

These memberships are important to many public officials.

To understand why Masons and RINOs are almost synonymous, all we must do is look at the words of one of the most famous Masons, Albert Pike. If you’ve ever seen the Masonic Lodge in Washington, D.C., where George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were prominent members, it’s a magnificent structure. In that case, you can see how those people might think of themselves as a government independent of the rest of America, that their brotherhoods were more important to them than their Constitutional duties. I’ve been in several Mason lodges, particularly the one in Cincinnati by the old Taft house, and I understand all too well the purposes and the stars painted on the ceiling. Let’s call it a “research project” not an invitation to membership. Albert Pike was famous for saying, “What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us…what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.” Otherwise, Karl Marx would have said these kinds of statements, which makes sense because he was a Mason, just as the Masons organized Vladimir Lenin to come out of exile and raid Petrograd for the communist revolution that destroyed Russia. And when you listen to the political positions of RINOs and the legal gymnastics that have emerged in the Darbi Boddy case in Butler County in 2023, then it is pretty clear that these Mason memberships are a problem because the members are more loyal to their brotherhood than to their constitutional oaths. And from there the contents of the SWAMP and their hatred for Trump and MAGA Republicans starts to make a lot more sense. These are people who are insecure and want to touch the face of immortality, as was articulated by Albert Pike.

33 Degree Masons is as high as you can go.

I’m not against Masons. Andrew Jackson was one of my favorite presidents, and he took on the epic battle that we need to have again with centralized banking. All members are not joined at the hip in political strategy, and membership doesn’t make them all bad. But it does say a lot about their character and the problem of Marxism failing all over the world and populism moving to the far right of Karl Marx, and away from this scam by the Masons that goes back hundreds of years to the Friday the 13th murders of the Knights Templars, forcing their movement underground in secret so that they could rule from the shadows. But for these timid types, there is safety in numbers, which is the origin of their desires for power and their tendency to abuse it. Such was grotesquely obvious when the Judge Edelstein case was occurring, and in many ways, it is still happening. The way this judicial network seeks to personally destroy people they think is a challenge to their authority is a real problem, showing itself in the Darbi Boddy case. For them, it has nothing to do with constitutional law. It’s all about protecting the brotherhood, and that’s not something we talk about when we elect these judges. If their memberships in brotherhoods keep them from behaving like Republicans, small government constitutional supporters, then we need to know all about it. Because we can’t have a representative government if we aren’t talking about why these people seek the memberships they do and to what extent it impacts their social judgment. As Albert Pike indicated, it’s all about the collective where immortality resides, and these older adults are very concerned about life after their deaths. So they turn out to be more loyal to their order, which lives on, than the merit of their individual decisions, which is at the heart of the modern MAGA movement. Voters have shown they want more Darbi Boddy’s, fewer Judge Powers, and their 33-Degree Mason memberships. I usually am pretty proud of Butler County law enforcement, but I have too much information that calls into question all these characters. And when they think they are going to abuse another person, such as Darbi Boddy, without it impacting their sacred safe places, well, they have a lot to learn about the future.

That’s a lot of memberships. What’s that say about the individual person you vote for? Who are they more loyal to?

Rich Hoffman

TikTok is a Deployment Weapon for China Against America: Social media was never supposed to be our friend, but it can be used to serve us

The thing that is obvious about all social media, especially China-owned TikTok, is that it must be viewed as a deployment weapon for war-like strategy. China uses TikTok to do what military weapons can’t, and we’ve let it into our country like a bunch of fools. That was, of course, the entire intent of the various social media platforms. I’ve told the story before, Facebook was never meant to be good for us, to keep us in touch with loved ones. It was meant to collect information on us that could be used against us. I was in California at the time when Facebook was buying up influencers to propel their product away from the social media platform Myspace at that time. I refused and never did open a Facebook account. Twitter, YouTube, and Google would head in the same direction. When you talk about algorithm control I have videos that have been there for 15 years, but since Google bought YouTube, my views have trickled to a complete stop, especially political videos. It could be argued that I am one of the most shadow-banned people on Earth. I had the exact same experience on Twitter until Elon Musk bought it, which improved it a bit. But my account is still heavily shadow-banned. It’s obvious when you compare views between my Rumble account and YouTube. One gets many thousands of views whereas videos I did on those heavily controlled platforms still only have 15 to 20 views almost two decades later. So, social media was always about information collection and propaganda distribution. And Facebook was so obvious that I deliberately never signed up. How did Zuckerbucks come up with over a billion dollars in value for a dating app before he was aged 21? Intel money made him rich, not the market-driven product itself.

I have learned to use social media as a powerful tool anyway.  My messages do get out in spite of the shadow banning and tight controls on message content that many have had.  I was one of the very first people on Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform.  And I nearly exclusively use Gettr as my source of news these days because of their excellent streaming offerings.  Twitter’s conversion to X has been better for free speech.  I still see many problems with it and am not completely convinced that Elon Musk is on the “free speech bandwagon.”  Musk is more of a Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy kind of guy, so I think he sees for himself a better future under the merits of pure capitalism than when social media first came out and China looked like it was going to rule the world, so everyone better start kissing the ring.  Social media was designed to spy on us, manipulate us, and cut us off in the direction of social scores based on our behavior.  If we didn’t do right by the administrative state, we would have our profiles turned off and be cast out of society, which the World Economic Forum clearly stated was their intent.  If they could control and monitor social behavior combined with finance participation, where they could turn your credit card off in a cashless society because of your social media dialogue, they were intent on doing it, which is why China owns TikTok.  It’s not for fun and sharing.  It’s to destroy our culture in America by poisoning our youth with low IQ level behavior that would be devastating to the next generation. 

TikTok is so effective that it has a lot to do with abortion and pot smoking becoming legalized in Ohio.  Republicans have been very slow to realize just how powerful social media is.  In my area, my blog site is much more popular with people who know about it than local news sources, and I have an excellent track record for being an influencer despite the massive shadow banning.  But TikTok is a thing all its own, and it is how social messaging from political parties gets straight to them, which was undoubtedly the case with Issues 1 and 2 in Ohio during the elections of 2023.  And you can bet that if left unchecked, they plan to influence 2024’s elections significantly.  The use of sexual images and social silliness that is the foundation of TikTok in the United States is meant to be poison for the youthful generation.  China would never allow such behavior to occur in their own country, and they do turn it off.  Always remember, anything that is free, you are always the product.  Nobody gives anybody anything for free.  You might be able to turn the tables on their intentions.  But understand what the game is and know who the game’s players are.  Nobody, giant corporations, and countries do anything, unless it gives them more power over you.  There may be some rag-tag rebels who can use social media for good.  But don’t ever count on it.  From China’s point of view, like the drugs that cross into America from open borders, it’s poison meant to destroy America from within.  If you rot a mind and a body, there is nothing to resist communist tyranny through the slow cook of increased heat and pressure.  Social media should have always been viewed as a military strategy of a significant threat and nothing else. 

However, just like all military endeavors, a plan seldom goes as intended, which is undoubtedly the case here.  Plenty of good social media uses have turned the tables on our aggressors.  I think of the Libs of TikTok as a great example.  There are the Charlie Kirks and Steve Bannons out there who have broken through the firewall and can get their content to millions of people, and they are doing the opposite of what China wanted to do with their control.  They are freeing people and decentralizing the social message that used to be controlled by the establishment press.  I have learned over the years because I have seen the direct administrative views of my page counts, book sales, and new media from Rumble that I, too, get millions of visitors, even if the reporting mechanics are entirely controlled by intelligence agencies who purposely want people like me to feel socially isolated and disconnected as if my voice was thrown into the bottom of a deep well that nobody could hear.  That is real, but over time, I have learned that there are soft spots in the prison walls, and getting your voice out isn’t as hard as they’d like you to believe.  Their control is an illusion at best, more perceptual than actual.  But the intent is certainly malicious.  They let a few celebrities through to give an illusion of social freedom in messaging.  But for most, if their message is dangerous to the administrative state or the Deep State, especially my kind of messaging, then shadow banning by controlling the algorithms is part of the mechanics.  Yet, despite that, I have found the format to be a powerful delivery system that can be used against the bad guys in ways they never intended.  Social media, such as TikTok, is dangerous and here to stay.  But they can be used against the enemy in productive ways.  However, make no mistake about it; they were designed and introduced to control society and destroy those against their tyrannical messaging.  And as we move into the next election cycle, understand the tools being used against us because that’s their purpose by design. 

Rich Hoffman

Tipping the Scales Toward Equity for All: The legal strategy to destroy Darbi Boddy who stands in the way of those tipped scales

I have people tell me a lot of things. A lot of things. You should see my email inbox, and regarding notifications on my cell phone, my battery life usually only lasts for a few hours because the screen stays on so much with people sending me texts, calling me, or notifying me that I have a new email on one of my three accounts that average over 300 new emails per day each. I try to answer as much as possible, but it’s impossible. I must pick what I listen to, and out of all that information traffic, I have a lot of very well-connected people who give me a lot of valuable information every day, all days of the week. That’s how I know what is really going on behind the scenes at Lakota with Darbi Boddy and the phony prosecution of her by essentially the same kind of people who have been using the same legal gymnastics to go after Trump. For instance, Sheriff Jones has been coming up a lot lately because of the Butler County Republican Party’s desire to pull together after the defeat of Lynda O’Connor on the Lakota school board, who has her fingerprints all over this talk of sending Darbi to jail for six months and a fine of $1000 just for showing up at a school board meeting. We’ll get into that more in a moment. But the details are pretty explicit, and these people are well placed, and they aren’t slack-jawed, dope-smoking losers. But very responsible, and respected VIPs. And their comments would hold up in court with no problem. Anyway, these sources told me the story of three of them who asked Sheriff Jones directly how he could support a candidate to run against Thomas Hall, and against the nomination of the Republican Party, where he became very defensive and told them all to “bring it.” He was questioned why he thought he could be a leader in the Republican Party and behave against the endorsed candidates. He didn’t care what the Republican Party thought and was audacious to throw his weight around. And by itself, that is not a very exciting story. But it does lend value to what I’m about to say regarding a conspiracy by the Lakota school board to remove an elected representative in Darbi Boddy, which has all kinds of things wrong with it. Details matter, and I get plenty of them that add up to the kind of stories you don’t get from the local press.

The real villains behind the RINO political philosophy is behind this door

I know the law firm’s name and the person who told Lynda O’Connor how to remove Darbi Boddy from the school board by making Isaac Adi the vehicle. At this point, the name isn’t as important. However, lots of people already know about it. I’m interested in the intent. This is not a story about Darbi Boddy going to jail for violating some bogus court order controlled by Judge Lyons and all the Butler County network of hive-minded bureaucrats; this is about judicial activism by one of the area’s most respected law firms to destroy every way possible the life of an office holder elected by the public to do community business. And their deliberate tampering with that effort maliciously is where the real meat and potatoes are. I was livid when I found out that another attorney was being introduced to Darbi’s legal defense before her November 29th hearing to answer a citation given to her just for attending a school board meeting, and this guy wanted a $5000 retainer. The goal is obviously to put Darbi on her heels, destroy her economically, and consume her supporters with a rat race that the real bad guys were controlling. So I was just a little angry about it, let’s say that politely.

These law firms are very politically manipulative. Here is a screenshot of a big one in the Lakota area. Their words, their actions.

I had heard for weeks this revelation from many sources, well-placed sources who are close to all these people, how this law firm got involved and schemed with Lynda O’Connor to essentially override the voters by destroying the life of a fellow school board member.  And this is what lingers in the background with all these cases.  These law firms are very progressive and lean far left of center most of the time.  So if you are trying to manage a school district and they essentially own the minds of the school board, which is the case here, then you can elect all the school board members you want or put up elected representatives to handle our business, but it won’t matter.  Because in the background, these lawyers think they are in charge.  We see that with these multiple cases against Trump, and in Butler County, Ohio, Darbi Boddy is our local Trump, and they have pulled out all the legal stops to destroy her in all ways possible.  But why?  Well, teacher union contract negotiations are coming up next year, and the school board will want everyone to get along and not go on strike.  And guess who negotiates those contracts?  They brag about how many labor contracts they negotiate successfully, but many times, they take the position of labor against the taxpayers, and the best way to make that work is to get rid of those who oppose labor.  The taxpayers have plenty of money to give; they need to figure out how to take it from them and give it to the radical labor element.  So having a loose cannon like Darbi Boddy on the school board isn’t in their best interest, to be polite about it.  Based on what people have been telling me.

History is good to study because it explains the actions of the present

Now, I’m not at all impressed with this. I argued with several of their people during the Covid lockdowns about the correct course of action, and they turned out all to be wrong. Lawyers seldom give good advice; they usually only give answers that drag the clock out for another six minutes and line their pockets with gold they steal from you with a comprehension of Latin that they think you don’t understand. I was right then about the Supreme Court cases defeating all the lockdowns, and they were grotesquely wrong. So, as I hear this story about Darbi Boddy’s attackers, the unelected types who hide in the background all the time and destroy the Republican Party from the erosion that takes place in those types of relationships, I know we aren’t dealing with people of intellectual superiority. This scam of using Isaac as the fall guy while all these insiders pave the way for easy future labor negotiations makes perfect sense to me. It sounds like what lazy people on cruise control in life would do. And to mask it all, they have turned Darbi into the vehicle of collaboration. There’s an old Metallica song about this very kind of transference. I told Darbi personally to drop all these losers and let Lakota die on the vine. I don’t want her to be hit by friendly fire in the coming months. But she told me that she wants to help the kids and was elected to do a job, so she is dug in to do the right thing, which I admire. But for her to defend herself by this constant stream of court cases that these bad guys keep throwing at her is not the right strategy. The fight has to go where it belongs, where the real trouble is up to no good, to the real influencers controlling everything from behind a fragile curtain. We don’t need Toto to pull back the curtain to see them or what’s happening. Plenty of people know. They don’t know yet how to do something about it. But admitting to the problem is the first step, and after the conversations, I have had with people, talking to me about it has been part of that first step of admission, something they never thought they’d have to do.

For many in the world, they find safety in collectivism. It’s too scary to be an individual.
Sad but true, mass collectivists are at war with individualism in Butler County, Ohio

Rich Hoffman

The 400 Fools in San Francisco: Capitalism is Destroying Communism, and Xi Jinping knows it

It’s not at all surprising that there were 400 fools who attended the Xi Jinping summit at San Francisco with Joe Biden. Most corporations, as I have been telling everyone for years, have communist leanings, and for the many lazy executives in them, the trend of globalism was in their favor. A stable business climate controlled by the centralized state allowed them to look like smart people, without actually having to be very smart. To win in that game, you had to cozy up to the regime, do what they tell you like trained seals, and you’d be successful, or at least appear that way. That whole competition thing is not for those timid people. Capitalism is scary because so long as the communists were in charge, they could always say, “They told me to do it,” when the shareholders started to complain about lost revenue. So I don’t view the people in San Francisco pandering to Xi to be particularly important. Sure, some of the richest people in the world were there. Elon Musk was there to grovel in front of the communist dictator, but I didn’t see what a lot of people did in the meeting. Rather, I saw the end of a dying regime, in China, playing out the plans of many decades coming to a fizzle that wasn’t very spectacular. All the concepts of globalism were falling apart across the world, and China was trying to appear to their home country as if they had conquered the United States, and the fulfillment of their objectives had come to fruition. That is how the entire visit would play on state-run television in China. A groveling Joe Biden pandering to the power of the communist party. The red flags of communism lined the streets of one of the great American cities. Communism had conquered the West and the people there were subjugating themselves to its incredible power.

The electronic voting machines have lots of problems.

Joe Biden’s behavior wasn’t surprising either. After all, he would not be president if not for Xi Jinping. China currently put Biden in office and the direct payments were part of the discussion. The Biden crime family had become wealthy over the years, selling access to their elected offices, and China knew what they were doing when they put the hapless old man in the White House to get rid of Trump. They didn’t like Trump’s trade deals, so they showed the power of China by inserting a complete buffoon in Trump’s place, displaying control over American elections and the people’s pick. China was almost daring anybody to do anything about what they did in 2020, first by releasing COVID-19 to lock down the world, then at the end of the year, the part they played to rig the election. For those who have not been paying attention, the electronic voting machine case is finally starting to get some traction. As I said in 2020, these cases often take years to put together, and part of the crime was to outpace the slow American legal system. That was part of the election theft, to move faster than the courts could process and China was clearly in on it. They have a lot to explain, about direct tampering with voting machine results and how Covid escaped from a Wuhan lab in the first place. But the voting machines were not the only form of election fraud. Just a big part of it. How does anybody think that people like Xi Jinping stay in power? Not by honest elections, that’s for sure. People don’t want to believe that rigged elections have been part of the American system, but the evidence is obvious that it has. And that China has played a significant role, even to the point of showing off, which Xi was doing in San Francisco.

I think it’s highly possible Trump will win every state.

But it’s not what it appears to be. China’s primary concern was that the world was turning away from them and that a serious decoupling effort was underway to separate the two economies, not to strengthen the relationship. And by inviting those 400 fools, tech leaders we always hear about in the news, CEOs from BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and Apple might do something to stop the trend. But they were part of the problem, and they had their issues in a free market society. Most of the damage they had conducted in the social awareness vacuum. And those days are over. People know what Larry Fink has done with his buddies at the World Economic Forum, and the pitchforks are out in America. There is going to be hell to pay in more ways than one in the coming years, and the protection of big-state communism won’t be able to hide them. Supply chains in America are realizing the liability of partnerships with China, with all the games on exports that go on, the trouble in dealing with communist labor unions on the West Coast that strike every five seconds and slow down the loading and unloading of cargo to and from China. Let’s just say that the labor advantages of dealing with China are no longer as enticing. They may have a lot of hard-working people that don’t blow up your budget, but the politics of dealing with China is ridiculously cumbersome, and slow. And people are moving on, finding other ways of dealing with supply chain necessities.

Game over for global communism

Which is what I saw in the body language of Xi.  I saw a worried dictator who knew the game was up.  Trump obviously saw it, too, in comments that followed.  Trump knows he’s going to have to deal with Xi as president soon, so he is already setting up the negotiating table for leverage.  But Xi knows this is the last year of Chinese rule.  The election fraud had given them a lovely puppet, but the American people didn’t follow him, leaving everyone exposed in the process and leaving those 400 fools in attendance with eggs on their faces.  A furious world is headed their way.  Election fraud won’t be so easy this time around.  Of course, they will try because they have no other way of winning.  They had been planning this communist push for years, and this was all they were getting out of it.  Global communism had failed and people were turning away everywhere, especially in the United States, and state visits like this in San Francisco were not going to fix everything, because it was all smoke and mirrors, to begin with.  Sure, they showed the world they could put Joe Biden in office and control the American political system with honey pots and payoffs.  But what did they get for it?  The American people were not bending their knees to the communists, and they had no intention of ever doing it.  And the big American corporations showed they had little power over people’s fundamental beliefs.  It was a disaster, a nightmare for them.  And it was their last gasp before the tables turned, and the world got a lot harder for all of them.  Because communism is dead, free markets would force validity, making all the corporations that had bought into the communist plot vulnerable to destruction.  And so it went; the show in San Francisco fell flat and sputtered to a close with the grim reality of what is to become of all of them.  And they deserve everything they have coming. 

Rich Hoffman

Bernie Moreno and J.D. Vance in West Chester, Ohio: Making Hard Work Great Again

I always enjoy the optimism of an early campaign effort, and Bernie Moreno’s is undoubtedly one of those good ones, early on. He’s running for the Ohio Senate seat against Sharrod Brown, but first, he has to win a primary, so he and J.D. Vance were at Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, Ohio to make a pitch, and it was full of optimism and an approach to politics that is full of more than empty promises. I like seeing people like Bernie getting into politics, people who have been personally successful and know what it looks like, and who want to do good things for all the right reasons. So, I was enthusiastic about seeing the two of them together, a current senator, and the one who would be his partner representing Ohio in the Swamp we want to drain. We are looking for MAGA Republicans who can work with a Trump administration, unlike the last time. If there has been anything good about losing Trump to exile for a while, it has been that it gave us a chance to knock out the firewall that the Congress and Senate had in preserving the Swamp. If you want to drain it, there must be cooperation from the other branches of government. Otherwise, it just won’t happen. And things are shaping up in a very positive way. I am pretty excited about the future, for a lot of reasons, and one of them was a book I had been reading that very day when I was going to see J.D. Vance again. It was Johan Norberg’s Capitalist Manifesto and it was strange to read a quote in it about J.D. Vance, from a Swedish perspective. Norberg’s book is not an American outlook on capitalism. Instead, it’s a European globalist view and a fascinating process to watch. But he was using J.D. Vance and an example about Middletown, Ohio to make a point that I thought was well made. So, it was weird to have all those elements come together in one Friday morning spectacle.

The point made was haunting me a bit because I am a bit older than J.D. Vance, and I watched Middletown, Ohio, go through its transition from a wonderful blue-collar town that ran off of an Armco economy, a steel mill that told a similar story to those in Pittsburg up the road.  They were the centerpieces of the town, and it’s where everyone worked.  But through lots of influences, particularly communist globalism, the steel mill lost its power, and the economy of Middletown tanked, and never recovered.  It went from a thriving town to something that looked like a third-world hell hole within a few decades.  By the time J.D. Vance came along and was a young person, his experience was captured nicely in the book The Hillbilly Elegy and the movie of the same name by Ron Howard.  That popularity and the association that J.D. Vance now has in the Trump MAGA movement, which Bernie Moreno was now a part of, got Johan’s attention to make a point about globalism in general.  J.D. Vance had said, which Norberg quoted, that neither he nor his friends wanted to have a blue-collar job.  They were all told to grow up and move away to some white-collar job, and that America was going to move to a kind of service-oriented economy.  I remember hearing my dad’s speech, “Do you want to grow up and dig ditches?”  Blue-collar work was frowned upon, even discouraged.  So, no wonder so many of those good jobs picked up and moved to places like China.  It wasn’t so much bad policy that moved them, but the education system, the entertainment culture, and political priorities that had it all wrong, or right if you consider that they were all in on a scheme to destroy America, that caused so many young people to grow up and not want to work.

If you want to destroy America, convince their young people to grow up and be lazy.  This wasn’t the point of Johan Norberg, and indeed not where J.D. Vance was politically.  But it was the underlying reason all the steel mills picked up and moved to other places through globalism.  It was getting harder and harder to find good employees to do these jobs; the labor unions certainly didn’t make it any easier, so those corporations moved to places with better workers and more of them.  And the natural poison pill to cultures like Middletown, Ohio, was that nobody wanted to grow up and work as hard as they had to watch their parents’ work.  Those kinds of blue-collar jobs were looked down upon as if they were part of a lower class.  It wasn’t enough to own a home, a few cars, and a bass boat.  Kids watched their parents be put down by culture in general for working in a steel mill, so they grew up wanting nothing to do with any of it.  And now that America doesn’t make much anymore, people are seeing firsthand how valuable manufacturing is to a culture and rethinking how they value those jobs.  That is the primary driver of the MAGA political movement.  People were told many things over the years; now that they see where it has all been going, they don’t like it.  And they want to improve the situation dramatically. 

I would offer that for those who profess that they want to make America Great Again, the best place to start would be to make Hard Work a Priority Again.  It is not so much a throwback to how things used to be, but to look at the grandparents and their parents who made up towns like Middletown, Ohio, promising to begin with and value what they did and to emulate that hard work in the future.  Americans were suckered by globalism into being lazy; they were told that they could grow up and make lots of money in a useless white-collar job where they ordered pizza at 9 am for lunch three hours later, doing very little in between.  And that everything would be great.  And it hasn’t been.  Americans need to get back to working hard and working often.  We need to stop listening to the rest of the world that wants more socialism, which consists of more breaks, more government handouts, and much less freedom.  The globalism we have experienced was a disaster and has been terrible for places like Middletown, Ohio.  Not because globalism was evil in itself, where capitalism would have an opportunity to lift everyone to a higher living level.  However, what globalism turned out to be was an attack on the American way of life toward conversion to global communism; that attack came in the form of convincing an entire nation that hard work was beneath them and that whole generations would grow up to be lazy, entitled, and dependent on globalism for their necessities.  The kind of MAGA movement politics that J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno were pitching and the type of globalism Johan Norberg was trying to sell to the world involved an appreciation for hard work at its core.  Something that would undoubtedly make Middletown, Ohio, Great Again.  We want the future J.D. Vance kids and their friends not to grow up and sleep on the couch but to go to work and do great things with a lot of ambition through their actions.  And through that embrace of values, America and the world can be great again because it all starts with hard work and people willing to do it for the betterment of humanity.

Rich Hoffman