Category: Progressive

Let’s Talk About God: Understanding the Politics of Heaven

For further conversations, it’s time to talk seriously about God and the politics of Heaven and, in general, everlasting life.  A lot of people think that death is the end of it all, but I would argue that it’s just the beginning, and part of the point of life is to grow into something that can function well in the existence of a multidimensional political universe, because as it is in Heaven, so it is on Earth.  The original sin was that God created man in his image because he wanted a family who would rule on his behalf over the Earth in ways that always had the eternal perspective in mind, and in that way, humanity was created to be over angels and demons relative to the Divine Council as it is talked about in the Bible many places, especially Psalm 82.  This is important because to understand the fight we have today, politically, we have to get our minds around the concept of God and not think of him as a solitary figure sitting on a thrown in everlasting life waiting for everyone to go to Heaven and sit around in the pearly gates to do “something” for the rest of eternity.  We tend to view Heaven as a destination at the end of the tunnel of life.  But I think that’s just where the battles begin, and what we see on earth are reflections of that eternal life, and God, Yahweh, has always been under pressure to manage the vast populations of eternal existence.  And that is why the Fall in the Garden was such a tragic occasion for him, which he has spent many thousands of years trying to resolve to his satisfaction.  That might seem strange for an entity that created the universe and everything in it.  But there is more to the story regarding the challenge of free will that is ultimately the point. 

We all know the story of the Garden of Eden, where the snake tempted Eve to eat from the Tree of Good and Evil.  This is the fruit of the lesser Gods, those in the pantheon at that time, for which Yahweh managed within this universal spectrum but constantly tried to undermine his authority.  Those Gods would be characters who had been around for many tens of thousands of years before the biblical period we are talking about here, gods like Baal, Moloch, Ishtar, Marduk, and a long list of the same names that would be called other names in other countries such as Greece, Egypt, and the Americas, but would be the same essential characters.  Yahweh was trying to do something different, and the rebellion on the Divine Council was certainly intent to challenge his authority, just as we see in our political order, which we can say reflects the actions of eternal life.  Of course, once God’s creation had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and become like “them,” the gods of the Divine Council, they had to be cast away for God to try again and again to make the human experiment work by comprehending the aspects of Eternal Life that God intended for humanity.  Not the kind of stuff they teach you in Sunday school or Church.  But if you dig into scripture and read what it tells us from thousands of years of interpretation and analysis, things start to appear much more as they indeed are. In that case, the world opens up much differently for those with the courage to eat from that Tree of Eternal Life. 

Humans couldn’t handle such a task, so they were thrown out of the Garden guarded now by Cherubim, creatures that have a recurring theme in ancient times.  And eventually, because they fell from grace and were now functioning in the politics of the lesser Gods, such as Baal, God wiped them all away with the flood story, which is very much the same story we find in the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Noah and his family are God’s chosen people, and they try to start the Garden story once more.  Only to fail when people attempted to build the Tower of Babel, again setting their sights on the kind of mistakes the Divine Council had made for thousands of years.  God came along and scrambled their speech so they could no longer build the Tower of Babel to reach Heaven.  And Yahweh sent them to the corners of the earth to separate them politically from one another.  But God doesn’t give up on this experiment with humans. Instead, he turns to Abraham and decides to make a new people from his line, which becomes the generations of Israel, Moses, King David, King Solomon, and the like.  But again, once Solomon died, his children fell to the temptations of Baal and the gang, so God allowed Nebuchadnezzar to raid his people and punish them for their discourse, which was their political alignment and worship of the lesser gods of the Divine Council.  Understanding that Divine Council, it helps to read from the ancient literature that comes out of Syria and modern-day Iraq.  No wonder those areas are war-torn today; the conflict is a mask of the truth.  Governments always want to think they are in charge as they completely are creatures eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  From there, after 70 years, God allows the people of Israel to rebuild and continue again, but of course, they fail, so he sends Jesus, his representation on earth, to be sacrificed like just another lamb out of Nazareth to solve the political problem with that Divine Council once and for all.

God’s problem, which is eternal, is how to get people to do the right thing of their own free will.  God could undoubtedly punish them and impose his desires through force.  But the divine experiment and the intentions of God’s purpose, and therefore, the meaning of life, is to create religious partners who can function for what’s right as interpreted by an eternal perspective.  Not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the political world of the Divine Council.  But the infinite aspects of all existence, as the universe knows and understands it.  God was looking for reflections of him and his intent to do on Earth as it is in Heaven and to share rule with such creations.  To say God has struggled with the Divine Council might seem odd, but the problem is free will, whether talking about people or angels, demons, and the pantheon of maniacal characters of eternal existence.  Life and death is not the goal of these considerations, but free will is.  And it is free will that is at the core of the American experiment, and it is the suppression of that free will that the world is attempting to stop presently in our political world.  But the root cause of the problem is an ancient one, considering the fall in the garden and why it was so tragic to God.  Because the politics of the Divine Council sought to corrupt the effort from the beginning, those characters would not allow God to create beings superior to them, such as humans were designed to be.  To hatch from life into death as reflections of God himself and to rule over the Divine Council.  And once that is understood, much of the trouble of our current time can be comprehended more fully.

Rich Hoffman

Meet Russ Loges for Lakota School Board: A great guy to help with some looming challenges

I liked Russ Loges the first time he ran for the Lakota school board.  I came to know of him during the last election as my focus was on the Republican-endorsed candidates in the previous election.  Russ wanted to remain independent as he was getting involved in the school board business then.  However, without any name recognition and much support outside of his efforts, he had an excellent showing, gaining several thousand votes with a noticeably conservative position.  I have since met Russ at a few events here and there, and each time, I found that I liked him quite a lot.  He’s a very likable person who has an excellent temperament.  And now that we are in September with the November election coming up quickly, one that will have a lot of Democrats voting because abortion and marijuana will be on the ballot, so there will be unusually high voter engagement during an off-year election, it’s time to get endorsements.  And Russ has already received an approval from some Central Committees around Butler County.  One of the two that are specific to Lakota schools.  So, he came to a meet the candidate night with the Liberty Township Central Committee to present himself with some questions and answers, which are shown here for those interested.  I’ve been to quite a lot of these over the years, and this one was unique.  I liked Russ Loges before the event, but after, I found my opinion of him had inflated quite a lot.  He answered many tough questions very well and cared a lot about what’s going on in Lakota and the specific challenges that are on the horizon.  Russ Loges is precisely the kind of person that the community would benefit from putting on the school board during the upcoming election, and he will win the support of many more Republicans for a party endorsement due to his excellent conservative positions. 

Yet what Russ Loges is not is a person trapped in ideology.  He’s a very even, measured person getting into the school board business from parental concerns.  We have seen over the years that, typically, the best school board candidates who become board members are passionate parents who want to make things better for everyone.  It’s a generally thankless job that doesn’t pay back any real fiscal compensation, but to play in that game, you must raise a substantial amount of money to become impactful in an election, especially in the Lakota school district, which has around 100,000 people within it.  When Russ ran before, he did it as a concerned parent who wanted to help.  This time, he has a broader approach that makes him well-positioned for much more support.  And given the crowd reaction at the Liberty Township Central Committee event, many more will become very eager to support his run for the Lakota school board.  Based on his answers, Russ is more than prepared for some of the complex challenges that are coming quickly on the horizon, and to deal with those challenges, Lakota will need people who care which was clearly expressed during the questions asked by Matt King during the event.  Russ has kids in the district and a wife who is a teacher.  Currently, he is a nurse and his bedside manner is instantly noticeable.  He’s personable, cares, and wants to help his community, so all those traits were very encouraging and made it easy for everyone who met him to get excited about it. 

On those times that I had met him, I wasn’t sure if he was the real deal.  So often, when it comes to political events and the people filling specific seats, you get images of people but not much knowledge of the person.  When I learned Russ Loges was a nurse, I instantly thought of a smart car driving, COVID mask-wearing big government type.  But I was able to meet Russ outside this event, getting out of a big truck, and he’s a good fit for the conservative base of Butler County, Ohio.  He’s outdoors-oriented and robustly presents himself.  He reminded me of many of my friends in the fast draw community, even down to the jokes.  Good, sincere people who love the American flag and the many who revere it with the pledge of allegiance.  He’s certainly not a political radical but more of an even-balanced family man who is proud of his country and wants to help it improve.  He’s a big guy with a warm personality who comes across as sincere without many pretenses.  As he shook my hand, he seemed ready to go fishing, or hunting more than anything.  He has a very natural leadership ability that is instantly noticeable.  So, it wasn’t a surprise to learn that he has already sat down with the Lakota superintendent to talk about improving test scores for the students and building a successful team that can tackle some of the challenges looming.  You could tell that he wasn’t just a nurse as an occupation, but that he was a leader as well.  He is used to managing other people because he has a balanced approach to communication that has been well-tested by experience. 

There are a lot of challenges on the horizon for Lakota and it will take outstanding leadership to meet them.  There is a teacher’s contract coming up that could be very contentious.  There is a facilities plan also emerging that will require a small fortune.  There are indications that the current school board is planning to seek a tax increase even as property value rate assessments will increase sharply due to state challenges.  So passing a levy will be even more challenging, especially in an environment where school choice will increasingly become the reality of tomorrow, regarding education.  It would be easy to sit on the sidelines and turn away from some of these community problems, especially for those who have grown kids.  But Russ and his wife plan to be in Lakota for a while.  He mentioned that he wanted Lakota to be good for his grandkids, so he’s planning to keep deep roots in the community, so this isn’t a fly-by-night endeavor for him.  He wants to help, and after meeting him, I am sure he is just the kind of person we need to work on some of these very difficult problems that are on the horizon, storm clouds coming in fast that will be painful.  Yet, those problems are manageable with the right kind of people to deal with them, and Russ Loges was very encouraging.  He could have easily won if more people had known him during the last race.  More people will know him this time so he should be able to get votes in the required numbers just by letting people get to know him.  I will certainly be voting for him, and I’ll be excited to do it.  Things don’t always go how you want them to in politics, but sometimes you get to meet good people, and if not for this school board race, I wouldn’t know Russ Loges any other way.  And after meeting him, I’m happy I did. 

Rich Hoffman

The Need for Speed in American Management: Fast Draw is the perfect sport to understand the benefits of capitalism

I had a good shooting season this year, as is usually the case.  Over the Labor Day weekend, there was one that I look forward to each year specifically.  I go all over the region to attend these gun-fighting competitions and meet many different people to satisfy my obsession with speed, which has been with me for a lifetime.  Cowboy Fast Draw is a unique sport that is very popular, and it should get a lot more news coverage.  But since it’s guns and a deliberate reverence toward a specifically American lifestyle, many woke media won’t touch it in even casual ways.  But not doing so is very disingenuous to American culture, which is the point of social rejection.  It would be like avoiding discussing knighthood in Europe or the samurai in Japan.  Gunfighting in America is one of those core elements that almost everyone can relate to, but the forces hostile to our country want desperately to remove it from people’s minds.  So we have these competitions all over the United States that are very well attended and increasing in popularity, yet many people don’t even know about them.  The shooting season occurs mainly during the warm months, from April to around October.  For me, the one over Labor Day in Darke County, Ohio, is usually the last, so it has a special meaning.  There are a few more in October and November, but I’m often too busy to get to them.  My reason for getting to as many as possible is that they are very positive experiences.  I think about many things that don’t make much sense in everyday life, but all the pieces come together nicely at Fast Draw events.  In the Labor Day of 2023 competition, I received a very hard-won award with significant meaning, and you can read the faces.  A lot is going on with these kinds of things. 

I see Fast Draw as a lot like golf; you get together with friends and see how low your score can be over some time. Gunfights usually last all day, so it’s not a one-and-done endeavor. It requires long, sustained skill that is repeatable. But unlike golf, this is a timed sport. You are forced to react as quickly as possible to the target, making this kind of competition very unusual and American. I like many things, including golf, but there are many things extraordinary about Fast Draw that I find very beneficial personally. Particularly when it comes to metaphors for speed, in regular life, where people don’t show up for gunfights with their guns on their hips and all the special equipment you get to mess around with to play the sport, there are lots of excuses for why things don’t happen or can’t. I find the typical labor position that has come out of the Department of Labor in government particularly repulsive, and since COVID was introduced to liberals, and they have used the potential for sickness not to do any work, my frustrations with the world have only increased dramatically. I do not look for excuses for anything. I think production is beautiful, but most of the world is looking for reasons, and the more liberalism in a culture, the more excuses that culture has for things that they think cannot be done. The attitude is, “If you want to do something right, you should take your time,” assumes that the faster you go at something, the worse the quality of the endeavor. In that way, the labor market that has evolved with lots of Marxism has sought to do less work and do it slower, rather than the classic American approach, which is faster and more accurate.

The reason that gunfighters in classic American Westerns were so obsessed with being faster than the other fighter is the proper metaphor for American culture, where the expectations for everything was tight. Capitalism evolved in America under the premise of speed. And, of course, the speed wasn’t of much value if accuracy wasn’t a part of the story. Of all the sports out there, Fast Draw is the fastest sport. It has elements of many popular sports, mainly drag racing. But there is nothing faster than Fast Draw, where the main objective is drawing a gun and hitting a target with a wax bullet in under half a second. And what I learn from watching different shooters from different places around the country is fascinating. And very refreshing. In the business world, slowness has been embraced because of all the socialist, communist, and under-all philosophies of Marxism running in the background, dripping wet in the compliance culture. Those who make the rules that human resource departments must follow load assumptions against the speed that a company can operate, and too often, people unthinkingly follow without pushing back against the essential premise. And it can be very frustrating to deal with, especially if you think about it, which most people avoid. In golf, you can take your time with the game and are often rewarded for going slower, so many people in business assume that slower is better and that success means making that adjustment. But from the perspective of my favorite sport, Fast Draw faster is better, and the management of speed and accuracy measures success and failure.

There are a lot of essential lessons in Fast Draw that should be directly applied to the business world, which is why I wrote a book on the subject, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  You must remove as much nonsense from the process to get the speed you need in the sport.  The more motion, the more steps, and the more variables there are, the slower your time will be.  And under pressure, you still must be able to hit the target.  You don’t have time to be casual.  Most of the winning times in the sport are around a quarter of a second to a half a second.  So, the pressure to achieve speed will expose anything unnecessary.  And that’s how it should be in business, whether it’s a drive-through window at a fast-food restaurant or selling a new car to a customer.  You might have noticed that since COVID-19 and the Biden administration has been in the White House, things have slowed down significantly in America.  The business world expects to go slower and blame the supply chain upstream for failure.  This is a very un-American concept, one of the biggest problems of the modern age.  And it’s very different in 2023 than in 2019 before Covid came along.  Yet, without measuring things with speed and accuracy, people might not notice that the value system was slow and, ultimately, communism with low-performance expectations.  The more Fast Draw events I go to, the more hope I have for the world because I can see people who know how vital speed is to modern culture.  Not just dressing up in gunfighter garments and paying reverence to the Old West.  I appreciate the shooters I meet and their “need for speed,” which is specifically American.  And it certainly gives me hope for the future when I see how hungry people are to win at Fast Draw.  Because if they can figure out that balance in that sport, they may do well in real life in ways that capitalism best reflects. 

Rich Hoffman

The Busing Strike at Lakota Schools: Hiding the real problems behind drivers who don’t deserve it

I love the new busing strike at Lakota schools. Nothing infuriates me more than slow-moving vehicles clogging up the roadways, and since school has started back for the fall, all the buses hauling kids around to a communist government school in my district that eats money insatiably has been a sore subject for me. I’ve dealt with this busing issue for years; I remember when Lakota cut busing as an extortion method to push parents to pass a tax increase back when we had to fight those levies every few months. And I certainly remember how it was during Covid. Parents learned not to have busing, and as far as I’m concerned, parents can take their kids to school. They’ve done it before; they can do it again. They already get a free babysitting service in the school paid for by the taxpayers, so the least they can do is drive their kids to school. But my favorite school board member, the only one who has been really good on busing issues to make things better for parents, Darbi Boddy, is supportive of busing services and has wanted to expand coverage. See, we don’t agree on everything, just most things. Darbi ultimately is not a professional politician, but she’s in politics the way it’s supposed to be. She’s a mom, and she thinks like a parent. So, she is undoubtedly sympathetic toward school bus drivers as they voted to strike just before Labor Day 2023. And what’s unusual about this strike isn’t about money or benefits. The busing services are contracted out to a company called Petermann, which handles the needs of the drivers, who are well compensated. Instead, the problem is over surveillance, a similar tech issue as is at the core of the Hollywood strike of actors and writers. Technology has turned into a tyrant, and the drivers aren’t happy about it, so they have walked off the job.

Of course, there is more to the story, which is why this is a compelling analysis. Lakota schools want to micromanage the bus drivers in ways they would never dare do with their employees, and because of Petermann handling the union responsibilities, it has given Lakota schools a chance to try and fix their social perception problem with parents during an election year, without having to take responsibility for anything and making members of their radical leftist union upset. Lakota has been very soft on pedophilia over the last several years, following some genuinely detrimental behavior with several past employees that have damaged the public school brand. Followed by some very disappointing report cards from the state and a financial situation where the lawyers are essentially running the school, the current school board, except for Darbi Boddy, has been a complete disaster. So they need a public relations push, and this school bus driver issue has been, for them, a golden opportunity. Suddenly, they want to use technology to monitor if the bus drivers are putting both hands on the steering wheel while turning and if they are staying within the speed limit. The same policy is not present to ensure that Lakota teachers behave themselves. If a kid shoots a spitball at the back of a bus driver’s head, and the driver yells at the kid. The act will be caught on video. But if it happens in a classroom, nobody will ever know. So based on that premise, Lakota management, starting at the school board, is talking out of both sides of its mouth, which is a standard from them, not an exception.

Without question, there are school bus drivers who are cheating slugs. They don’t fill their logbooks out correctly; monitoring will help correct that problem. But the number is likely under 25%. There is no precise justification for abusing the other 75% with overmanagement while the rest of the school culture gets away with horrendous acts of defilement and social degradation. Sure, bus drivers park in places they shouldn’t be to associate with other drivers who shouldn’t be there between pickup tasks. There are many reasons to justify the increased monitoring of the bus-driving staff. But the question is, “Should they do it?” Given the government school culture, the least of the problems are the bus drivers, yet the school board and superintendent want to be harsh with them in just another phony plea to convince parents that management cares about the kids. Parents interact with school bus drivers as representatives of the school more than they do the school itself, as the bus usually comes to their homes personally, where the school is someplace the kids disappear to. This has allowed the school board to appear tough on discipline over employees they don’t even have responsibility for while Lakota’s teacher’s union members get away with everything. If Lakota wanted to be tough on employees, it would have reacted much differently to the many abuses of kids that get reported but are slowly dealt with at the school board to protect the school’s image rather than to make kids a priority. But if a school bus driver goes over the speed limit by driving 40 MPH on a road that’s only 35, even though the rest of the traffic is going 45 MPH, then the push will be to write that driver up for a safety violation. Technology has allowed for this kind of oppressive micromanagement, which is not good.

It’s hard enough to get drivers for a school bus; it’s a part-time job at best that you have to spend your whole day doing, first early in the morning, to pick the kids up. Then, mid-day pre-rush hour traffic takes them home. It’s an idea I don’t think society should have ever started. It should be the responsibility of the parents to take their kids to get an education, wherever it is. Bussing has made it way too easy for parents. In this case, it has been an all too easy target for a school board that has mismanaged its affairs to appear more diligent than they are because the introduction of expanded technology has allowed tyrants to have power over others they should never have. Mainly when the utilization is not applied evenly to all parties involved. The bus drivers are being punished for disciplines that the school board would never apply to the teachers and administrators under their management. The third-party Petermann drivers are an easy target with expendable employees. And if nobody goes to school, the teachers get a more leisurely day, which we saw they were too willing to exploit during COVID-19. Technology isn’t used to improve everything, only to control it for power over innocent people while the real trouble persists elsewhere. The hope is that parents will think Lakota is doing an excellent job with the safety of their children by monitoring speed limits and hand placement during driving while the teachers are trying to convince boys that they are girls and that everyone can use whatever bathroom they want. Meanwhile, the lawyers are using taxpayer money to settle every legal challenge that comes their way, and they are trying to do to Darbi Boddy what the school board is trying to do to the bus drivers: blame them for all the lousy mismanagement of the district, when the real trouble is in their back yard, which many parents will never otherwise see.

Rich Hoffman

I Don’t Like “Rich Men North of Richmond”: Crying about how unfair the world is won’t fix it

At first, I thought the Oliver Anthony song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” was interesting.  I watched people rally to him in private concerts with great enthusiasm and was impressed that the song communicated to them in ways that good art does.  Great!  But the looters have climbed on over the last few weeks, especially at Fox News, where they thought they had found that populist connection with their audience again when they played it at their 2nd Place Debate for the under 10% presidential candidates.  And Oliver Anthony was featured on Disney-owned Good Morning America, the Joe Rogan Podcast, and many other outlets.  The world is in shock over this song, which I could call the kind of song that might have been featured on The Dukes of Hazzard years ago.  I liked it, but what was all this shock, and what did I think about it?  I like the young man, Oliver Anthony; it was wise for him to turn down several record labels and do his best to keep his music small and private—authentic.  That is, after all, what people like about it, and the moment he loses that, it’s all over.  Authentic is better than financially successful, I would say in most cases.  But as I heard the song a few times, I felt more like Oliver Anthony was just another slack-jawed hippie singing about how unfair the world is, as is typical in any bar on a Friday night as people ten beers into the evening throw darts and shoot pool drowning in cigarette smoke and cheap cologne laced with sweat, complaining about how corrupt Washington D.C. politicians are.  Complaining about how unfair life is does not solve the problem, and Anthony Oliver has made no claims to being a conservative.  He’s much more of a liberal, so, interestingly, many are accusing him of being an icon of the political right.  I would say, far from it. 

I’m a big tent Republican Party kind of guy, and if people who like Anthony Oliver’s music want to join the fun of a President Trump Republican Party, that’s fine with me.  I might look at their politics while we’re all in that big tent and shake my head.  Very few people are alive on earth as conservative as I am, so I am usually disappointed with people’s politics.  There is nothing new there.  But I am also one of the most tolerant of other people’s opinions.  The key to a future Republican Party is that many people are coming to it.  After the Trump mug shot, many from the “hood” are now converting from Democrats to Republicans, and I’ll happily hold the door open for them as they walk by with marijuana smoke streaming from their mouths, which I find objectionable.  But this is about winning, not so much converting everyone to my version of conservative politics.  There are union members who love Trump, and suddenly, we are all rooting for the same political figure, which is weird.  But it comes with a big tent.  If everyone wants to go camping and talk over the weekend, likely at the end of it, I will convert people over to my way of thinking, so I’m not worried about values.  But first, the right people must be elected to have the debate.  The Republic must survive as something we can all agree on.  So, I welcome all the drunks from the Friday night beer binge as they play Oliver Anthony turned up on their car stereos while driving around with the windows down. 

I’m not with Glenn on this. Don’t be weak in the first place. Life works much better.

The problem with Democrats, or people heading in that direction, is that they are typically victims in life, and victimization is dripping off that “Rich Men North of Richmond” song.  Republicans are can-doers, typically, Democrats are can’t be dones, so they seek the power of government to do what they can’t do for themselves.  So, from the outset, the two sides aren’t even functioning from the same planet, and if we want peace, everyone must at least want to achieve the same things.  And what’s going on with the Oliver Anthony song and the people drawn to it is that it correctly identifies why people feel like victims.  But I would say they don’t need to be victims because they have everything in their power not to be.  The American Constitution limits government power so people don’t have to be victims.  The Rich Men North of Richmond became that way because there were too many people at the bar on Friday drinking too much when they should have been paying attention to what was happening in the world.  The rich, powerful men in Washington became that way, not because they were the best or brightest.  But because, they were the most unethical and willing to take advantage of people who were too lazy to manage their own lives.  So, singing about it or drinking about it doesn’t solve a thing.  And the sad thing about that song is that so many people can identify with it.  They can relate because the music does speak to them.  But in a healthy society, it shouldn’t.  The song’s existence as a work of art is great because it gives us some measure of culture.  But the reality of that culture is pretty pathetic and passive.  It’s not the kind of stuff that inspires greatness. 

I’ve expressed my comments about this song to several people who have instantly taken offense to my opinions, something about me not having compassion for the “down and out,” whatever that means.  For people who have known me for a long time, they know what I’ve been through in life.  It was never an easy road, and I have lost everything many times over.  But there has never been one day where I have not woken up to make that day better than the day before.  I know pain, deep pain.  It’s much worse pain than Oliver Anthony is singing about—life-crushing pain.  But I’ve never felt the way about it as he does, to cry about how unfair it is.  I’ve always been a turn-lemons-to-lemonade person, a positive thinker who can turn even the fires of hell into drinkable ice water.  I’d love more songs like that.  If there were, then we could say those are the ballads of the Republican Party.  But this “Rich Man North of Richmond” is just more people complaining about how unfair the world is without having the courage to do anything about it themselves.  And that’s what makes a great nation.  Not a bunch of crybabies.  But people who can deal with the pain and make something good happen.  I can’t identify with what Oliver Anthony is singing about because I’ve never felt that way.  Not because it’s been an easy life but because I’m not wired that way.  And rather than yield to those emotions, I would say not to cry, don’t drink your problems away on a Friday night listening to that song.  Instead of being sad, read a book, do something constructive, and continually work to improve yourself and the world around you.  And I think the result will be impressive and something you can feel good about.  Complaining does not help.  And Oliver Anthony’s song is all about complaining when everyone should be getting to work to make the world a better place, starting with themselves. 

Rich Hoffman

The Communism of LinkedIn: It’s a dating app for job seekers who desire the destruction of corporate America

I was never a big fan of LinkedIn, even before they banned my account over my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which they thought was disparaging to their excellent relationship with China.  So, to answer the question I get at least 50 times a week, no, I am not on LinkedIn.  I was, for a while, out of some obligation I thought was part of the modern world.  But I had little value for it, so at the first dispute, we parted ways happily, which has provided me with just enough emotional distance to have an objective opinion about it.  LinkedIn has a very menacing presence in all actuality and is laced with communism in ways that an entire generation has not considered, and I find it despicable.  I view people with a job with a good company yet still maintain a LinkedIn profile as adulterous married people who always look at their dating apps with an eye on something better.  It is impossible to be in a committed relationship with a spouse while always looking out to see if there is someone better.  A job, like a good marriage, requires a commitment, and dating apps are a clear sign that one or both spouses are not committed to the relationship.  That is essentially what LinkedIn does; it is a dating app for job seekers.  And if someone has a good job and a good employer, well, they should be committed to that relationship, and they shouldn’t always be looking for a better job.  Some people out there, just like people who get divorced a lot, are always looking for the next best thing, and by jumping from job to job, they might find opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.  But that is my position on LinkedIn. It’s a dating app that shows a lack of commitment to an employer and that people who are on it all the time are one-foot-in, one-foot-out types of people who are not very valuable to an organization. 

Yet, there is something far worse with LinkedIn that indicates its Chinese roots, which it is well known for supporting.  The hidden message of LinkedIn is that people don’t matter and that leadership is embodied in the collective, not the individual.  LinkedIn goes against the gunfighter metaphor that I use often, the comparison of the lone gunfighter who steps into a saloon out of a heavy rain and orders whiskey at the bar with their back turned to the room.  The gunfighter knows that nobody will make a move because the room is full of parasites who want to use anybody they can meet to further their life in some way.  So the gunfighter doesn’t worry about some assassin that might try to shoot them in the back.  Such thoughts are Hollywood fantasy.  In real life, people are much more malicious and lazy.  They’ll use them before trying to kill someone for all they are worth.  Therefore, people of worth are precious in the world because most people fall well short.  Instead, most people reside in the crowd, happy to follow others, which is why the gunfighter knows they can order a whisky at the bar and enjoy it without concern for potential assassins.  Nothing in the world is more valuable than leadership, and leadership is not formed through networks and relationships.  It’s in understanding the motivations of other human beings and what they are willing to do to obtain value, then directing them toward some state of usefulness.  LinkedIn is an audience of people in the saloon looking at the gunfighter, measuring to see if something can be gained from a relationship.  When discussing networking, we are talking about building relationships in this fashion. 

Yet China, as a collectivist, communist society, does not strive to empower its individuals into greatness.  They look for compliance as their primary objective, so they have much trouble building their economy.  Without the outside influence of globalists from the World Economic Forum mentality, China would still be a poor country.  All their wealth has been stolen; it wasn’t generated through individual achievement, as in Western capitalist countries.  In many ways, the designers of Linkedin are well aware of this.  The hidden message of LinkedIn is that individuals do not matter, nor do other companies.  By filtering down individual achievement, the people on LinkedIn are not looking for the next Jack Welsh or President Trump in the world, who ran a very successful show on television about the values of business in The Apprentice.  They want a society of bootlickers who are not committed to corporate leadership and are ultimately easy to control from the centralized state.  By always being willing to jump from one job to another, nobody has deep roots of commitment to their employers, making them weak toward centralized control.  The LinkedIn audience is looking for compliant, noncommitted people to populate the workplaces of the world, and the effect is noticeable.  Professionally, there are a lot of non-committed people out there who show fragile leadership toward their organizations.  And that is by design.  LinkedIn tells the professional world that people don’t matter; they can all be traded like baseball cards and easily replaced.  So, puff yourself up to potential employers looking for just such a poison and destroy the concept of capitalism by destroying the notion of authentic leadership among the corporate community. 

You have to watch these tech firms and understand their overall philosophy for getting into business, to begin with.  Facebook was a dating app that tapped into the human need to be wanted and then exploited that desire with a sense of community or communism.  That same approach was introduced to Western cultures by attacking the concept of marriage with easy divorce.  If you were unhappy with your spouse, get a new one.  Don’t fight out the problems; go somewhere else, which has destroyed the concept of the American family or even a European family.  And in so doing, that gives the state more power over the individuals involved.  Rather than the family or the corporate culture having the strength and ability to resist such temptations.  The way to attack the concept of family was to make divorce more socially acceptable and too tempting whenever things got tough in a marriage.  LinkedIn has sought to do the same in corporate structure, making it easy for talent to leave at the first sign of trouble and keeping CEOs always turning toward the state for approval rather than providing leadership through the frequent storms of life.  In many ways, we see the essential conflict of our times: Do you follow the leadership of Yahweh, or do you seek the many gods of Canaan and sacrifice your firstborn children to appease them?  LinkedIn says to appease the gods, make whatever sacrifices you need to make, and surrender leadership to the state.  I say, be the gunfighter, follow after the individual Yahweh and the rebellion against collectivism that he represented, which formulated the foundations of all Western culture.  Be the leader, not a follower.  And don’t seek the arms of always some new opportunity. Instead, continuously make the best of what you have and fight for a better day.  And stay away from the communist desires of LinkedIn. 

Rich Hoffman

The Company of Tomorrow: Political trends are shifting away from the World Economic Forum values, and that’s a great thing

Everyone is always looking for the next great business tip for a competitive advantage, so here it is.  You can tell because of trends like what is going on with the Washington Redskins NFL team and the Cleveland Indians.  The fans of those teams are getting petitions signed to restore their names to what they were pre-woke.  The momentum of wokeness has shifted, and we see the political pendulum swinging the other way.  The Marxists had their chance, which didn’t have a positive impact that society could see for themselves.  The Beatles song “Imagine” didn’t come out very well when the World Economic Forum was starting mass viruses for their Great Reset and turning the responsibility of enforcement over to your local human resource office to do through businesses what nobody would ever be able to do through government regulation.  The Marxists of the world figured out that by design, our political systems in America were established to go slow to keep the government from interrupting the machine of capitalism.  So, they turned their attention to businesses to attack them there, and what we have seen happening in business climates over the last several decades has been Marxism, and people didn’t notice until recently.  Because most people have an adversarial relationship with their employers, it wasn’t something people saw coming in the front door.  But now that it’s here, they want it gone.  And that is the future state of business.  I’ve seen this communist, Marxist approach in the industry for a long time, growing year by year, and finally, after Trump was removed from office after a government-organized coup, no different from the many communist revolutions around the world, people finally have had enough of it, and that trend began to go the other way after the last Covid vaccine mandates. 

Just as professional sports teams were tricked into changing their names into woke acceptance, this is not what society wants.  They want cool names for their sports teams, not the Guardians, but the Indians in Cleveland.  I was just in Cleveland, and that name change a few years into it is still a joke, and it’s not getting better.  I have had some interactions with members of the family of that team, and their woke acceptance has not gone over well.  People are turning on them for allowing woke politics into their sacred sports franchise.  And that is certainly the case with the Washington Football team in D.C.  People want their Redskins back.  This anti-capitalist approach to life is not what people want in the world.  They have been patient with corporations that became politically active toward Marxism, some of America’s largest corporations.  When we talk about globalism, we are essentially talking about Marxism because that is how it is everywhere else.  Americans have taken the advantages of capitalism for granted because they didn’t know any better.  And they assumed that the companies they worked for had at least primary American values.  But that’s not how most corporations are these days; they have drifted into this Marxist compliance because if they had manufacturing plants in China, Vietnam, or Europe, they were dealing with some level of Marxism, whether it was outright communism or socialism.  It was not free market capitalism that was the driver of their economies.  It was the slow-moving and lazy administrative state, and it was slowing things down to levels that have been unacceptable in America.  I’m old enough to know what it was like before, and I have watched over several decades of being on the front line how Marxism has migrated into the human resource departments to influence how people live their everyday lives.  But the final straw happened during Covid and the slow realization that most people have from President Trump being in the White House, then Joe Biden.  Bidenomics has not been good for anybody but the global Marxists. 

I have often pointed out, over a long period, how the Lean Manufacturing trend was filled with cultural Marxism.  Many of the central foundations of business ethics these days attack the notion of the golf-playing CEO with a nice car, a trophy wife, and is oozing with success.  In Lean Manufacturing, they want the members of management to come from their offices out to where the work is done, not just to become more effective in understanding a problem.  That is how it sold to them.  But it’s really to minimize management in the eyes of the employees, to establish a level of sameness among everyone that displays nobody is in charge but the centralized employees.  Not even the marketplace.  Compliance with regulators as they get their talking points from the World Economic Forum has been their weapon of choice and has been a slow burn.  The CEOs and CFOs who have survived the most were those bootlicker types who appeased the bureaucratic regulators and were not focused on giving the public what they wanted—but imposing on the public Marxist restrictions not just in the employer but in the marketplace itself.  Rather than march people into Washington D.C. at gunpoint as Castro did in Cuba and kill political rivals off point blank, the Marxists took a much more passive-aggressive route.  They regulated capitalists out of existence.  But the marketplace is catching on and is pushing back.  Because of Trump’s successful administration, people tasted the good life again and want it back.  So, the political sentiment is swinging the other way. 

The World Economic Forum is failing; many of their 2030 plans, as scary as they are for their intent, are falling apart, much the way the name changes in sports are getting so much public pushback.  I do get to talk to people worldwide for perspective, and the sentiment is pretty much everywhere the same.  They are upset with Marxism and don’t want it in their products or the companies that make them.  And they certainly don’t want it in their sports teams.  People were willing to put up with it as long as they had the illusion of capitalism functioning in the background.  But now that they know differently, they want their capitalism back, so the future of business will go to those companies who most embrace capitalism for the majority of market share in the future.  Further woke trends from the human resource departments, such as paperless paychecks into bank accounts that centralized bankers can completely control, are not tomorrow’s trend.  But quite the opposite.  Ownership was diminished by the Marxists, including how pay was distributed or whether or not your employer could force you to get a vaccine of poison to keep your job.  The Marxists got caught talking out of both sides of their mouth; while they were saying work from home, fair pay for fair work, and make sure you get an excellent ESG score, the radical leftist Larry Fink and the Wall Street insurgents were saying, if you value your job, you’ll get the government medicine from the world’s largest drug dealer, the federal government.  People were willing to listen before and in the years leading up to these ridiculous sentiments of globalism on American corporations.  But now they aren’t, and success will be measured differently.  The less compliant with Marxist measures globally, the better companies will be.  And that is tomorrow’s trend for those who want to get a jump start.  Capitalism works not just because it makes money for those who utilize it.  But also, it’s a measure of morality that the public can influence, which was always at the heart of all economic activity and always will be.

Rich Hoffman

How to Make a Good Team in Sports and Politics: The point of everything is to give voters options

It will continue to be one of the universe’s great mysteries why people can look at sports teams and have opinions about what they should be doing, but they can’t apply those same methods to their lives.  This is a prominent issue every year in pre-season football with the mini camps as teams figure out which players they will cut and which will make their final roster.  Good teams figure out the right players and get them all pointed in the right direction for the success or failure of a season.  If the players are allowed to pick their fellow players, teams tend not to do so well.  It takes good leadership to figure it out and put people together who likely wouldn’t figure it out for themselves.  Good teams tend to have players playing together who wouldn’t otherwise be friends.  One of the mysterious qualities of leadership is to see things of value beyond the choice of friendships, and when it comes to sports, most people get it.  They understand what makes success and have many opinions about it.  But they can’t do it when it comes time to utilize those same skills in their lives.  That is certainly the situation in business.  And it is undoubtedly the case in politics.  The goal of all these endeavors is to figure out what success looks like, whether it be winning a Super Bowl, having a great business quarter, or providing a great political party to the voting public; once success is understood, then leadership needs to do what it must to give that result.  It’s not complicated.  Yet, it remains one of the least utilized factors in human interaction. 

There is only one correct measure to winning in politics; it is in a political party providing the voting public with good people they can vote for.  Any other action is missing the point.  If a political party is not focused on those attributes, then they aren’t trying to be a good political party.  I would say this is a problem all over America, in every aspect of county politics, no matter where we talk about it.  And that is certainly the case with the Butler County Republican Party in Ohio, where I live.  I can say that I know many people at that party, and I personally liked them all in some way or another.  If you sit down and talk to people, I can usually find something I like about just about anybody.  But the problem is, do they make an excellent political party just because you want them?  And in most cases, that is not the reality.  Politics should only aim to provide voters and taxpayers with good people to represent them best.  When political parties lose sight of that strategy, things go wrong.  And that is how RINOs in the Republican Party come to be.  Most people get into politics for ideological reasons.  However, the concessions they make to get along with other people become detrimental to their representation of the voter base, which is the value of the party brand.  If people have good representation in politics, then the brand of the party could be said to be good.  If voters don’t, they start to lose faith in the system, voter engagement lowers, and the direction of victory in politics changes dramatically.  When voters feel that the people they elect don’t represent them, we could say that politics has failed.

It’s just like the comparison with the sports team that desires to put a winning team on the field so people come to the games and feel good about the chances for a victory, so they buy beer and overpriced hot dogs at the concessions, which is really how the team makes their money, how they measure their value to the customer base.  If the team isn’t winning, there are fewer fans to buy hot dogs, to put it simply.  The same holds in politics.  I know many people who want to run for office within the Butler County Republican Party.  But, they do not feel they can remain people of integrity because of the restrictions of party politics.  So, we end up with the wrong people running for office while much better candidates that the public would love to have representing them are sitting on the sidelines.  This is a case where the players on the field pick people they like and are comfortable with, not the leadership of the voting public deciding how that team would shape out.  Too often, and this year of 2023 is undoubtedly a good example, many good people are not participating in the political process because they have learned that they aren’t in the cool kids club and will never be invited.  Because the party is picking the members, not the voters.  And instead of letting the voters shape the party, the players are forming the team; then they wonder why many fans are not supporting their losing effort.

Not everyone gets into politics for the same reasons.  I understand that some feel that getting into politics protects their business interests from a corrosive government and provides a barrier to their efforts to keep their businesses healthy.  These are not ideological people but practical ones who see government as dangerous to their interests in business, so they get involved in politics to protect their efforts.  And those people are trying to play nice in the sandbox with ideologically based people who enter politics for reasons of genuine philosophy.  And those kinds of people are scary to those looking for political stability.  I get it.  Just like a wide receiver on a football team being upset that a new tight end is playing the slot receiver role, the wide receiver might feel like the coaching staff is trampling on their turf.  But so what? Maybe that is the best way to become a winning team.  That doesn’t mean that the tight end should be run off the team to make the wide receiver feel like they have job security and aren’t threatened by challengers.  Challenges make the team better.  But then better for whom?  For the players or the fans?  That is what must be decided, and what I have seen from the GOP in general, especially since Trump has been out of office, is a party for the players, not for the voters.  It’s the players making the teams they want to play with.  They are not trying to give the voting public the best representatives they can get.  And if a political party isn’t doing that, they aren’t trying to be the best they can be for their communities.  While such a concept may not be complicated, it remains the biggest stumbling block to any successful venture within human endeavor.   And that is certainly the case in politics.  Some great people want to participate, but they have been told in so many words or less that politics is about maintaining friendships and that everyone needs to stay in their lane and behave.  But that is not what voters want, and until political parties listen, the public will continue to be let down by the result.

Rich Hoffman

The West Chester Tea Party Does Not Endorse Lynda O’Conner for the Lakota School Board: And neither do I

For clarity, the West Chester Tea Party has not, and will not endorse Lynda O’Conner for the Lakota School Board.  There has been some rattling around from several people that they would, but they have told me personally that those rumors were untrue and they do not support her.  And neither do I.  We all have long friendships with Lynda and other candidates who these days call themselves Republicans but have drifted way to the political left.  But friendships or past relationships don’t make a good candidate.  Whether or not they represent our values to earn a vote is the issue at hand.  Too often, endorsements are given out because of friendships, not actual performance.  Lynda O’Conner has been the school board president for a while now, and she has attended Tea Party meetings in West Chester for over a decade and has formed relationships with many of us over the years.  However, based on her performance and what she did to Darbi Boddy as she begged us all to give her a conservative school board, the moment she had it, she essentially turned into the progressive governor that Ohio had, John Kasich, and betrayed us openly, even recklessly.  I tend to move on when I experience people like that.  I’ll give them a chance once, and once they show who they are, I don’t get too kinked up about it.  It’s always worth a try to give someone a chance.  Then, once they show who they are, you make decisions and move on.  Knowing she has betrayed many people in the Liberty movement within the Lakota school district and is running again, she is seeking endorsements for the upcoming election.  I had some reason to believe the rumors that the West Chester Tea Party might endorse Lynda, but quickly, they set the record straight and wanted to make sure they screamed from the mountaintops that they would not support Lynda O’Connor for the Lakota School Board and based on what they have learned about her, they never would. 

I wouldn’t usually talk about something that happened that was confidential, but looking back on it as I have, those privileges are meant within the context of friendly trust.  Yet after what happened with the previous Lakota school superintendent and the behavior against free speech that Lynda led against the incoming school board member Darbi Boddy, it’s clear what was going on, and I’m still insulted that she thought so little of me to try it.  I mean, she should have known better.  I spent hours and hours with Lynda O’Conner on the phone, meeting her in person, trying to help her.  But from her side, all she was doing was consensus-building in the classic sense against someone she had targeted as a political rival in the community.  And that didn’t become clear until the days after a specific meeting in the basement of some of our mutual Tea Party friends in May of 2022.  I should know what she was up to because I have covered these modern versions of The Delphi Technique for years.  It’s one of the most corrosive tools used in all public schools.  After a contentious school board meeting where I spoke in favor of Darbi Boddy, it was clear Lynda was trying to run her off the school board over minor issues.  Lynda had recruited Darbi to give her a majority on the board, along with Isaac Adi, and I did what I could to smooth out the edges and give credibility from the freedom movement side of things.  If I were on board with the effort, it would help the conservative base. 

I didn’t see a need to be overly cautious with this relationship with Lynda.  She had just spent the previous decade trying to win my trust, so I figured getting a functional, conservative school board in charge of Lakota schools was worth a shot.  Even that day I met with her and several other people, it became pretty clear what she was doing; I still wanted to give the effort a chance at working.  But she was looking for compliance out of Darbi Boddy to some liberal view of authority that was shocking to many of us, especially the West Chester Tea Party.  We all found ourselves in the basement of one of the leading members, with Isaac Adi and some school board mentor of his from Monroe schools pushing a sheet of paper in front of me, asking me what I wanted out of Lakota schools, which made me angry because of the amateur effort.  It was an apparent consensus-building exercise, much like the Lakota community conversations had been trying to win over opposition to school policy for a while.  And Lynda sat across from me with a smile, thinking all this was acceptable.  She had surrounded me with people I had trusted, especially in the Tea Party, and she felt that the peer pressure might win me over and away from the continued support of Darbi Boddy.  After all the years and everything I had written over all the time we had known each other, she thought I was that stupid. 

The meeting didn’t go well.  My wife and I left that day, never to speak to any of them personally again, because, within a few months, we had all the drama over the school superintendent.  Everything got worse after much further erosion in the community led by Lynda’s tampering with everyone’s political sentiments and wanting to pull everyone to the left, and lawsuits became a significant issue.  I had to explain to the attorney for the superintendent that if he had just apologized to Darbi Boddy for his role in trying to do what Lynda wanted, which was to remove her from the school board after many of us had spent the previous year trying to get her elected, then a lot of the trouble he found himself in wouldn’t have been such an issue.  But now that people knew and learned how much Lynda knew about it all along, those were self-inflicted problems that ultimately cost a lot of money in the district.  Through it all, I hadn’t talked to any of them in that basement meeting, so when I heard that the West Chester Tea Party was thinking of endorsing Lynda, it wouldn’t have surprised me after all the other people who had fallen off the wagon over the last year.  But if there is anything good that did happen, as a result, they did let me know that they felt the same way about Lynda as I did and that they would not support her or any of the other candidates who have gone over to the dark side of politics.  That’s certainly the case with Ann Becker, who is running for another term as trustee in West Chester.  She used to be president of the Tea Party for both West Chester and Cincinnati, but she has moved well away from those good old days now, more toward the political left.  Watching that kind of thing is painful, but it always happens.  And when it does, you always must wonder what people believe.  But happily, it is good to see that the West Chester Tea Party has not waivered, as others have, and they will not be endorsing Lynda O’Conner for the Lakota School Board.  And neither will I.

Rich Hoffman

A Conversation with My Mom: Understanding the Cult of Trump

It was an easy answer that had been coming up more frequently, especially with the Trump indictments by a corrupt legal system run by a crime boss in Joe Biden, who was only in power because of a stolen election. And the thugs were showing that they were in charge, but they were mystified as to why so many people still supported Trump. They had not thought that to be the case. Instead, they expected submission, groveling, and fear from the Trump supporters. Even as they distributed a mugshot of a former president to show their power over him and much of his former staff. We saw a coup by Marxist insurgents, just like Lenin, Mao, or Castro in Cuba. This happened in the United States, and they thought they had it all figured out. Yet, instead, they didn’t understand why Trump was getting more popular, and nobody seemed able to explain it, even the Trump supporters. But the issue became very clear as I visited my elderly mom in the hospital. We were having one of those life-flashing-before-her-eyes discussions as if checking the validity of everything’s worth. From issues when she was a little girl that were coming back to her very fluidly. To things that happened just yesterday. And in her condition, she had been telling all the nurses who were tending to her about some of my very violent past because it was on her mind, and we were talking about it in a way we never had before. Life moved quickly, and there hadn’t been time to catch up, at least for me. She felt she had done something wrong, producing a person like me who was so angry that many people outright hated. She came from the Happy Days generation, where people measured success by how many people liked them. Not me. She didn’t understand why I needed to carry a gun everywhere. She said to me, “Maybe if you just did what you were told, so many people wouldn’t be after you,” she said.

Vote for Trump to fight Marxism

We reflected on many stories, but the one she had told the nurses was one where I was involved in a large fight where many people were killed in the process.  As we reflected, only a few were still alive out of all the people involved.  She was upset that I was so proud of that incident.  She felt guilt about it while I took great pride in it, and that was the core of the problem and why we hadn’t talked about it over all these years.  But that wasn’t the only issue.  I reminded her of the first grade when I poked the school bully in the eye with my scissors.  He was picking on somebody. I had stepped in to stop it, and a fight ensued in class.  He was a really big kid, and everyone was terrified of him.  So, knowing he was dangerous, I fought him that way and stabbed him in the eye with my scissors.  I got into a lot of trouble.  Another time, I was on the school bus.  I always rode in the back, as far away from the figures of authority as possible.  But that was always where the kids who did terrible things sat, and I witnessed many bad things.  One day, they were doing drugs, sharing apparent stimulant pills, and they tried to force me to take one.  I threw it out the window, as I have never taken any drugs, ever in my life.  And I felt very strongly about it even back then.  A huge fight ensued, many of them against me, and many people got hurt, some of them badly.  I got into a lot of trouble.  A lot of trouble.

I don’t sit around thinking about it, but I had dozens and dozens of those kinds of stories, and as my mom reflected on them like older adults do as they are trying to work things out about their own lives, I just let her talk.  But up to that point, I am not a sit-down-and-talk-about-it person.  I keep the throttle down pretty hard, and I like things to go fast.  Not that I’m trying to outrun my past.  I don’t like getting stuck thinking about it because I see it as a waste of time.  But visiting her in that condition it was on her mind, and she felt like she had done something wrong to have such a socially ostracized kid, and she was being hard on herself for all the death and mayhem that was in the wake of it all.  Then, telling her how proud I was of my life was too much.  Yet she had said something that explained the current situation with Trump and the Marxists, who were essentially trying to take over the American government, and why there was such a lack of understanding about the whole issue.  The theme of my life was pretty easy to sum up: resisting anybody who wanted to control my life in some way. I have had the unique circumstance of never being beaten into any submission.  But from my mom’s point of view, she felt that I would have had a much easier life if I had just done what people told me to do.  But I didn’t want an easy life.  I enjoyed the violence.  I enjoyed the heartbreak.  I liked the pain.  Because I wanted more than anything to be free, free as a person to think what I wanted when I wanted to.  So, to me, all those horrible things were good, and I was proud to now reflect on them, knowing what I had to do to arrive at this moment.  On the other hand, she valued safety as the primary criterion of goodness, and because of that, she felt like she had failed. 

Not all Americans had my experience.  Many, at some point in their lives, had taken that pill to keep from being beaten up.  Or they avoided stabbing a bully in the eye because they were afraid to hurt the other person, so they ended up getting beaten up themselves.  And they said yes to the pushing and shoving against them, where a long history of dead bodies didn’t populate their past.  It costs a lot to resist the bullies in life, and there are many of them, and most people do not feel as strongly as I do about it.  But their inner rebel does come out when it comes to Trump.  And secretly, they support that he has been so strong as their representative, and where the Marxist insurgents expected to bully people and have them fold up like cheap lawn chairs, people have continued to support Trump, and that support has increased with each new indictment.  As I answered my mom, appeasing the bad guys does not improve life.  I’d instead carry a gun like I do now everywhere, knowing that lots of people would love to kill me.  That was her fear: if you, just for once in your life, would appease all those bad people, maybe they’d leave you alone.  But no, they never leave you alone.  All they understand is force, and in my way, I have fought very hard with lots of casualties along the way to maintain my freedom.  And now, I was watching the nation of America waking up to that same sentiment.  And I think it’s good, and about time.  Better late than never, but I can certainly say that I understand it fully.  And what’s to come quite well. 

Rich Hoffman