Category: Progressive

Remember When Lakota Paid $175,000 to an Employee over Ethical Violations: The cost of mismanagement of public employees is extraordinarily high

For the quick answer that is being talked about because of the Lakota superintendent’s lawsuit threat letters, the response to them would, of course, be frivolous litigation aggressively pursued based on The New York Times v. Sullivan case of 1964. In that well-known case, criticism of public officials protected by the 1st and 14th Amendments ensures that legal recourse is off limits for pursuing damages. The price for a life in public office and the comforts that come with living off public funds is that criticism is healthy for an honest exchange of information. No matter how crazy the information may be, which hasn’t been the case with this Lakota superintendent case, it is protected under the American Constitution. There is consistent case law that resolves the issue to the extent that any challenge to it would perfectly justify a knowingly frivolous abuse of litigation and the time of the courts themselves. And with that known, the aggressive attack on the public by sending out threatening letters to around ten community members just because they expressed themselves about the kind of private conduct that Matt Miller has utilized in his life has only caused a lot more anger. Because of this aggressive act, and what has been learned about what the school board knew and when, now there have been explorations of class action litigation against Lakota schools themselves for the reckless spending of taxpayer funds that have gone on not just in the actions of protecting their superintendent from public judgment, but in several other instances as well. Currently, a group of people are adding up all the costs and instances so that a coherent story can be pieced together by the evidence, and further action is pending in those assemblies. 

Yet, along the way, it has been noticed that a lawsuit filed by former teacher union leadership member Emily Osterling won her $175,000 in 2019 for wrongful termination back in 2017. At that time, Matt Miller put forth an 11-page resolution that listed a series of allegations, none of them criminal, pertaining to Osterling’s dealings with students and their parents. The resolution illustrated behavior that was willful and persistent violations of board policy pertaining to staff ethics as well as Ohio’s code of professional conduct for educators. And federal laws govern how she educates and serves the students. Well, that got some people’s attention since we had all just been told that any of the Lakota superintendent’s actions revealed from his very explicit divorce records that his conduct wasn’t illegal. And that morality wasn’t a consideration of employment. Upon learning about all this behavior, many people in the Lakota district were shocked that Lakota didn’t have a “morality clause” in the superintendent’s contract like other schools do. And in that oversight, they have allowed a very aggressive, a very progressive activist and an unwelcomed figure into our community at a high cost, with no way to get rid of him. And that has brought up the excessive cost of keeping that employee with indirect costs that go far beyond his actual salary and benefits. By the time his cost to Lakota is added up due to lawyer fees, public relations firms, and other burdens connected to other instances of similar mismanagement, it looks to be in the many thousands of dollars. Even millions if we go back to all the circumstances since his hiring in 2017 when that Emily Osterling case occurred. Now I’m not suddenly a supporter of teacher union members. But the point of this matter is how Emily Osterling could be held to some standard of values and even terminated from her job when Matt Miller was not held to the same standard as a superintendent for essentially doing much worse. 

Matt Miller was always nice in my presence, so I was shocked to learn that several school board members thought Matt would sue the district over his contract for a lot of money if he were terminated over the revelation of his divorce revelations in 2020. I had my doubts about this until I saw how he behaved toward the community who learned about his private life and expressed themselves as to why they didn’t like it. The letter I received was very aggressive, and my policy on that kind of thing was to hit back many times harder. That’s when discussion about a class action case started to take root in gathering up all the facts and the timeline. And after reading that letter, it was obvious that the school board’s worries were justified. However, to understand the law, it would have been better to settle the issue in court than to dig deeper into the trouble with attempts to cover it all up with PR firms and lawyers. Understanding the constitutional limits of legal recourse, it would have been perfectly justified to counter any such attack with frivolous litigation given the context of his contract concerning community reputation, which was his burden to maintain healthily. 

With the standard set by the Emily Osterling case, it’s evident that a community precedent had been established in removing her as an employee. It didn’t hold up in court, and they ended up paying her out a lot of money. Add her case to the many others out there and we have a serious case of mismanagement at the school board level over a long period of time. The job has been too big for them to handle since they give everything to some professional class to take care of, which ends up costing a lot of money. Of course, there will be justifiable legal costs, with legal firms and PR outlets, but what we are seeing is a massive amount of waste, waste we wouldn’t have noticed unless Lakota’s superintendent decided to attack members of the community in these bizarre ways as if he were entitled to employment, no matter what his personal conduct revealed. Much of this he has done to himself through his own mismanagement of his own life. Then Lakota, as a district, has had to spend a lot of money to protect him from his own actions. Then when you add up all those costs to all other similar disputes with other employees and public relations problems, you get quite a large number. And that large number results from massive mismanagement by a public-school culture that is out of control and not aligned with the community that pays for it.

And in many cases, the only correction we have for such bad behavior on a massive scale is the constitutional protections of The New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964. No wonder progressives everywhere want to shut down free speech. But all the law of our country is built around constitutional law, not the protection of public employees by a judgmental public. Without those judgments, there is literally nothing to keep public employees honest. And what is such an insult with this case at Lakota, despite learning that the very things that are happening now and being justified as correct were the same things that same superintendent did to get rid of other employees, for ethical standards. And to keep people from talking about it, he sent out nasty threats to people hoping to crush criticism which in his case, the criticisms are more than well justified. The best advice anybody could give him would be that he shouldn’t be making news if he doesn’t want to be in the news. And threatening the community for their anger at his actions is making news, not the kind Lakota would like to have. But it’s just the latest in a long history of mistakes that have cost a fortune and have nothing to do with funding education for children. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Senate Control Stolen in the Middle of a Saturday Night: The battle is about information control and who decides its quality

You can never allow a centralized authority to control what information is. And clearly, the goal has been to use this China model of information control decided upon by some administrative state who would determine what information is and that would then become the standard for reality. Our concern is playing out in the election of 2022, as it was during the election of 2020, and the global push to control the message around Covid.   But then again, we’ve seen this behavior at the local level in the school district I live in, where those who represent the administrative state have insisted that they control reality by defining what information is. When bad behavior was questioned by the public of those in charge of the school, the action against the public was almost identical to what we are seeing nationally and internationally from what have conveniently been called globalists. Maybe it’s not surprising since most people get their education from the same controlled sources so that they would think alike shouldn’t be such an abnormality. But the insistence on altering reality with collective belief to support some mass agreement that decides whether information is relevant or not is bizarre. In the case of the local school issue, many who have come under attack by that trending insistence of information control and giving control entirely to the authority figures to decide what information is or isn’t had to be reminded of the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964) case. Information is merit-based, and good information or bad information is decided by the quality of the information, not who controls the definition of it. Which is undoubtedly applicable to the FBI, the Biden administration, or the Desecrators of Davos who insist that the greatest threat to the world is climate change, as it’s clear that what really matters is who controls the votes in the world and by what means. 

Overnight during the first weekend after the election of 2022, where Republicans had been trending ahead for control of the Senate, it was announced by the Fox News desk that Catherine Cortez Mastro would keep control of the Senate, beating Adam Laxalt in Nevada. With the election taking over a week to process and the obvious vote counting slowing down to a drip, drip, the obvious strategy was to wear everyone out, announce the results over the weekend while everyone was sleeping and retain power in at least one of the houses of Congress in America who represent the needs of the Desecrators of Davos. There will be a runoff in Georgia to determine a seat, and there is still lots of smoke in the Alaska race that has obviously been built to control how information is processed and distributed to the public to show control when it clearly doesn’t represent what voters wanted. It’s the same kind of situation as we just witnessed in the elections in Brazil with Bolsonaro. The good news is that we are not talking about the obvious, we have watched people we formally trusted, such as Leader Mitch McConnell, the Fox News Team, and even the Associated Press let us down for some goals that were not specifically American in their value. But it’s like Trump has said all along, it’s not the voter that matters as much as the people who count the votes. And in controlling that information, people who don’t deserve to be in power have been able to retain it. Was there a Red Wave in the 2022 elections? Well, yes. More than 6 million more Republican voters voted for Congress members, so they were energized to give input into their government and the management of the information it uses to govern our country. Then the reason that reality didn’t translate to more flipping of seats to acquire power is the evidence that shows information of massive voter irregularities that show the wrong people are representing our country in government. But to hide that from the public, the authority figures, just like the local school system functioning from the same value systems, insist that they determine what information and value it has to the public. Anybody who doesn’t follow their narrative is a domestic terrorist. Essentially, the China model. 

But what is to be done about this? Well, just as in the Sullivan case utilized above, we do have a constitutional means to deal with this very problem before everyone goes for the Second Amendment to attack the problem of blatant election fraud to keep the powers of government that have been selling America out, in the position to decide what the definitions of information are so that they can then control mass society even in bizarre ways that leave people shaking their heads in disgust. I would offer that the pressure of competing information to dispute falsehoods is the best way to solve all these problems. Free speech is the immeasurable remedy to all this blatant corruption. The reason that corruption exists at all is that we have trusted the sources of information too much over time, empowering these corrupt malcontents and letting them think they would get away with all this information manipulation. The forces in power decide what is true or not authentic based on their power needs. Not on what reality decides. That has been wondrously obvious with the local issue I mentioned, and there are good lessons to learn from it that certainly apply to the mess at the national and international levels. The bad guys are in a fight to claim the definition of what information is, and they insist through force on altering your opinions of everything to enforce it in ways that serve them. So to fix that problem, we must attack them there. 

The way to defeat bad information is with good information, and the plan for many years now has been to gain control of the means of distributing that information, whether it was corporate media, the record industry, print media, the Associated Press, or whatever people trusted as information. The belief was that if those sources could be captured and controlled, then control over America’s mass population could occur. The vile manipulators who wanted to take America down from within thought they’d have an easy time of it if only they could shut people up and control the definitions of good information from bad information. But information is what it is, good or bad; it is merit that decides its quality. And when information is competitive, people can then decide through free will what its value to society is. Without good information to fight bad information, the FBI could then decide what reality is and enforce it in society accordingly. That is why the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964) case was so important. It is relevant for local problems, but it’s just as relevant for national and international issues as well. Reality is decided by the most truthful information as determined in the battlefield of ideas. And in the wake of the very good elections of 2022, we can clearly see what good and bad information is. There will be lots of talk about election fraud that will be correct. The corrupt behavior was on full display for all to see because there was freedom of information to pass judgment on the behavior, whereas other places in the world do not have such an ability.   People in other countries might grumble at the local grocery about their corrupt governments. But in America, we can do so, and the authorities are not allowed to come and arrest us and put us in jail over it. Or destroy us in the courts. They have certainly tried to give us that impression. But they have not been successful. They may have stolen the 2022 election and held power cosmetically. But we learned a lot in the process, and that information will be infinitely more valuable. And a better future is on the horizon because of it. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trying to Find Something Nice to Say About Mike DeWine: Are Fran’s cookies enough?

Obviously, I’m not a Mike DeWine fan. He blew it during Covid by leading the nations into the lockdowns and open tyranny that the rest of the blue-state Democrats followed to ruin our lives. I know people who had their lives utterly ruined during the Mike DeWine lockdowns and even died. The social isolation, the separation of family members, and the attempts to shut down social gatherings such as churches over some ridiculous government tampering with the medical industry were reprehensible, and Mike DeWine led the way. My kids absolutely hate Mike DeWine; his dumb behavior set back their lives by likely seven years at least and personally cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it was no small feat when a person I know who is very close to the DeWine administration asked me if I could think of something nice to say about the guy ahead of the Midterm elections on November 8th, 2022. I can usually think of something nice to say about anybody. But on Mike DeWine, he has essentially been a Democrat, and I don’t like anything about Democrats. Just because he put an “R” next to his name doesn’t make him a Republican. As we have seen at many levels of politics, an “R” isn’t enough. Suppose a politician doesn’t act like a Republican. In that case, I think worse of them than if we are just dealing with a Democrat because we are dealing with another level of dishonesty, and DeWine sold himself dishonestly when he proposed that he was a Republican. Yet the person running against Mike DeWine for this 2022 governor race is even worse as a Democrat, so the question is, do you vote for the Democrat who is pretending to be a Republican, or do you deal with the radical socialist who calls herself a Democrat but might as well be the secretary of Karl Marx? These are tough choices and not very good for a world of free and fair elections. 

So I have been digging deep, trying to find something I like about Mike DeWine. My friend knows I represent a lot of Republican voters who just will never put their name next to Mike DeWine because of how he behaved during his first term. But a few nice words from me might encourage others who feel the same way to maybe hold their nose and vote for DeWine anyway, for the good of the party. So this has been a tough one for me, and I have had to work hard at it for several weeks now, trying to find anything good about Mike DeWine, and the thing that jumped out most to me was that his wife, Fran, makes good cookies. I had a chance to meet with Mike DeWine a few months ago at an event, and his wife gave me some cookies, and they were really good. Were they good enough to elect him governor again? Well, maybe. Ruin people’s lives, kill them with lockdowns by putting the liberal disaster Amy Acton in charge of Ohio Health Care, but Fran’s cookies…………………… it’s kind of like weighing an Egyptian heart against a feather to see if you can pass into the Duat during death. 

But then I had to think of some more things if I could, and I can say with a straight face that during the last two years of Mike DeWine’s term, he has worked well with the Republican Reps and Senate on gun legislation. DeWine has been good on gun control measures and pro-Second Amendment concerns. He even signed H.B. 99, which my local state rep, Thomas Hall, sponsored, which provided standards for teacher training to be armed in public schools to fight back against the risk of school shootings. So, those are a few real things that Mike DeWine has done in his first term that was very positive. Sure, he wouldn’t have done them at all unless he was way underwater with Republican voters because of what he did during Covid. But it’s way better than what we would have had under Nan Whaley. Mike DeWine has signed real law proposed by the Ohio legislature that provided constitutional carry and Stand your Ground law that has undoubtedly made Ohio much better from a Second Amendment perspective. And that’s kind of what politics is, a give and take, and if it took so many people to hate Mike DeWine to make him strong on Second Amendment issues, then maybe that’s a good thing.

Then there is an issue that I care about quite a lot, and that is the election of Sharon Kennedy to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I know Sharon, and she is fantastic. I would love to see her become the Chief Justice, which is very possible. The Supreme Court, for a long time now, has been in a balancing act between liberalism and conservative value. If Sharon wins the Chief Justice position, then her replacement would then be appointed by Mike DeWine. And in that way, like the gun control legislation, DeWine would pick a strong conservative, which would certainly help secure the Supreme Court with much more conservative representation. Ultimately, we must have a conservative Supreme Court. We have a strong presence of conservatives among the State Reps and the Senate, but the Supreme Court has been weak. A lot of people have called themselves “Rs,” but in reality, they have been very liberal by their voting record. DeWine, in other years, might have picked a liberal for the Supreme Court nomination, but he’s not dumb. He sees where things are going in this MAGA Republican Party, so he would be very inclined to appease Republicans with a strong pick.

So there are three things I thought of nice to say about Mike DeWine. See, I can find something nice to say about anybody, even him. He has been good for the last two years on Second Amendment issues. He has a good chance of doing very well on the Supreme Court by picking a conservative replacement for the Chief Justice. Based on what DeWine has done with gun rights, this particular year would likely be a more conservative choice than in other years. Then there are the cookies. Should we vote for Mike DeWine because of his wife’s cookies? Maybe it does all come down to that.

Sometimes you get governors who are so out of touch that you can’t even talk to them when you see them. Fran was always so personable when I was at that event with the DeWines. Mike asked me if I wanted a picture; I, of course, said that I was good. I didn’t want a picture. He didn’t make any strange faces; he just moved on to the next person. But Fran made sure I had some cookies, and they were very good. Even though I think of the DeWine family as a bunch of Democrats, I can at least say that they mean well. That was DeWine’s excuse after Covid; he thought he was doing the right things and just following the orders of the CDC. And that is always the danger of following government; they usually don’t know what’s best. But they have the power to impose their view of reality on people, which makes them dangerous. But Fran DeWine’s cookies were good. All voters will have to make that hard choice on November 8th. Are Fran’s cookies enough? 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Protect Lakota Kids.com and the Public Records that Show all the Evidence: Defending children from the extreme liberalism of Lakota schools

It’s not like the bad behavior at Lakota schools happened overnight. It took place over a long period of time. For those who have been wanting to see all the evidence from the Matt Miller divorce and the crazy sexual lifestyle of the superintendent of Lakota that has been much talked about, you can see it all down to the last public document at the excellent website Protect Lakota Kids.com.  CLICK TO Visit for yourself. I am proud of the great people who put that site together, and you better believe it; it was not an enterprise of a few lonely people. It’s a community effort; even better, over 600 people have signed the petition to protect Lakota Kids from the diabolical exploits of the radical progressives who work for all these government schools. This particular school is in our neighborhood, and it is challenging our values as a community, so it’s great to see people coming together to stand up to the vile behavior that has been on full display for quite a while now. The evidence of that behavior is reflected in the meeting segment shown below. A parent gave a very nice speech about the bad behavior of the superintendent, but additionally on the behavior of the school board members and other administrators. No wonder they didn’t see anything wrong with the superintendent’s sexual behavior because they are just as bad in many cases. What does that say about the people who run Lakota schools, especially when you can see for yourself just how bad that behavior has been for the superintendent? 

When the upset parent’s speech was given, I was working on getting new school board members elected. For me, that was the solution: to get better management on the board who would take the job a lot more seriously, not drink so much, and find themselves in compromising situations when they went to social events around town and out of town. The stories from some of these events have been horrendous and embarrassing to me. I like my community; I think there are a lot of good people who live in Butler County. I’ve been associated with Butler County most of my life. I could have lived anywhere in the world that I wanted, but I loved Butler County so much that I stayed in the area by choice. But these extreme leftist types who always come with more government expansion, especially in the public schools, do not represent the values of the community I have known for five decades. Many people moved to the area to be part of that kind of community. They did not move to Butler County to be embarrassed by the extreme liberalism of Lakota schools. For too long, they have put up with it to go along to get along. But after learning more about just how liberal and sexually reckless the people who run Lakota schools really are, there has been a very steady chorus of anger that has been building for several years now. To say the least, when Matt Miller was hired to be the superintendent in 2017, he reflected the values obviously of the people who hired him. And to understand what those values were, just read the voluminous public records on the Protect Lakota Kids website. We know the school board knew in 2020 just how bad things were, and instead of fixing the problem, they moved to cover everything up, which everyone should find alarming.

I had hopes that good management might fix some of these problems, but instantly the governing board gave the new school board members a fruit basket of friendship and worked to either bring them into the fold or to get rid of them. One of the newly elected board members seemed to like the fruit basket. The other one could care less, and instantly, Matt Miller and his partners on the school board worked quickly to get rid of her. And at that point, it was apparent that I had wasted my time trying to work with the board to have proper management at Lakota. Because the sexual deviants, the swingers, and the radical left loons who make up Lakota management wanted to protect their racket from the outside eyes of the holy rollers in the community and their pesky “Christian values.” They had no desire to listen to voters; they simply wanted to hide bad behavior from the public, and by reviewing the public documents at Protect Lakota Kids, it’s obvious that this was a common assumption, not an isolated behavior. With our tax money, we were funding the kind of behavior among the adults at Lakota that we wouldn’t endorse in our community otherwise except behind the innocent faces of our children. 

Yes, the title of that website, Protect Lakota Kids.com, is appropriate because if we don’t do it, who will? The school board certainly isn’t interested in helping kids find their moral compass in life. And if we aren’t teaching kids the basics of living a good, productive life, then what are we teaching them to be? If you leave it to the school, the role model they have in mind is Matt Miller. Obviously, the Lakota superintendent has serious sexual issues, as chronicled by the public records listed on the Protect Lakota Kids website. And you don’t have to live in Lakota to have an opinion about this matter. This is a problem in all public schools. Everywhere there are government schools, we see the same essential issues.

What is different about the school district of Lakota is that parents are taking control of their community. We have tried to elect good school board members. But the progressive types have rebelled against that notion. So, if parents can’t control their school board, they will create awareness with their own media, with websites like Protect Lakota Kids.com.   At that site, they are doing the job that the media should have been doing all along. But it’s not as if good people didn’t try to do things the traditional way. Speeches like the frustrated parent shown here have been going on for a long time. And it proves that the school board chose not to listen and to act to defend the bad behavior from the judgment of the public at all costs. And that isn’t acceptable. We aren’t paying all the money that we do in taxes to fuel this level of liberal politics. Butler County is a very conservative place in the world, and Lakota schools are a playground of liberalism that has embedded itself into our community in extremely unhealthy ways. It’s a fight worth having because, in the end, the product of the community is the children. Left to their own devices, the leadership of Lakota is intent on making kids into reflections of their own impoverished lifestyles, into the train wrecks spoken about by that concerned parent. I know that parent, and when she was talking about handpicking people from the GOP for the school board, she was talking about my work. She was frustrated with the results; she was ready to give up on the school way back then. I would say that it’s always good to try to fix something. But to her point, Lakota has been beyond gone for a long time now. And it will never get better if we allow them to govern themselves. Because given a choice, Lakota management will always pick the wrong thing.

Rich Hoffman

Protect Our Lakota Kids

Why The Desecrators of Davos Want to Redefine Our History: If you know the truth, you won’t listen to them

There’s been a little game going on for a very long time that is the core of all our political movements around the world. Many people recognize the problem and point to secret societies, and all their maniacal schemes are revealed as danger from behind many curtains of concealment as the ultimate villain. But it’s far more profound than that, and it all centers around history and our understanding of it. One thing that is clear coming out of the World Economic Forum events at Davos over the last several years, and we’ve seen it in the United States through attacks such as the 1619 Project, is the desire to reinterpret history so that a modern political class can make a move to change our society into what they want to control. We’ve seen it in the push to remove the Bible from courtrooms; we’ve seen it attempting to make slavery a Republican problem and undo the foundation of America in the first place. The game is to feed mass populations a lot of garbage and keep them from having the opportunity to know the truth about themselves and their own history so that centralized bureaucrats within the Administrative State can easily control them. However, even as much as I talk about politics, I know a lot more about history, and it’s easy for me to see what’s going on, which is why I have been spending more time on history lately. The clear strategy is to redefine the historical narrative so that “they” (the Desecrators of Davos) can become our new gods from the perspective of the “technocrat” and rule the world just as any king or dictator from times past might have tried. I have addressed many of the concerns about artificial intelligence and the future of robots in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, to counter what the Desecrators of Davos have been saying, hoping to scare people into compliance. Instead, the actual game is what we all must stay focused on to understand what they are really after.

Much of what I do in life, I don’t mind saying because, in many ways, the explosions have already gone off, and there isn’t a damn thing anybody can do about it now is operate like the demolition experts in Force Ten From Navarone did in that famous war movie. In that film, the goal was for a small crack team to blow up a dam that would then flood out a bridge to prevent Germans from crossing a vital river and attack Allied forces. So a small group of two people takes their little bag of explosives into the center of the giant dam complex to set it off, only to realize that the charge was too small to destroy the dam. Feeling like they failed, the two guys leave thinking all is lost. But, as the demolition expert understood from the outset, if the charge were too big, they never would have been able to get it behind enemy lines. Therefore, the charge was designed to be small but to set off a chain reaction that would gradually put cracks in the dam, allowing the pressure of the water behind the dam to do the rest of the job, which is what happened. The small charge set off cracks in the dam that grew bigger and bigger until the whole thing came apart. That is how I see the attacks we are inflicting upon the Desecrators of Davos and the many secret societies that have been working behind them with cult-like persistence for many centuries. So the global attackers’ goals today, the rumors of child sacrifice that go on behind the curtain of our society, and the media’s seeming complicit to help cover up appear very scary. But when you understand the goals and how to beat them, things start to make a lot more sense. That is why they don’t want people to understand history.

So what’s going on? Well, there is a push from the global elite, that people call them, to return the earth to a global species of goddess worshipers, to the religions that predate Egypt and most of the advanced cultures we think of in such a way. The truth is, and this is why I have been talking about Atlantis a lot more lately, is that these global forces and their secret societies want to get back to that origin story; they want to erase the ideas of Christianity away as if it never existed and force everyone into this cult of blood sacrifice to the mother earth as things were in societies of Atlantis and even much older. You can always tell what people are up to by what they attempt to keep people away from. Talk about Atlantis was common until the 1930s when the progressive movement in America began taking over politics and our media culture. But the truth is that Atlantis was a major cultural center with international commerce at least 10,000 years ago. Whatever happened to the talk about an island in the middle of the Atlantic, a large island that sunk by many thousands of feet, leaving behind only the mountaintops in the Azores and Canary Islands, the people of Atlantis, who were very tall in stature, which led to the mythology of the Titans in Greek mythology, and the giants of the British Islands, the people migrated into North America where the center of all culture was until a giant comet came and wiped everyone out. The descendants of the cataclysm, over the next 4000 years or so, reestablished what they remembered from those times. We have the many cultures of the world that led to what we know about in Sumer, Egypt, and the events that led up to the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran, with Buddhism evolving in the far East. All these influences are similar yet developed their own evolution, cut off from the homeland of the original earth-worshiping culture.    

The thing that nobody wants to say is why we should ever want to return to Atlantis as the Mason movement obviously wants to, along with many secret societies with the same aim. The idea of devil worship and astrology is to deface the beliefs of Christianity that developed, which created western civilization centered around the pronoun “I” and to return to sacrifices to the forces of nature which govern the universe. The idea that man would use science to dominate nature is a threat to members of that ancient religious order, which is why people like Yuval Harari are trying to scare everyone away from science by saying that humans will cease to exist and will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence. But with the evolution of western ideas, which grow out of the Bible, the concept of mankind dominating and owning nature is a threat to the globalist forces who have not yet matured and grapple at the skirt of mother earth because they are terrified of a self-fulfilling future. America represents that self-fulfilling future, which is why they seek to destroy it. As far as Atlantis society evolving out of North America and being a global trading alliance, you can trace the history of the Aztecs to their ancestors in the caves of Aztlan, in the White Sands area of New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona, and follow the Indian legends of prehistory for them and see how things connect. I would point the curious to the Skinwalker Ranch just outside Vernal, Utah, for evidence of this lost society. But it’s all about scope; you have to pull back far enough to see the whole picture before you can understand it, and why the Desecrators of Davos want to limit that vision for their own attempts at global domination, and to know why they want to do it. Then and only then can we make a moral case for America, which is precisely what I plan to do over the coming years. The slow explosion that will bring down all they are holding back and destroy their intentions where they are powerless to stop it. Wait until we get into the empire of giants that ruled in North America during the Archaic period, but that’s for a bit later after the cracks in the damn are more obvious. This will be fun!

Rich Hoffman

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Yuval Harari Couldn’t be More Wrong: The Desecrators of Davos are as clueless as a child just born, perhaps worse

My position has always been that I’ll put my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business against any of the books published by the World Economic Forum losers any day of the week as a strategy guide for the future, and it will win every time. It is undoubtedly true of the books by Klaus Schwab. I’ve read them all and have considered them the work of an insane lunatic hell-bent on taking over the world. But one thing I was reminded of by Alex Jones in his new excellent book, The Great Reset, was the motivations behind Yuval Harari. I have read some of his books, but I’ve always blown him off as background noise of progressive nonsense and a person obsessed with a false historical narrative designed to manipulate the world as Carroll Quigley did in his Tragedy and Hope. In the case of Harari, the modern version of Tragedy and Hope, his thrust is that only through cooperation does the human race advance, so if the world managers want to control the course of history, then the good bureaucrat essentially seeks to force collaboration between people to provoke the proper outcomes. In all cases with these Desecrators of Davos people, they expect to be more educated than the average person so nobody will ever question their flimsy view of the world and will think of them as geniuses, which includes people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Fink and many others who make up the audience of Yuval Harari.

My policy is always an open invitation to these Desecrator types. I’ve seen their guest lists, and nobody is attending the World Economic Forum in Davos that I expect to lose a debate against. I wrote my most recent book as I watched the Desecrators of Davos types move against an America First Trump Presidency in 2017 and 2018. In my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I talk about the future of artificial intelligence in far more accurate ways than Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari in placing the technocrat as the future of all mankind. They couldn’t be more wrong, and they certainly don’t understand the power of the individual. Their concepts of mass collectivism, which go far beyond the ridiculous limits of Karl Marx, are childlike and extremely naive. But because they have gained access to money and influence, and in human societies, those tend to be the default modes of operation that make people into kings, which we have yet to evolve beyond as a species, then the smoke screen that they can build as members of the wealthy elite is that they know something that everyone else doesn’t know. And the truth is, they don’t. They are all indeed like the wizard in The Wizard of Oz; they use their money to buy influence in the world. They use special effects to appear smarter and more intelligent than the rest of society. But really, they are just feeble losers hiding behind a curtain that a simple dog could pull away their concealment to reveal the truth. There is nothing about the Desecrators of Davos that is all that special. They have simply taken advantage of gullible people from the position of concealment to appear to be bigger and better than they really are. That is until you actually read their books and argue with them. That’s when people like Yuval Harari shrivel away under the weight of intellectual scrutiny. When pressed with reality, they can never answer the questions because their thoughts are entirely products of the safety of their academic vacuums, which formulate outside the reality of truth.   

My position has always been that it’s the individuals who develop great methods of leadership who make the world spin, not the forced technocrat strategies of forced cooperation, for which the United Nations has built its entire existence, and force global corporations to adopt the same methods for their basic survival. There is a reason that most large companies are brain dead from the beginning to end of their organization charts because they have lost leadership ability. Their blind trust in the ridiculous claims people like Yuval Harari make about human cooperation has cost them billions and billions of dollars in revenue. To cover up their mistakes, they more fully commit to the failure to hide them from the world. And in this way, most major corporations have fallen into the trap of adopting failure to cover up their mistakes in following these losers at the World Economic Forum. The Disney Company finds itself in just such a place now that, obviously, the world isn’t going to accept woke politics as its reality in America. And the rest of the world is following the populist path as well. The books of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari will not be accepted as the thought of a global people. Only the suckers who are bad managers themselves who join the World Economic Forum hoping to hide like the Wizard of Oz just how dumb and cowardly they really are as managers that collectivism becomes their security blanket. In my book and most of my work, I argue that problems must be faced, like a gunfighter in the street fending off bad guys. To do that, you must have courage, leadership, and know how to identify a bad guy. In the case of Yuval Harari, the bad guys trick everyone into the street unarmed and shake hands to make peace and avoid the need to have a conflict. Meanwhile, the bad guys get a free hand in the town to do as they please, which is why the world is as bad off as it is now. 

I can’t recommend the new Alex Jones book, The Great Reset, enough. For people who don’t want to read all the ridiculous books of the Desecrators of Davos, Alex does an excellent job of putting them into one book their true essence. His book is a one-stop shop pointing out the dangers of globalism, as is the clear intention of Schwab and Harari, who then lead many of the world’s billionaires to a promised land of guilt, hiding in their own way. When you make enough money like the Zuckerbergs and the Gates people do, the George Soros types, and the Larry Fink manipulators at BlackRock, then there is always a danger that they might be able to buy the loyalty of nations through some indirect means. And to hide that tendency from themselves, they always find themselves attracted to people like Yuval Harari and are more than willing to twist history and perspective into pretzels to help hide the guilt of their own faulty existence. It would also be my argument that some people are too smart to become rich, like Bill Gates, because there is a cost to that wealth. I certainly wouldn’t be willing to pay it. When you have that much money, there are always people who want to be near you all the time. In the case of Donald Trump, he thrives in those kinds of environments. But I wouldn’t trade him places any day of the week. Time to your own thoughts in your own way of achieving them is far more valuable, and I think people who are shopping at Walmart and Target and getting chicken sandwiches at Chick-fil-a are far more intelligent than those at Davos. But unlike those Desecrators of Davos, they don’t have the luxury of the money to buy their innocence and attempt to trick the entire world into believing they are something they aren’t. The ultimate truth is that people can still see the broken-up people behind the curtain and aren’t fooled.

Rich Hoffman

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A Review of Alex Jones’ ‘The Great Reset’: What to do after a prom date goes bad

It has been quite an experience, two different books by the same name came out within a year of each other, but the conditions of the world were vastly different between the two. When Glenn Beck’s book called The Great Reset came out in January of 2022, I have come to think of it like that daughter you might have who is preparing to go to prom. Some slack-jawed loser wants to take your little girl out on the town as a prom date, and being a nice compliant subservient to the local school system; we are supposed just to let it happen without protest. The kid shows up in a piece of junk car with stringy hair and slumped shoulders, and you’re supposed to be happy about it. He pins a flower onto her expensive dress while you and your wife record the moment with pictures you are sure she will want to look at for the rest of her life. You shake hands with the dude even though you want to break his neck, stuff him into the refrigerator, and wave to her as she leaves with him on what you know as a parent will lead to doom and regret.   But society tells you that you have no choice in the matter, that she is a girl of the world, and you are the dad, and you must allow this thing to happen. Reading Glenn Beck’s version of The Great Reset is much like this scenario. You know that there are vile characters who want to do bad things to your mother country, America, and you can now see who they are, which was wonderfully outlined in the book. 

But then recently, in the same year of 2022, some eight months later, Alex Jones’ book called The Great Reset came out. That version of the same topic is like that same prom date, only that it’s when your daughter comes home at 4 AM in the morning. She’s beaten up with bruises all over her body. Her dress is torn to pieces. She can’t find her underwear. She is crying and tells you that she lost her date around midnight and can’t remember most of the evening. And it’s quite clear she had been sexually assaulted, and she doesn’t even know by whom. So instead of having pleasant memories of her first prom, you are now at the police station filing a police report, and there is a manhunt on for her date, who has also turned up missing. And the evening is officially a disaster that she will spend the rest of her life trying to forget. That is the level of the truth bombs revealed in Alex Jones’ book on the characters of the World Economic Forum and their inspirations for world domination. I couldn’t recommend reading it enough because, honestly, people need the shock to understand to what extent our country has been attacked over a 100-year period. Glenn Beck had been much more amicable when he wrote his book, but since that innocent time of less than a year ago, so much more has been revealed, and our nation’s innocence has undoubtedly been lost. And now, we must figure out what we are going to do about it. That is the Alex Jones version of The Great Reset. It’s the harsh reality without the kindness, and it’s the answer that many people are seeking as we come upon the midterm elections where the American uniqueness of the Bill of Rights has prevented an all-out attack on our nation and left the bad guys vulnerable to the mass public for the first time in history. 

A couple of parts of the book that really stood out to me were issues that I have long talked about, such as China was, the creation of this World Economic Forum group, people who work behind the scenes of the United Nations and purposely propped up the poor country with finance going back to the post World War II days and the Nixon Administration. Without American influence, as I say all the time, and few people joining the cause, except for Alex Jones, China would fall apart into another poor country of barely functioning farmers. It was the people I call the Desecrators of Davos, the so-called elites of the World Economic Forum, who have been transferring global wealth into China to give it stolen power to implement their goal of a big bad Administrative State run by communism, controlled by those same Desecrators of Davos. China isn’t the real villain; it’s the one they created to attack America and the world through force and finance. And their intentions for our destruction are straightforward and involve many of our own people who have clearly worked against us all with treason and sedition. They ignored our Constitution and assumed that they could do what they wanted to us and that there would be no ramifications. Alex Jones does an excellent job in his book of telling the history of China, and we see the same kind of action being taken today with Ukraine, which is under the same spell for the same reasons. Ukraine is a United Nations-created country that is the money laundering capital of the world for these same global villains meant to destroy the nationalism of Russia for global control. Other than all that, they are all nice people. 

Then there is the thing that I think is the most important, and I haven’t heard many people willing to back me up on it until now. Alex states the obvious, but he does it boldly; when he declares that he believes that the Covid virus was made in a Chinese lab and unleashed as a bioweapon, he has done the world an excellent service. It’s about time that people admit to themselves that Covid was a military attack by the Desecrators of Davos against the world so that they could usher in their Great Reset that Klaus Schwab and his band of international pirates clearly had planned with treasonous help from Americans in finance, corporate influence, and politics. If you’ve ever read the Klaus Schwab version of The Great Reset, which I have, you will understand why Glenn Beck and Alex Jones have put out their warnings in similarly titled books. To me, Klaus Schwab was insane in his utterances, but I took him seriously years ago when Covid was released. I immediately knew what it was and where it came from, and the rest of the world has been slow to name the villain. It’s like finding out that the kid who assaulted your daughter and has gone missing is actually the CEO of the company you work for, so if you punch him in the nose, you are probably going to lose your job. Yet, you must do more than punch the CEO in the nose; you must prosecute him and go toe to toe with all his vast and infinite resources. But because it’s the right thing, you must do it. The Covid created virus by these Desecrators of Davos harmed the entire world simultaneously, and it was all meant to give Klaus Schwab and his minions a Great Reset economically. It’s quite clear, especially in hindsight. The world is slowly figuring it all out. And to know what to do next, they must read Alex Jones’ version of The Great Reset. It is the truth bomb that people need, and I can’t recommend it more!

Rich Hoffman

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The Truth About Vanessa Wells: Crawling through the mud is where the bad guys hide their crimes

According to the media narrative that Fox 19 in Cincinnati has tried to establish, and many of the liberal losers within the Rinos for Lakota group, they think the revelation of the bad things that Lakota superintendent Matt Miller has done, which Vanessa Wells revealed, was out of revenge because she was not elected to the school board during the last election. Such a suggestion is really ridiculous, especially when the real story is known. I speak with Vanessa Wells a lot, sometimes every few hours during a day, so I have a pretty good understanding of what she is doing and why she does it. I also understand why people didn’t want me to work with her and tried to convince me that she was dangerous and out of control. I wasn’t born yesterday. Usually, people don’t like someone because they don’t want to live up to the measure that a harder-working person applies to others. Or, their value systems just aren’t compatible. In Vanessa’s case, it’s likely both; she has a high moral value for how things should work, making political people very upset. And she is sharp as a tack, more intelligent than many lawyers that I know. It is not surprising that she has so many lawyers in her orbit right now because they are attracted to her intelligence and sense of justice. And I said to Vanessa recently what I thought about those election results last year where she fell short of winning.

There is a story to that, which I’ll get into shortly, but I’m glad she isn’t on the school board. She is far more influential behind the scenes than she ever would have been in an “official” role. I think Darbi Boddy has done a great job on the school board. I’d love to have more people like her on the school board. But you also need people like Vanessa Wells to work in the trenches, crawl through the mud where all the bad stuff is hidden and where the radical union elements conduct all their malice. I’m a big fan of Vanessa Wells, and I’m glad she is doing what she’s doing. Lakota is far better off because of her.

I remember when Lynda O’Conner introduced me to Vanessa Wells as a proposed school board member. Lynda is now the Lakota school board president, and I wanted to help her get more conservative votes on the school board that more adequately represented the actual residents of Butler County, Ohio. Vanessa was sharp and willing to learn all she could. But as we got closer to the election, and we had to do fundraising for the candidates, and she had to appear at events to get on the Republican Party slate card, Vanessa’s people were not happy with her. They were worried she would go from a rag-tag freedom fighter and concerned mom to a sell-out politician from their perspective, just like all the other sell-outs in the world. I assured Vanessa that wouldn’t be the case, but she was having doubts as the election drew near. And after she won a lawsuit against Lakota schools, Lynda started pushing Vanessa away, so things were getting rough for everyone to be in the same room together. We gave Vanessa a campaign manager to help her with the tasks of winning an election, Bruce Jones, the outstanding fiscal officer of West Chester, and the guy Sheriff Jones wanted to replace Roger Reynolds with as the Butler County Auditor, but the more structure we gave Vanessa, the less authentic she felt her ambitions for the job were, and she was becoming miserable. 

Vanessa approached me several weeks before the November election because she wanted out and to drop off the slate card for the Republican Party of Butler County. She was worried that I would be very angry. But I understood. She worried that if she dropped off, it would make me look bad to the eyes of all the movers and shakers. I told her I understood, that everyone involved had seen more than a few rough elections and that I didn’t care. I told her I wanted her to feel good about what she was doing and that, ultimately, she had to do what she thought was right. So, she dropped off the Republican slate card and ran independently. Of course, I heard about it from just about everyone, but I didn’t try to talk Vanessa out of her decision. Without the slate card inclusion, Vanessa won 5000 votes when the election came around. Darby Boddy and Isaac Adi, who stayed on the card, were the top vote-getters, and if Vanessa had stayed with it, she would have easily have beaten Kelly Casper. The radical union element just didn’t have enough gas to get much more than 7000 votes, so many of our thoughts about voter engagement and turnout, if given conservative options, turned out to be true. Vanessa, without party identification on election day, did exceptionally well. So, there is no shame in what she did or her performance. And there certainly isn’t any desire for revenge. We were all surprised she did as well as she did without the Republican endorsement. Without endorsements, she might have won anyway because she performed so strongly. Any thoughts anybody might have about Vanessa Wells wanting to get revenge on Lakota schools because she didn’t win the school board race simply don’t understand the situation. 

Yet, I’ve always said there needs to be leadership behind the scenes and on the board. It takes a lot more than a few public statements to manage a district full of radical left-winged loons and the union money extracted from property owners with essential threats to their children as the means to get it at play. And I told Vanessa recently that she has been far better for Lakota in the role she is in now than if she was in a straitjacket on the board where all the crazy union rules and the Ohio School Board Association creates methods to regulate the management, not the employees of the far-left political faction who want unencumbered access to our children. With Vanessa on the outside, she is free to act as she needs to, and she has managed to rally lots of good people to the cause, far better than if she was just another nameplate sitting at a desk talking into a microphone. And when she first told me she didn’t want the Republican endorsement, I thought about these possibilities, which have turned out to be very beneficial. I would go on to say that if there were no Vanessa Wells, then when a public employee did get caught doing bad stuff, there would have been nowhere to go with the information. Vanessa did what needed to be done with that information and handled it correctly and legally. And without her, nobody would know anything about this Matt Miller story. It would have been covered up and swept away like so many other issues are, right in front of our faces because the rules control the conduct of the school board. And there never are the kind of good people working in the mud to discover what they’ve been hiding. And the truth is, if Vanessa Wells had won that school board seat, it’s quite clear that many of the good things that are happening now wouldn’t have happened at all. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Newark Holy Stones and the Lost Civilization of Atlantis: Why we should all value David Wyrick and his very good work

I’ve talked about it before, but I don’t think there is anything more important in the archaeological record than the discovery of the Holy Stones of Newark, Ohio, in the stone mound found just to the south of the prominent site there. The Ten Commandments written on a stone that predates the publication of the Bible in North America is nothing short of jaw-dropping, which was undoubtedly the case when a very interesting person by the name of David Wyrick found what they call The Decalogue Stone in a stone box buried at the bottom of a very large, and ancient mound in 1860. Wyrick was digging in the mound with four other helpers when they found the stone box buried in a well-preserved tomb complete with a featured skeleton that Indian legend said was a very important person. Legend said that each time someone passed by the 50-foot mound, they put some kind of stone on it to pay respect. And by 1860, in a very remote part of the world outside of Columbus, Ohio, the entire mound was covered with enough stones to fill a wagon 15,000 times. So the mound had been there for a very long time. The material dating around the dig site was around 50 AD. But the stone itself could have been even much older. The entire problem with the stone was that nobody who could write ancient Hebrew should have been in Ohio at that time, and the mound culture that built Newark was already being associated with Adena and Hopewell Indians, and they wouldn’t have any concerns about the Ten Commandments. So rather than embrace the find, then and since, the liberal community of academia set quickly to plant their feet and discredit David Wyrick. 

It was mainly Democrats who moved to prove that the Newark Holy Stones were fakes. Yet all over North America, more stones were found that had the same essential problem, and entirely different people found them. The 1800s until about the 1920s was a unique period in America and science in general. Institutionalism had not been fully established, and adventure was the pride of the day because people could settle in a new land without a lot of government to restrict them for the first time in known history. So fresh ideas had time to develop, and adventurous thoughts were very much in fashion. Spiritualism was a popular social topic, and amateur archaeology in digging into the history of the previous cultures was exciting and unrestricted with limits like we have today with the Native American Graves Act, which is built on the premise that Indians were the indigenous culture that had their rights taken from them by the emergence of a hostile European conquest. Such laws were, in fact, created by the types of critics that immediately came forward to prove David Wyrick a hoax because the man was trying to prove that one of the Lost Tribes of Isreal had escaped into America after the destruction of the Second Temple at a time when it was generally accepted that ocean travel was not possible. It was also popular then to talk about Atlantis, contemplate the possibilities of an ancient culture that was very advanced, and consider what that might mean to the human race. As the Progressive Era took hold and the intentions of socialism were being slid under the door, the attempts to get control of society as the rest of the world already had been experiencing was fully underway, and the Democrats who were seeking to establish such an institutional world after the loss of their cause during the Civil War wanted nothing to do with robbing Indians of their heritage by saying that white-skinned Europeans with their Bible culture were part of the mound culture.

Yet, that is precisely where the evidence is pointing, but not quite the way that David Wyrick thought of it. What liberals don’t want to admit to, which is the key to most every argument against them, is that it’s the Vico Cycle at play with American Indians. And the dates for that influence go back much further than the early institutional controls of archaeology and anthropology care to admit. They have, over the last hundred years, purposely tried to fit all discoveries to the Liberal World Order narrative and have ignored the facts that were right in front of them all along and discovered in America during a very unique period of adventure that is unique to any culture then or since. There is no telling how many stones like the Newark Holy Stones have been found that are in private collections. One of the reasons we do have these stones with the Ten Commandments on them, which is one of the best examples of all that have been found, is because of David Wyrick and his obsession to prove that they came from the Lost Tribes of Israel. It was the equivalent at that time of admitting that the 2020 election was stolen. The Liberal World Order desired to say that election fraud was impossible where the evidence all points to the fact that it happened in massive amounts, enough to put lots of people in jail and change the fate of many millions of votes. Democrats wanted the system to save a narrative they wanted for their Progressive Era plans, where newly created Lincoln Republicans saw the Bible in everything, even in Indian culture, which didn’t fit the narrative that Europeans were bad to destroy the history of indigenous people because liberals needed that narrative to set up their goals of destroying the concept of America with guilt since they had lost the slavery argument and had to try other methods if they were going to bring Karl Marx to the newly formed country and get control of institutionalism everywhere.     

Yet what the proof is showing now, in the 2020s, is that the Newark Holy Stones are part of a lost culture that were likely descendants not so much of the Lost Tribes of Israel but from the destroyed civilization of Atlantis. It looks like a very advanced culture in North America well before the last Ice Age was destroyed by an earth-killing cataclysm around 11,600 years ago. And this Atlantis culture was interacting with the entire world at the time and was sea-faring to allow for global trade. And they had a vast empire in North America after the cataclysms because the various Indian tribes were scattered everywhere once their advanced culture was destroyed. There has been a lot of talk about Atlantis being a continent that sunk in the Atlantic Ocean, which I think could be a possibility given what we know about the impact radius that created Saginaw Bay in Michigan. Crustal osculations could account for a major shifting of the oceans over land masses that could push them down, just as the weight of ice had created the Great Lakes. The earth’s crust is still pushing up against those lakes in those places. The earth is not perfectly round, and after a major impact with a comet around 11,000 years ago, it would have been possible for a land mass the size of Australia to be sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. And keep in mind that the ocean levels at the time would have been 400 feet shallower. So there would have been a lot of coastal areas that would have been different in the times of Atlantis, and this would explain a lot of things about how a planet-killing event leaving only a few survivors around the planet to start over again with the knowledge of previous culture and all the myths born from them, that were so similar, yet developed their own peculiar traits. Given all that, it’s not at all inconceivable, as the evidence points, that the Ten Commandments and Hebrew writing come from something like an Atlantis culture that moved from North America into northern Africa and then over into Egypt, where early sons of Israel would have learned of the Atlantis stories and their culture early in the days of Pharaohs. As we remember, Joseph ran Egypt during a 7-year drought because he interpreted the dream of the Pharaoh, who was so grateful that he gave him the keys to the kingdom. And in that way, Moses eventually would have knowledge of all this before the Exodus and the 40 years in the wilderness and the building of the Ark of the Covenant and the Ten Commandments, which it could be argued are the essential ingredients for all civilizations that want to last a few years. So yes, I think the discovery by David Wyrick is one of the most important finds in the world’s history. We are now unraveling the possibilities and understanding our own story of the past, which is far different from what we have been told.    

Rich Hoffman

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A Man Who Gets Divorced Loses Leadership Ability: What is wrong with Tom Brady

I haven’t talked about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a while because, honestly, the world is at war, and who really cares about NFL football? But this story is about Tom Brady, who almost everyone agrees is the best football player of all time. His marriage, his retirement, and why the Bucs aren’t as good on the field as they are on paper is an interesting study on the impact of good leadership on any culture, whether it be business, entertainment, or politics. What Tom Brady is going through is a good baseline for just how important leadership is to any culture. He has traditionally been the best on a football field not because he is the strongest, fastest, tallest, or most creative, but because he has a way of making the people around him better, which is why he’s been in so many Super Bowls and Championship games and won many of them. And when that leadership isn’t working, it’s obvious why. So with the Bucs at 3 and 3 at the point of this article is not over for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They are playing in the weak NFC South division, so they are still in first place even though the Bucs should have won close games against Kansas City, Green Bay, and Pittsburg. But they lost those games because they were simply outplayed, and it’s quite clear that the team is distracted by Tom Brady, his retirement status, his marriage trouble, and his general age. It has to be tough to be 45 years old and playing with a bunch of kids who are 25 years old, old enough to be his own kids. And the head coaches are all the same age or even younger. 

What’s different about this year with Tom Brady is that the NFL obviously doesn’t want him around. The media doesn’t either. They have moved on to the Patrick Mahomes types, the Josh Allens, the much younger and mobile quarterbacks who are part of the new story of the NFL. The Bucs have done the woke thing and put people of color in charge of their coaching staff, even though they obviously have problems making decisions. They aren’t the best people for the job; they were put there because of color, although Todd Bowls, the head coach, made great news when he recently dismissed the measurement of color, which gained national attention. Bowls is a great defensive coordinator when he can dominate the other team. But his playcalling is terrible in close games when the other team isn’t intimidated, and that has certainly carried over into this year, where he remains the defensive play caller, and he just can’t stop the other team. Everyone has gotten so used to being lazy on the field and on the sideline because they just expect Tom Brady to get the ball at the end of the game and win it for them that some of these games are just getting out of reach. Tom Brady usually has an opportunity to still win the game for them, but people are happy to let him do most of the work. And that problem comes from leadership. The coaches are lazy; the players reflect the coaches. One thing about leadership that is always obvious, people adapt to the personality of the leader, so when a good leader is present, it’s evident to the world because the culture takes on their personality; when there isn’t good leadership, it’s just as evident for all those reasons. 

And every day, the news is that Tom Brady is getting divorced from his wife, Gisele Bundchen, a person many consider the most beautiful woman in the world. During the Super Bowl year of Tom Brady’s first year in Tampa, she was a tremendous asset. The other players looked at Brady and his wife, their children, Tom’s love of his parents, and his good-guy image as the best in the world, and they played off it. They listened to Tom Brady because they wanted to be like Tom Brady and have what Tom Brady had: good successful life in every way people measure success, money, beauty, ethically, and categorically. But this year, Tom Brady looks like a person like everyone else. Even at press conferences, Brady goes way out of his way to appear just like the other guys, that he’s nothing special and that he continues to play because he wants to be around his teammates. This is to other players who often have to think about whether to tackle at full speed a 300-pound player with their 250-pound bodies at 20 MPH with a head-on collision that will undoubtedly hurt the next day, a weak proposal. While they know, they have a few million dollars in their bank accounts. Why are they going to hit the other player so hard again? Especially since everything is always about Tom Brady?   Unless you have a special coach who can motivate such players, a lackluster effort is almost baked into the problem.

But specifically for other guys, they look at people they follow, and if the leader can’t hold together a marriage, then why should they listen to them about anything? A guy going through a divorce is a loser, no matter how fair that assessment might be. If you can’t hold a family together, why should anybody listen to you about anything? If a woman who knows you in your most vulnerable state, behind the media curtain, isn’t so in love with you that she’ll do anything to stay with you, then there is something wrong, and a locker room will quickly figure that out. And that holds true for everything, not just sports. If a leader can’t lead a family, they certainly can’t lead an organization, a school, or a society. All men know that once a wife leaves a man and is off to Chuckee Cheese with a new one, and a man loses his kids to a stepfather, it’s over. A family is broken beyond repair, the children will grow up with likely problems as a result, and the leadership potential of that man is gone. There is a lot of effort in the world to try to hide personal behavior behind processes, but that is just not how human beings are wired. Tom Brady is the best of all time because he did everything well. His private life was successful, which then carried over into on-field behavior. But this is the problem when you stick around too long, people start thinking of him as just another guy, who has problems just like everyone else, and at that point, the magic is gone forever. This is why I thought it would be good for Brady to stay retired, ride off into the sunset, and let history remember him as the best. But to lose that leadership ability, which he clearly has, especially now that his wife is clearly not with him, the cost is far worse than just lost games. Tom Brady has lost his leadership brand. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers may still win their division. Tom Brady may even win another Super Bowl. But in doing so, he has lost what is most important, his leadership brand. And once a man loses it, it’s nearly impossible to get back. And to the way I think, that isn’t worth another chance at a Super Bowl. 

Rich Hoffman

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