Category: Regulations

They Banned Me on LinkedIn: Another case of a private tech company doing government work as an arm of censorship

LinkedIn Banned Me over Election Fraud Discussion

I’ve never been a fan of social media.  Sure, to promote the blog and some of my work to people interested in it, I have used Twitter in the past and YouTube. I’ve never done Facebook. I’ve always viewed it as garbage for a lot of reasons.  When everyone in the world was using it, and I wasn’t, people thought it was odd.  But as is usually the case with most things, I turned out to be correct.  Facebook is a creepy attachment of the government, which took over a private company to do its public bidding.  Eventually, the courts will work it out, but I’m not giving away free stuff to the government through Facebook data collection until then.  But I have a book out and on my professional profile on LinkedIn, which I’ve had forever since it started as a site; I was banned because I accepted election fraud on my feed as I was talking about my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  They saw my responses and found them detrimental to good conversation, and they banned me, which pissed me off.  The thought of some weak-kneed progressive pieces of crap having some influence over my life was more than enough to set me on fire, which I’m sure they’d enjoy knowing.  But that’s what I get for participating in their stupid free social media platform.  It’s their playground, and we all chose to play in it on their terms.  Yet, I won’t be going back to LinkedIn.  They are no different from Facebook or Twitter, and all the rest of those government traps put on the internet freeway to manage society from a new kind of compliance standpoint.  Accept that 2+2 is 10, or you will be banned from the platform and not allowed to play in any reindeer games.  They can pound sand.

Oh, of course, they try to kill you with niceness.  LinkedIn keeps sending me emails telling me how many hits my site is getting, trying to contact them to turn the site back on.  They want me to produce a government I.D. of some kind, either a driver’s license or a passport with a photo of the front and back, and send it to LinkedIn to review whether or not my site has been banned by accident.  What bothers me is that they should know my personal information.  By forcing the government I.D., it has a creepy orthodoxy that is all too related to what’s going on with the attempted vaccine mandates.  My message to all those skinny jeans losers running LinkedIn who are dumb as a rock; it’s a free site.  It can come and go, and I could care less.  They were better off with me being a content provider. They’ll miss me more than I’ll miss them.  I am not accepting a partnership between a professional social networking tool and government intrusion.   They are acting as agents of the government, and that’s where I draw the line. I’d rather spend my social media time on platforms like Gettr, Gab, and Mike Lindell’s Frank Speech. 

Yet think of the audacity of these social media platforms inspired by communist China.  They view themselves as members of the government, censoring the public.  For LinkedIn to become an arbitrator of truth over election fraud, for instance, is way over their mandate.  As a professional, if I want to talk about election fraud, it is part of the public debate.  It might harm me professionally, or it might help.  That is up to the marketplace to decide, and I, as an individual, determine how I want to play it.  But LinkedIn took it further; they were editing speech and claiming it’s for civility causes that they made up independently.  Essentially the goal of LinkedIn is to create and enforce wokeness in corporate culture, not just to connect people for job placement or professional engagement.  Their goal is to lure in professionals with the nectar of professional communication but to embed in them wokeness as established by the global rules of government into thinking what they tell you to, and keep an excellent lucrative job, for you to follow those rules without question.

I had put on my feed on LinkedIn a good video by Anna Perez from Real America’s Voice about Larry Elder and the election in California.  I commented that Democrats wouldn’t have a chance if they couldn’t cheat, and for that, LinkedIn freaked out, pulled down my page, and started the process I reported on the government I.D. issue. It’s the same argument about a private versus public company.  If LinkedIn or Facebook, Twitter, or any of the rest of them want to be employees of the government, then they need to announce that.  It’s not their job to shape the argument of election fraud, which is a problem.  They don’t get to hide behind a private façade to avoid litigation for a government conspirator doing public work.  Yet that’s what they did; they participated in the election narrative by limiting one side from presenting the evidence to facilitate the false report that there wasn’t election fraud.  Well, professionally, if a company or CEO is trying to operate a business in California, isn’t it something they would be concerned about to know if Larry Elder was going to be the governor and Newsom was going to be recalled?  I would think so.  And if LinkedIn were concerned about the “business community,” they’d want to see such speech conducted for the betterment of society in general. 

However, like the rest of those older social media platforms, LinkedIn was created to do what they are attempting to do in 2020 and 2021, tell people what to think about things and be soft arms of government agency and compliance.  Ultimately, they are how wokeness has been spread into American culture, and we should be pretty angry about it.  I am more infuriated that I gave them a chance than anything.  It was disappointing to be so right about them; I was hoping for a bit that maybe they were different.  But no, they are just as bad as the rest of the communist scumbags.  And I am done with them forever.  Rather than send them my government I.D. so I can play in their sandbox, I would instead put 100 times more energy into seeing their demise.  Fighting for election integrity, change the governor of California and ultimately the tech companies that reside there, and putting Trump back into office to fix all these massive screw-ups that we have seen at a record pace since Biden was put into power.  All those woke companies who have been seeking to erode the American Constitution with social media bylaws created by tech geeks and their Starbuck’s-stained fingers have attempted a coup.  They deserve punishment, which will come their way very soon.  They never had a right to operate as government censors.  They can do what they want as a private company, but when they involve themselves in public work, well, that’s a different story.  And that day of reckoning will come quick.  For my part, I won’t miss them, and when the opportunity comes to sink them, I won’t hesitate.  They crossed the line, and there is a cost for that.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

We Have to Stand Up to our Bullies: Mean Tweets were what kept peace in the world

We Have to Stand Up to Bullies

I know it from years of professionalism, and most people with common sense understand it, too; you don’t sacrifice effectiveness for niceness.  Now in a leadership role, I think the most effective communication is with honey rather than vinegar.  People are more willing to do things in their life of their own free will if given a chance.  However, they often need leadership to help them figure out what that is.  And they often need a kick in the pants to reside beyond their sense of laziness to aim for higher things in life.  It is up to leadership to define the goals of an organization.  How people get on board with that strategy is up to them.  But complacency and drag assing are not options.  Often there will be resistance to the goals established by a leader, and sometimes, they will have to employ methods of motivation that might be boisterous or otherwise.  This is not the same as being a bully.  Our culture understands this subtle nature well; we’ve seen it in movies like Back to the Future.  We all have our Biffs in life and could cheer on George McFly when he punched the bully in the face at the end of the movie to win his future wife and start a good life for himself.  We see it every year in The Christmas Story where Ralphie gets tired of getting picked on by a group of bullies coming home from school, and he beats the crap out of one of them, which solved that problem forever.  In my own life, I poked a big-time bully in the eye with a pair of scissors when I was in the first grade.  I had to, and yes, I got into a lot of trouble.  But you can bet that it was worth it; it changed many things for me for the better.  There are many bullies in the world, and the focus of our academia has been to avoid conflict, which has only empowered them.  And it was the wrong approach.  From his years of experience, Trump understood what leadership was supposed to look like, and we saw it daily in what was called “mean Tweets.” But look what happened in the world when he could no longer provide those mean Tweets; when Twitter took down his account and through election fraud, he was removed from office.  How is the world doing now?

Even George McFly Learned His Lesson

We all had our stories of bullies when we were young, and we either dealt with it or looked for some protection in group behavior to hide from them.  And yes, it’s that simple in the world.  Those who never learned to fight back against their bullies joined groups such as political parties to do their dirty work for them.  It is clear to all that the Democrat Party has offered a chance to be a bully on their behalf with collective salvation.  We see it in our businesses when consensus-building exercises stifle any attempts to impose work standards by a strong leader.  People who want to hide their timidity usually do so by hiding in groups, and from there, much evil is launched.  Humans trying to avoid this reality have built every part of their civilization around the idea of a democracy for just this very reason, to hide their lack of courage, leadership, and zeal for day-to-day life.  With a democracy, pack hunting, they believe they can hide their soft souls from the world and do OK, just as long as they are not exposed as phonies.  They go to school to get pieces of paper that tell the world that they have proven their worth academically.  They join clubs so that others will say they are notable within the context of the group.  They do anything and everything to hide the fact that when they had a chance to punch their version of a bully in the face, they didn’t, and they grow up bowing to every kind of corruption that there is because they essentially are terrified of conflict.

But most people understand the value of leadership, so we put President Trump in office because he had a reputation of standing up to bullies and fighting back.  We saw it on television and read about it in the media for several decades, so we gave him a chance, and it worked out great.   America First was a plan people could rally behind.  The world was not acting aggressively toward the United States in any way.  Trump had brought peace to the world one mean Tweet at a time and survived what aggressions were thrown his way by an endless stream of media and activist groups.  It didn’t matter, Trump was successful every day he was in office, and the world was better off for it.  Many who didn’t like him felt the way they did because they were averse to conflict, not that Trump did anything wrong.  People felt that Trump should have been more “presidential,” which is just short of saying, “we want to steal your lunch money, so let us do it.” It said more about the state of other people’s minds than it did of Trump.  People showed by electing him twice that they wanted leadership in the world, not the collective shield of group-oriented behavior.  People in America wanted to win at life, and to do that, leadership needs to be present to set the objectives.  And once those objectives were set, people also needed to be pushed to achieve those goals.  We had that type of President over the last four years, and America was winning.  Look what happened in just seven months after it was taken away.  The world is literally on fire from every quarter of it. 

Ralphie Gets Its!

We could talk all day about the malcontents around the world who want a weak American president.  Without leadership, the bullies from every quarter of existence emerged to push people around, and a kind of tribalism that is entirely destructive occurs.  It is the most understudied aspect of liberalism that there has ever been, the need for individuals to stand up to bullies not to join groups to seek protection from them points to the ultimate failure of their plight.  The world and everything in it needs leadership that pushes individuals toward greatness.  Not where groups provide refuge only to become bullies themselves spreading evil upon the earth.  There is nothing good or just about a Democrat Party who protects the weak and meek by allowing them to join the masses to become the bullies themselves.  And there is nothing good about a Republican Party who lets them do it the way George McFly did in Back to the Future.   Allowing evil to grow is just as bad as perpetrating it yourself.  With that said, I do not doubt that we are learning our lesson right now.  Even if they weren’t Trump supporters before, many people are craving the mean Tweets of the Trump administration.  It was better to win in the world than cower in the corner and hope that something terrible didn’t happen.  We have to stand up to the bullies of the world, and we can’t become bullies ourselves along the way.  Being a leader is not the same as being a bully.  Our academic system needs to learn that for future prosperity.  But in the meantime, mean Tweets or whatever their replacement becomes will do just fine.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Matt Huffman Understands Good Government: Conflict is critical to a properly run republic

People like the Title to my New Book, for good reason

First, I have to say that I appreciate all the kind words I’ve received over the title of my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  As I said in the video above, they have been whispering to me their enjoyment, almost as if they were afraid to say it in public because the word “gun” is in it.  Yet, that is entirely on purpose.  A lot in The Gunfighter’s Guide will challenge previous assumptions, the most of which is the nature of conflict in business and why we as a culture need to embrace that conflict more as we have in years past.  For a long time now, where we have been going has led to so much corruption because the value systems have not been on success, but in getting along.  Strangely enough, I was at an event with Matt Huffman, the President of the Ohio Senate, and he gave an excellent speech that displayed his understanding of this very need for conflict in any civil exchange.  Politics is a blood sport and was always intended as such.  They fight so that we don’t have to in general society.  But this is also the expectation in business as well.  If there isn’t conflict in a discussion, then why have the conversation.  All the consensus-building efforts that we have seen coming out of our academia are out of step with the American way of doing things.  It’s like telling us that American football shouldn’t be about putting on pads and hitting the other guy as hard as you can to stop them from scoring a touchdown, but that we should all play flag football, and that scoring isn’t all that important.  The title of my book evokes a truth that many people understand, and I appreciate that this early in the process, people already understand the need for a philosophic presentation of this very American concept.

Matt Huffman has done great in Ohio as President of the Senate

I had wanted to tell Senator Huffman how proud I was of him and the Ohio Senate in general for passage of Senate Bill 22, which took away Governor DeWine’s health directives over Covid-19 and future overreaches with legislative control.  If Huffman, George Lang, Terry Johnston, and much of the senate body had not moved to pass S.B. 22, Ohio would have been impeded by the recent Biden push for mass closures and mask mandates over the recent Delta Variant.  I thought it was a big deal when the Senate did what they did, and the House followed quickly.  DeWine had cut the entire legislature out of any covid protocols allowing the Governor to become a ruthless dictator over rights of health decisions which put white coat bureaucrats entirely in charge of all our lives.  And it went on for way too long, essentially because nobody wanted to have a conflict with the Governor.  Yet nightly at the Ohio capital, on other things, there were riots and vandalism over social causes that nobody wanted to deal with, and times were looking very bleak.  Trump was being pushed out of office by a group of radicals who were not afraid of conflict. Conservatives were not being met in the same fashion, allowing activists to roll over logic and goodness without fear of reprisal.   You might remember around Christmas of 2020 going into 2021 when I mentioned that Matt Huffman might be the next president of the Senate and that Governor DeWine’s powers would finally be quelled after a year of behaving like a complete tyrant off the rails and out of control. That’s what happened, Huffman was sworn in during the early months of 2021, and he went right to work doing what the legislature had been hoping to do for a long time, stand up to DeWine and return Ohio to civility with a proper government. 

Huffman told his story a bit of how contentious it was standing up to Governor DeWine, who did not want a fellow Republican senate to override his veto of S.B. 22.  DeWine tried to use the necessity of a single point of action to manage emergencies, which was always part of the poison pill of Covid-19.  It was presented as beyond legislative control where the Dr. Fauci types would manage our lives instead of our elected government because of an emergency health crisis.  But our constitutions do not indicate that liberty and freedom are only temporary factors of our daily life.  Even during an emergency such as tornado impacts, hurricanes, or health crises, all people still have their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And sometimes, we have to fight to maintain those rights.  This is what Huffman, Lang, and the rest of the Senate did when they told Mike DeWine to pound sand and suck it up.  They were going to override the Governor’s veto and take away his health directives.  DeWine had abused his power, and he needed a slap down.  It was an example of how proper government should look. It was the suitable alternative to open warfare with people storming the capital to retake their rights over the Covid restrictions.  In every state, the House and Senate must fight like that on our behalf, and in Ohio, it happened.  Fighting is not a bad thing.  When fighting turns to permanent damage, that’s another story, but people who enter the bloodsport of politics should understand that’s the nature of the game.

That is, after all, the theme of my book and why people are saying under their breath that they like the title so much.  It alludes to the American understanding that conflict is at the heart of our “republic.” When the law wasn’t present in times past of western expansion, the gunfighter’s brought some form of order to those far-flung regions.  Many people were killed in cold blood and drunken violence, but the presence of conflict was the first foundation for law and order.  If someone did something to someone, the threat of a gunfight was a genuine menace, and people thought twice about it.  And if they were caught killing in cold blood, the community often hung people right there on the spot, killing them.  Many times, innocent people were hung.  But people did think twice before engaging in destructive behavior because people were not afraid of conflict as they are today.  In so many ways, you have to look at our academic approach to conflict during the last century and question whether or not we have all been poisoned with the pill of globalism so that our republic would fall under those same conditions.  So it is certainly my goal with The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to resurrect the sentiment that conflict is good and healthy for maintaining a proper republic.  Not necessarily with violence, but in how Matt Huffman, George Lang, and others did with S.B. 22 in 2021, which has saved Ohio from a tyrannical Biden administration looking for ground cover for their many scandals.  Without the conflict with DeWine, Ohio would still be imprisoned by the white coats of bureaucracy.  It seems rare these days to see such conflict and courage, but it does happen; there are Matt Huffman’s out there who understand good government and utilize it to the proper effect.  And people understand that in my title, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, something important has been missing in our business and political cultures that need to be dusted off and resurrected to full effect.  And then, and only then, is when America is back and will sustain itself for the world well into the future.   

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Biden Threatens Businesses With Covid: When anti-science becomes a weapon of cover-ups

Remember the FEMA Camps?

I’ve told everyone before what Covid was, why it was made, and what the world’s governments plan to do with it.  Just as a reminder, this push to impose vaccines on businesses and the Biden administration’s mask mandates are strict because they have no legal authority to do so.  So hoping that peer pressure will do all their work that the law forbids, they are implying to businesses that if they don’t enact stricter than the CDC policies for managing Covid, then they might create a perceptual unsafe work environment for their employees, forcing them out of fear of litigation to adopt the Biden tactics. That’s all it is.  Like China, the Biden Democrats and many foreign agents of mass corruption connected to this administration are in deep trouble with many things they have been caught in.  Such as the election fraud of 2020, which is presently unraveling, the debacle of Afghanistan, which will make Iran look silly in comparison.  The economy is tanking, and the Biden people need something to blame since their policies are stifling growth.  Oh, and also, Larry Elder is about to win as governor in California punishing Gavin Newsom for his lockdowns there harming one of the world’s biggest economies. They need a story to take people’s eyes off the southern border, which is a mess.  So many terrible things have been unleashed in the opening months of a corrupt Biden administration that these losers hope that Covid will save them once again.  Notice how Dr. Fauci has lost his mind over this Delta variant just as Rand Paul pressed him on his connection to the Wuhan lab in China and the funding by NIH of Covid.  We now know Covid was made in the lab there for what the Chinese imply is a bio-weapon.  Yeah, Covid is all those things, meant to hide these crimes and more.  The masks and vaccines are not about health maintenance at all.  And the push for vaccines has to have a majority of people near 100% to hide what the vaccine will do to people.  Suppose statistical sampling is 100%, and we all of a sudden have mysterious deaths, sterilization, and other ailments creeping into society within a few years. In that case, nobody will see that healthy people who did not take the vaccine are not suffering the same conditions.  If everyone gets the jab, nobody will know the difference.  This is what you get when malicious, bad people take over a government and get caught doing ill will on people and still hope to cover up their debacles.

I’ve heard these stories for years, and now it’s pretty clear where the old fears of FEMA camps came from.   I think the area I’m in outside of Cincinnati was designated Sector 5.  Troubled people were to be taken to the railyards just south of Indianapolis to be quarantined.  It was never quite clear who would go there, would it be sick people somehow made that way by the government or holdouts against some government mandate like resistance to the vaccination.  But given the conditions of our times, the forces at play have hit the panic button, perhaps too soon, and now we see what we see.  But it’s not a surprise to me at all.  Those FEMA camp rumors look to be more fact than fiction, and those were ten years ago.  I remember the pictures of the plastic coffins stored on the side of railroad tracks for what purpose nobody could imagine.  The world was simpler back then; nobody could imagine a day where the government would stop the economy and force all of us to stay in our homes under force.  Now it’s not so scandalous. 

I always took those kinds of things in stride.  I think the people who run these government agencies are idiots, and they can be easily beaten.  If they decide to intrude on our lives, then we are free to fight them.  I generally leave them alone as long as they leave me alone.  I don’t want such people in charge of my health or safety.  No doubt, they have been talking about this for a long time; the rumors made it out onto the Alex Jones show, well before YouTube made that show one of its first targets of censorship.  Now we know why, and we know that Big Tech was in on this game from the start.  Like I said in the video above, this is all anti-science. It’s been covered in Ayn Rand’s book Anthem, where people far in the future are dazzled to discover the light bulb again.  Their tyrannical society had traded science for submission.

I don’t think all of the government is in on the gig, but many federal employee types find complete authority attractive.  The Big Tech companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook played their part as government censors immediately with Covid.  They were in on the game plan from the start, and that would be the first place to go to prosecute for the attack on our country.  They denied medical help to people sick with Covid by censoring references to hydroxychloroquine and Regeneron cocktails to manage the virus.  We were meant to have the virus manage us, not science containing the virus.  That was always the plan from the very beginning, and many people knew it.  The conspiracy theories may not have been as sinister as we thought regarding the FEMA camps, but there was more truth to it than fiction, and we are in that nightmare now. 

But what caused the nightmare?  It was the cover-up of the crimes, and I don’t think what we see now was how things were supposed to go.  The Donald Trump presidency was not supposed to happen, and it pulled the scab off the wound created by the SWAMP too early.  The Democrats and their puppet masters had to push the panic button to lay ground cover for the many crimes they were caught in, which we see now.  They are caught in this election scandal, and people are unwilling to hide behind a curtain of wokeness to conceal the truth.  They might have in 2020 when this Covid game was first played on us.  But not now.

We know too much.  Everyone knows that the best measure to fighting off viruses is a person’s immune system.  Vaccination is a means to managing a virus in a society with weakened immune systems and wouldn’t be wrong if that were the case.  Yet, that’s not what we are talking about here.  I would never undermine my own immune system with medicine unless it were necessary.  And it’s not necessary.  This virus was created as an attack, not as some occurring natural threat, so the solution to it is not in vaccinations, but in politics, where the virus was really created.  And for the government, mandates are about as tough as wet paper holding up a paint can.  They have no legal grounds at all.  They have no power.  All they have are implied threats which are designed to scare a workforce into acting against employers.  That then forces employers to adopt the government policy to protect themselves from potential litigation.  And that’s all the government can do, is scare people into compliance because the actual science is weak and full of corruption.  As human beings, we should know better, and they think that fear will rule over logic.  But then again, these are the same idiots who have entangled themselves in all these cover-ups.  With their track record, why would anybody think that something they do would work now?  Think things through, dear reader. Don’t be a buffalo watching all the other buffalos being killed around you and just standing there grazing.  Because they think you will, stand there and take it.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

We Don’t Have the Right Politics for Space Travel: We’ll have to change that before settling Mars

To move into Space, we need Capitalism as the driver of our politics

I am by far not an Elon Musk fanboy.  I like a lot about Elon Musk and the great work he does with Tesla and SpaceX.  But I’m not crazy at all about his talk about universal incomes and climate change.  I view a lot of what he says as a guy throwing up ideas, much the way he runs his companies, and if someone can shoot holes in his thoughts, he welcomes that chance.  He sees it as making things better.  I could talk and argue with Elon Musk all day and year, and I would have fun doing it.  And I think he would too.  But I found an extraordinary moment from him recently on Part III of the exclusive Everyday Astronaut interview where Elon walked them around the Starbase facility ahead of a Superheavy launch attempt. I’ll put those interviews up here for you to watch, but I found them remarkable.  Space X is how most companies should be run. It reminded me of the eventual aim of my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which is to learn not to be afraid of those who intend to impose fear on you.  To learn not to fall in love with rigid rules and to reunite yourself to risk because that’s how the human race advances.  During Part III, Elon paused and referred to just that very concept.  But he knows he can’t say such things.  He has all kinds of people who follow him, liberals, conservatives, people who have no idea what they are.  He currently has to work with the Biden administration if he wants to send ships into space.  He must also work with other countries, like China, because we are all tangled together in unhealthy ways.  So, I get why he couldn’t say what he wanted to say.  But I am under no such restriction. 

I don’t typically think of the “degrowth movement” as an accurate word. Still, the way Mark Levin talked about it in his recent book, American Marxism, seems more appropriate when talking about the sciences than just saying “socialism” or “communism.” Many young people think of these things not as a recent threat but as an ancient menace that expired well before their time.  But they understand growth, and for this topic, it’s certainly the correct way to term what the political left has been doing.  Elon Musk has played around with left-leaning ideas, such as the universal income, electric infrastructure ran by solar, and even smoking pot on a podcast to show how cool and hip he was.  Those are all things that have made me ignore what Elon Musk has been doing.  That is until he does something magnificent like developing the Falcon rockets for reusable landings and building the Starships in Texas.  Slowly over time, I’ve watched Elon as he has tried to do “growth” things in a world run increasingly by “degrowth” personalities; he has been getting frustrated.  For instance, he moved to Texas, leaving California behind after the ridiculous Covid policies shut down the state economically.  And recently, when environmentalists threw protests toward his desire to build a Starship factory at the Starport facility because of water concerns, he sounded more like a Trump supporter than a centralist libertarian. 

Musk is trying to do all pro-growth in a world being drug into a no-growth period by the participants of the Vico Cycle, which I explain in detail in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  These cycles are not new to the human race, they have occurred many times in the past, and we end up constantly re-inventing ourselves.  And that is what Elon Musk sees he is up against, and he let it out a bit during that Part III interview.  That was the primary reason I wrote my book, to help people not repeat the past, but to punch through into this new space age not with restriction and fear, which the communists of the world want, but with unrestricted adventure fueled by the power of capitalism.  When it comes down to the various philosophies, we cannot all have different ideas about the direction of the human race.  We either want to grow or retreat into the huts of history and return to yelling at lightning bolts and attributing gods to their origins to make sense out of a storm.  Or, we want to fly about those mysteries into the worlds beyond and fulfill our quests for adventure, both large and small, on a vast playing field of unlimited possibilities.  The two views of the world will not live together forever.  The inflection point is upon us.

And that’s when Elon Musk realized that everything done at SpaceX would disappear in an instant without him.  It is he alone that is doing all these outstanding achievements.  Sure, he has lots of brilliant employees who do the heavy lifting, but he provides the vision, and without vision, nothing happens.  If human beings are going to be a space-oriented society, then a new type of government will have to be embraced.  The one we have now, which fought hard to keep Donald Trump from being president and wanted to get rid of him when he was, will not allow the efforts of Elon Musk either to carry humans into space.  We have to solve one problem at the philosophical level if we are ever to put 1 million people onto Mars like Elon Musk wants to do.  We have to have a growing economy with an increasing workforce to accommodate it all.  To have hundreds of thousands of people on the moon, Mars, and wherever else in the next couple of decades, Elon can do the math that was in his words during the interview.  The illogical politics of our current moment, driven by communism and Marxism, are just wrong for the adventure of space. 

Going even further, we have never solved these problems even in our science fiction, except perhaps in Star Wars.  People need to be free, adventurous, experimental, and free to fail for space to work.  A micromanaging government will always be in the way of what Elon Musk wants to do.  He can only smoke joints so much, enough to keep the parasites off his heels.  He can only spout off so much greenie weenie appeasement to keep the environmental protestors from standing in the way of a new Starship manufacturing plant in the middle of the desert.  And that is the point of my book, not to crawl back into the Old West and sleep in hot unairconditioned cabins using the restroom outside.  And getting water with a bucket every time you wanted a drink.  Modern conveniences are good to have.  But what we may not want to leave behind is the courage and adventure of discovery and wealth building.  I would say that those are far more essential things than climate preservation or the appeasement of soft-natured Marxists looking for a big daddy government to care for them the way their parents failed.  Once we solve those problems, we can then move to space.  Elon Musk has figured out how millions of people are excited about it and follow his every move.  They don’t know that the politics they wish to ignore are just the very thing that will keep their feet on the ground and their starships from flying.  We must solve the politics before we can solve the space. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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The Good Guy J.D. Vance: There’s a long way to go, but he’s certainly one you’d like to see get there

A Good Guy, J.D. Vance

Nancy Nix continues to be a great example of influence leadership in Butler County, Ohio.  I attribute the success of any endeavor, whether it’s a successful business or a political community, to the strength of its influence leadership, which I spend a lot of time talking about in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  Influence leaders are not the ones who put a spotlight on themselves; but instead, they work as leaders in ways that aren’t traditionally measured for the success of any enterprise.  And that’s what Nancy does, and how I finally was able to meet J.D. Vance after many other opportunities to do so came up short.  I had wanted to meet J.D. since he is running for the Rob Portman senate seat.  I had been writing about how much I like Jane Timken in that role.  I had liked Josh Mandel because I know him as a Tea Party guy.  But I’m not crazy how he has managed the pressure once he did get essential seats.  Timken just picked up an endorsement of Kristi Noem, which meant a lot to me, but the big drawback there is that she’s too close to Mike DeWine.  When I have talked to her personally, she is quick to explain the complexity of that relationship.  I give her some room there because everyone has to have some representation as a party leader even if she doesn’t agree with everything they do.  But the question is, to what effect would other things be accepted in accepting a few screwballs here and there?  Some other candidates for this Rob Portman Senate race are not viable, likely under 10%ers who just muddy the water.  But J.D. Vance is one whom I’ve wanted to like because I liked his book Hillbilly Elegy when it first came out, and I have thought he did a great job in the media covering that book and talking about Trump’s White House.  Yet he seemed too good, so I have had questions for him that you could only tell upon meeting someone, and until Nancy managed to get us together, I would have never otherwise known. 

When reading the Hillbilly Elegy, I had thought that it was precisely people like J.D. Vance who should be managing our affairs in government.  After all, he checked all the boxes; he was a lawyer trained at Yale, worked in the tech industry, was a Marine, and rose from the ashes of Middletown, Ohio, which is literally in my back yard to move into great things of personal achievement. They made an interesting Netflix movie about his life and family based on the book, and I wondered if his wife was as sweet and understanding in real life as she was in the book and movie.  As it turned out, she was.  And when meeting J.D., you can tell without a shadow of a doubt that he is a good guy.  A very good person and the reason for it is that he had a good family.  Sure, the Hillbilly Elegy was about severe dysfunction at certain levels. Vance’s mother is now known so well for her history of substance abuse.  He had a wild childhood that crushes most kids in most families, most of the time.  As J.D. says in his book, he is astonished to come from his childhood and into this new life as a normal person.  I don’t think I am too surprised that J.D. is such a good person because even with all the dysfunction with his mother, he had a very good family otherwise.  Many people inside the Beltway politics don’t know that those from the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, on down into Tennessee and Virginia, are pretty intelligent.  They have been ridiculed and made fun of in every way that society can make fun of a people.  But I’ve known them all my life, and I have had family members go through the same kind of thing as J.D. has.  Luckily my parents were rock solid, but I have cousins and aunts and uncles who were every bit as troubled as J.D. Vance’s mother was.  It often comes from being too smart for their own good, which gets them into trouble, and they turn to drugs to shut out the voices of logic that run counter to a crazy world.  Reality is just a little too real for them, and they collapse on themselves.  But in J.D. Vance’s story, his strong and deep family is pretty standard among the people I know, and yes, they are Trump voters.  They listen to Alex Jones in the garage through a rebel radio network.  I have family, in fact, that still lives down in the areas of Kentucky, such as Slade and Buckhorn, who are so suspicious of census workers that often those government workers disappear, never to be heard from again. 

I had a few copies of the Hillbilly Elegy; I bought the updated paperback when it came out after the Netflix film was released, and J.D. had added the new afterword at the back of the book.  There he explains that he took his book proceeds and bought the property down in Jackson, Kentucky, where his grandparents were buried, and stated that he wanted to preserve the land so that his kids could enjoy it as he did.  I brought that book with me for him to sign at our meeting, which he did.  Yes, J.D. Vance is a really good and sincere person.  He is the real deal.  But my concern was how would he hold up under the pressure of politics once the honeymoon was over and his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment was over.  After all, it’s not a question as to whether he can get elected.  J.D. has some great campaign people.  He has great fundraising and support.  He is great at television and other forms of communication.  He has a supportive wife.  You can check all the positives.  Is he tough? Well, he had to be to come out of childhood without being a mess.  Can he stand up to corruption?  I think he has no tolerance for corruption and can afford to stand up to it, knowing that he has a good family to lean on no matter what happens in his life.  So, I asked him the question I wanted to ask, why I needed to meet him. “So what will make you different than Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, other Mr. Smith Goes to Washington types who get into the Senate with great intentions only to get buzz-sawed in that corrupt culture?” And he said the only thing that could be the correct answer; he said, “well, it’s going to take a coalition of about 8 or 9 people, and from there, we can begin to turn the tide.” It was good to hear that he understood that beyond just campaign talk.  Everyone has great ideas when they are trying to get elected.  But very few know what to do once they get there.

J.D. Vance on the Warroom

J.D. Vance was ready for the buzz-saw.  His wife was there, and I could see her look; it was the look of a supportive wife who would have enjoyed being anywhere but there because all the handshaking was not her thing.  But in her was that same kind of unconditional and dependable love that J.D. had with his Mamaw.  How do I know, because I have a wife like that, and I had a grandmother much as J.D. did.  Appalachia women from the mountains and the wild men they married and tamed.  It’s a Middletown, Hamilton, Ohio kind of thing.  And when you find a wife who understands, then it can make a person nearly invincible.  And for those reasons and more, J.D. Vance is a good option for that much-needed Senate seat. There’s a long way to go in the race yet. Still, I would love for a person like J.D. Vance to fill such a seat when the world is desperately hungry for those kinds of people to manage our government with influence leadership and a tremendous personal foundation for truth and justice for all.  I want to see how all these candidates hold up under the pressure in the upcoming months, but I can at least say now, I am cheering for J.D. Vance.  I hope to see him intact at the finish line.

Rich Hoffman

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Screw Our Freedoms: ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ would have been different if written in Deadwood

Screw Our Freedoms, no, I don’t think so

It was pretty amazing to see the massive panic coming out of the Biden administration over the vaccine push and mask mandates.  Stunning really, from celebrities to Dr. Fauci himself, last week leading into this one has been a test of sorts for this global push for a central government to take over all day-to-day activity.  But for that to happen, they had to scare us into imprisoning ourselves into the cage they intended for us.  Instead, what happened was that they found most of us refused to enter and are running about doing our own thing regardless of their taunts.  That left Arnold Schwarzenegger to tell us on CNN to “screw your freedoms.” Dr. Fauci said pretty much the same, something in direct reference to Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, as over a million people descended on the Sturgis Bike Rally, an annual event I talk about a lot.   Despite the Covid warnings of the new “Delta variant,” people went anyway and didn’t wear masks.  People were getting tired of the government crying wolf every day, and they were finally starting to ignore them.  I would argue that people should have stopped listening to the government months ago, but ultimately, people were getting it, and the government has been in a bit of a panic.  So much so that Biden avoided talking about the evacuation of Afghanistan but instead deflected comment to the booster shot to the vaccine that would be available soon.  Covid is their cover story to hide all the crimes that have been committed, even when the world was on fire and all they wanted to talk about was a glass of water. 

This is Where We Are

God bless Kristi Noem, who went to Sturgis herself after a week of the press following Dr. Fauci and trying to put tremendous peer pressure on her to cave to the gods of Covid.  She rode her horse onto the stage at Outlaw Square in Deadwood carrying an American flag in front of a large crowd and gave an excellent speech on freedom.  The optics were tremendous, and you could tell by what the media didn’t show.  Hardly anybody covered a prominent American governor riding her horse carrying an American flag while wearing a cowboy hat down the streets of Deadwood, South Dakota, at all.  But for Kristi Noem, it was her answer to the criticism.   It was a kind of Braveheart moment in this new American story, and it infuriated the government.  Wait, Kristi Noem is the government.  So was Donald Trump. Let’s say instead, these insurgents connected to international Marxism have infected Washington D.C. and other academic circles with the intent to overthrow our American Constitution.  How about that?  We don’t want to overthrow the government.  We want our government to resume administrative power and take away the leverage that the spooks, kooks, and losers of international Marxism have over us presently.  We let them have that leverage after all out of niceness, and they misread that niceness as weakness.  But that niceness has expired.   

This is what Leadership looks like

While all this was going on, I read Vivek Ramasamy’s new book Woke, Inc. a few times, which I liked a lot.  But, there was a lot I didn’t like at all, which I attribute to him being on the inside of corporate America for a long time—even being tempted by the fruits of globalism.  I loved his book because I loved his perspective.  But as I closed the book for the third time in a 70 some hour period, I concluded that Vivek is still learning. He’s a brilliant guy who has made a lot of money, but he’s still the kid in India who grew up with a caste system spoiled by American capitalism.  He thinks the modern Woke problem can be solved like the story he recites in the book The Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor committed Christ to death because the Church no longer had a use for Jesus.  Jesus Christ had served his purpose, and now it was time to die and let the Church handle things.  Well, we can’t help where we are born, and I’m perfectly open to people fleeing from where they came from to come to America for a chance. I’m even more for America spreading its influence to many of those places so that they can get western civilization in their back yards, which makes what’s happening in Afghanistan that much more of a tragedy.  But in America, when we get tired of being poked in the eye by some bad guys, we won’t be kissing them on the cheek and leaving quietly as Jesus did in that story.  The Brothers Karamazov is a very European story. That’s not how things are done in America, or at least they haven’t been.  And that planned assumption that Americans would passively sit around and be bossed around was a bad one from the start.  Yes, there are plenty of bootlickers in America who will.  There are more who won’t, and that is what’s going on with the masks and the vaccines. 

Liberty or Death……..but where are the deaths?

I only bring up Vivek because he wrote a reasonably significant book that the mainstreamers have fully embraced.  He represents many people who hatched this Covid plan, and clearly, they don’t understand Americans.  I was enormously proud of Kristi Noem when she hoisted that flag on stage atop her horse in Deadwood.  I had just returned from that exact spot a few weeks ago.  Deadwood and South Dakota, in many ways, are vestiges of freedom that people growing up in India or Russia can’t even imagine until they see it for themselves.  And even then, the culture change is dramatic. It’s not an accident that Mike Lindell held his Symposium in South Dakota. That’s where the heart of America is, and you can certainly feel it when you visit. It’s a long way from Wall Street and the hacks of investment that Vivek knows.  People who ride horses, shoot guns, and love their American flag aren’t putting up with what they are seeing, and the current government is just now getting a feel for it.  These kinds of Americans aren’t going to be controlled by Facebook or Google. They’ll just come up with their alternative.  They aren’t wearing masks or have the government tell them to take the medicine they don’t want.  And if the government gets too pushy, they’ll get shoved back.  When people wonder why Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires,” as Biden calls it, they haven’t seen anything yet when they try to go door to door in Ohio or South Dakota to confiscate guns and force people to take a vaccine.  Instead, they will see something far different from what Vivek Ramaswamy proposed with his example of Christ versus The Grand Inquisitor.  If The Grand Inquisitor tried some of that stuff that he tried to pull on Jesus Christ in the city of Deadwood, or Sturgis………well, I would promise that he would have been shot dead before he ever had a chance to sentence Christ to death.  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great book would have been a short story instead of a great literary classic if written in Deadwood.  And the bad guy would have died quickly and spectacularly under a hail of gunfire.   The American way to fight these things ultimately isn’t with a kiss on the cheek, but a hand on our guns and the willingness to defend ourselves when pressed by an authoritarian government that does not have our best interests in mind.  And it’s good to see people finally sticking up for themselves because that is ultimately the way to peace where such a tragedy could be avoided.  Do like Nancy Reagan used to say, “Just Say No.”

 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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How To Lie With Statistics: Bill Gates and his big secret

Bill Gates and the Way to Lie with Statistics

I’ve been watching all the press for Vivek Ramaswamy’s new book Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam and Mark Livin’s American Marxism, and it has been frustrating.  They are poking around the rim to a much deeper problem, and that’s a baked-in ingredient to the original scam.  And that scam is very much a part of all our lives, a recent invention that touches us at every possible level.  For that very reason, I set the conditions of my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, at a time before the progressive era.  We need real answers to these problems, not just asking the questions. That’s not to say Woke Inc or Mark’s American Marxism are not good books.   They are great books, and everyone should read them.  But they are short on solutions.  We all know that first you have to ask the questions, but like most things in our modern world, the answers are never entirely within reach, and many people spend their whole lives looking for their fulfillment.  But they can’t get it because of a bit of scam that started at the start of the academic age where technology passed over the airwaves and into people’s living rooms.  Where television and advertising attacked people’s intellect in ways they had no previous intellectual defense mechanism.  And an age was created where billionaires and corporations could function in ways that no king of England ever could, through subversion of all national sovereignty hiding behind a façade of free-market capitalism when in fact, the villains are among the worst dictators the world has ever known.  Bill Gates comes to mind.  Gates is a guy who gained a lot of wealth early in his life.  So he replaced the ambitions that typically occupy paying off mortgages and raising children with climate change and vaccination obsessions. Over time, it has warped his mind into a villain for all liberty lovers everywhere. 

I guess I had read it before.  The book was so old that I read it first years ago.  But I didn’t know until recently that Bill Gates had put his blurb of approval on the front cover when the book was released to the public in 1993, at the height of Microsoft’s rise to power.  The book How to Lie with Statistics was initially published in 1954, and much of it reflects a time long forgotten when the average income for most American homes was much lower than it is today.  Seeing one of these modern versions of these books with Bill Gates’ name on it, after all the Covid mess, the election discrepancies, the push for a Green New Deal, the multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, it was to me like a Batman villain leaving behind some hint that the source of the crime was within reach, but that the villain knew people were not smart enough to figure it out.  It was as if Bill Gates was saying, “the answer is right in front of you fools, but you do not have the minds to see it.” His endorsement of this old book by Darrell Huff is pretty much mockery if you look at it in reverse, from the comfort of hindsight.  What Vivek and Mark and many other modern political pundits and writers missed when analyzing contemporary events was that the villains of our day were using the methods of this little obscure book.  Well known among the billionaire activists of the world are books like this, to commit open crimes right in front of our faces.  Rules for Radicals come to mind, as well as The Communist Manifesto.  They have positioned themselves as the most intelligent people on earth who have the most money, so naturally, we assume they know what they are talking about.  But what they want is revenge for being geeks or domination of the world, such as George Soros has always been after.  If there is any law we need in this world if we are not going to have honest elections and put our billionaire in the White House, then we need to eliminate certain kinds of donors whom we know use their money for evil to undo our Constitution.  George Soros certainly falls under that category, but then again, so does Bill Gates. 

Bill Gates little Secret

Lying with statistics didn’t start with those modern terrorists.  Human beings worldwide never really figured out how to filter media such as radio and television once our private time went from fixing tractors to suddenly watching I Love Lucy on tv each week and the ads that accompanied them.  Suddenly, we were inundated with statistics of every kind because statistics told a story, such as how many people like to ride school buses and how much meat men and women eat on Tuesdays.  We never solved the validity of statistics in any society on earth and who tells the story.  What happened to us was that honest people continued to earn honest livings on farms and factories, coming home to their families each day as dutiful Americans. Still, the scum bags, the shysters, and scam artists of every kind and the activists who wanted to rule the world found a new game in town, the art of manipulation through mass media and the ability to lie with statistics so that social movements could be moved toward those who wanted power.  Bill Gates knew what he wanted to do with his life.  He was already rich and could have anything he wanted in the world.  But what his money couldn’t buy was public sentiment for his religion of global warming.  But he could use his money to influence opinion with all kinds of statistics, and that is how it started with him and where we find ourselves to this very day. 

How the scam works

All the villainy we have seen involving Covid-19 is described in the book How to Lie With Statistics.  Without question, Bill Gates endorsed this reprint of the book as a kind of hint, a game he was playing with the world, a catch me if you can sort of thing.  He did it again in 2015 when he put the book on his summer reading list with other books about vaccines and other troubling issues.  It’s an easy book to read; it’s certainly not complicated.  Other books like it have been written since, yet Bill Gates picked this one to endorse personally.  Not exactly the book of a modern genius. Instead, it’s like the Rosebud from Citizen Kane, where Gates would destroy the world to save it from human beings and their statistical improbabilities of climate change, only to leave everyone confused as to how it all happened.  But Gates can laugh and look in the mirror, declaring that he initially gave us all the hints.  But we were too stupid to see it, so in that way, he can then transform all his guilt onto us.  After all, he was the honest patron who told us how evil he was and what he planned to do.  It was our fault that we let him do it.  Do you see how that works?

All the math on Covid was wrong, purposely misleading just as they say to do in How To Lie With Statistics.  When colds used to be counted by deaths, this new method measured everything in cases.  Like the example in the picture of the farms that increased over a five-year period, it wasn’t farmed property that changed.  It was just that the rules were changed to give more properties the qualification of being a farm.  What governments worldwide did following Bill Gates and his money began to measure things differently regarding colds.  They did it because they wanted Bill Gates funding, something that Gates had the money to give away even though he could care less about any of it.  Money could buy for Bill Gates love or homes.  But what he wanted was influence over power-hungry people who didn’t care what statistics Bill Gates gave them.  For a fee, they’d take it and run with it, and in so doing, people like Gates were able to purchase up most of the media culture.  And people never noticed faulty statistics from honest ones because everything was hidden behind a common assumption in all media, that other people more intelligent than we were made all the statistics we heard about.  But what the gag and crime were always meant to hide was that the people making the statistics weren’t so smart.  They were vicious and evil.  But to mask it from themselves, they even gave us the method they planned to use against us, to our doom.  But they knew we would not even look at it and would fall for their scams anyway.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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A House Divided is OK: What I learned from Gretchen Wollert’s book ‘Born To Fight’

Its Better to be a House Divided than to put up with Evil

When Gretchen Wollert sent me an invite to review her new book, Born to Fight: Lincoln and Trump, I’ll have to admit that I was a little skeptical.  And I always think about that skepticism whenever I bring out a new book as I am now.  Many people are out there writing books, so how are you supposed to know one from another now that publishing has decentralized?  Ironically, we live in a time when more books are produced and sold globally, yet human beings seem to have lost the means to their intellect.  But there was something about Gretchen that I liked a lot, so I read her book and found it quite good.  It was more than just another book on Trump riding on the coattails of his presidency.  What she did that was unique was compare President Lincoln and President Trump in a parallel that was oddly similar in so many ways.  Not to mention was an unusual reminder of the times we live in and how they aren’t much different than how things were before and after the Civil War.  Where I didn’t expect to learn much new for me, it turned out that Gretchen’s comparison over more than 100 years of American history was the exact thing needed to answer a question I had been thinking about a lot lately, whether we should be a house divided or value the ways we are different.  And to accept that fate. 

In my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I have many quotes that I like a lot. Still, as I read Gretchen’s book, one came to mind how the Civil War started essentially because Lincoln was elected. Soon after he won his re-election, he was killed by a radical leftist, an actor from that social order, just a few days after the war was over.  JFK was killed very early in his term, again by a radical leftist—an open communist that many think was deeply tied to a newly created Deep State.  By the time Trump came along, the killing of presidents had changed. My quote reflects this transition as such: “Once the dandies of the world took ownership of production, the means to a living, a new way of killing people has become fashionable–the ruining of their reputations or at least the attempt of it. These days we call it “cancel culture,” but that is just a new name for an old practice: that replaced the honor of a gunfight to the death to preserve honor and integrity.”  The attempt to kill Trump was under the new method of erasing him from existence, starting with Twitter.  The modern belief is that a killed reputation is better and cleaner than actually shooting someone in the head, removing them from life itself.  We might now look at the behavior of the political left and our modern Deep State and be shocked into inaction by the evil of it all, but it’s not new. It’s a repeat of history over and over again.  These repulsive forces against the righteousness of America will never go away until they are defeated and utterly destroyed.  There has always been an assassin element rooted in political parties in America, so far always on the political left, and our good Christian sensibilities have usually turned the other cheek over and over again, empowering the bullies.  But what is happening now is not unusual.  It happened before, which is what Gretchen was able to capture wonderfully in her book.  And if we don’t put an end to it, we will see assassinations physically or by social ostracization well into the future.  There is no making peace with it. 

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Now Lincoln tried to bring everyone together by stating that a “House divided cannot stand.” And to this day, many Republicans are still saying it, and they are always the first to compromise.  That gives the wild communists always left-leaning the power and leverage politically.  They know Republicans will move off their position; they never meet anybody halfway.  Democrats take and take and take until there is nothing left but an empty husk of the country.  And if you don’t do what they want you to do, they plot to get rid of you in every way possible. That’s how they function.  They know Republicans don’t want a “house divided,” so they are always looking to show just how much the house is divided.  And they use that leverage to dominate the right in every way.  That is until people voted for Donald Trump, and he was willing to fight the good fight against the Deep State, much to the political left’s consternation.  But this time, the left was slipping, and they had to get rid of Trump before they lost their grip on power, which I would argue has already happened.  The left has power on paper.  But they do not have the hearts and minds of the masses, and that brand has been forever damaged.  They are presently living a very slow-moving death. 

I closed Gretchen’s fine book thinking that America can stand as a divided house.  Ultimately, Lincoln picked a moral war that killed hundreds of thousands of people for the idea of freeing the slaves.  The battle was a bloody mess, and it had to happen to do what was right in the world.  Trump, in his way, had to stand up to China and the jealous villains of the world who wanted to see the end of America. Trump’s America First platform was, in its way, a demand for freedom from the clutches of Chinese communism that had been well planned and was well on its way before Trump took office.  The violent reaction to Trump being elected was much the same as the South had toward Lincoln.  There will always be these violent uprisings when people pick a president outside of the forces that think they are in control.  And to take a page out of President Roosevelt, which I think is another good comparison to Trump, peace is no good if we allow evil to boil into life.  Specifically, Teddy Roosevelt said, “the pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.” When we see evil, we are compelled to face it down and destroy it.  Not to make friends with it. 

Ultimately, that is what I learned from Gretchen’s book.  For her point, she wanted to show how similar the lives of Lincoln and Trump were.  But it’s in the context of history that the more powerful message is clear to all.  As the American people, we always have picked the right kind of fighters to do what needs to be done.  The forces that want to keep us under control have always sought to kill off our champions for justice, which we have seen in our own time with how Trump has been treated.  But as we’ve seen, this isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.  We must allow for the house to be divided, not to sacrifice everything to unite it.  We need to have our battles; we need to fight the fights.  And through the smoke, we need to see who wins.  But to accept evil, no, we can’t do that. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Kings Island Goes Cashless: Communist China is leading the world in controlling financial transactions

Communist China is Leading Kings Island into going Cashless

I understand why Kings Island, as a company, would want to go cashless.  Forget about the conspiracy theories for a minute of a global cashless system run by a communist regime.  They have many people under 22 years old that they employ, and cash is messy.  Everywhere there is something to buy at Kings Island, at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, Kings Island must act as a major bank and carry a lot of cash on hand to operate.  It is a tricky problem to put all that money in and out of a safe.  Then there are all the mistakes that the employees make during a typical business day, and they lose a lot of money at each station where goods are purchased.  Then, of course, money is dirty, all kinds of people touch it, it never gets washed, and it becomes a cesspool in the pocket of someone’s dirty, sweaty pants.  For the convenience of Kings Island, one of the biggest amusement parks in America located in Northern Cincinnati, getting away from cash and moving to credit cards makes their job a lot easier.  That is part of the big global plan to push for a cashless system.  Companies like Kings Island have tremendous overhead just in dealing with employees who handle cash on any particular business day, and it’s a real pain, especially if there are options.  I understand why Kings Island wants to be cashless.  I know why global communists wish to be cashless, which we’ll talk about in a minute.  But what nobody was asking is, what do the customers want?”

Well, I can tell you my thoughts, I was infuriated when I was stuck in the Festhaus of Kings Island with all my grandchildren, and my wife couldn’t buy any food because we just had found out while paying for that food in line that they were only taking credit cards.  No cash allowed.  We were all hungry and tired.  We had been swimming, so we didn’t bring anything that might be easy to lose into the park.  We put a hundred bucks in our pockets for food but otherwise kept all our valuables in the car.  Now we couldn’t use that money to pay for food, and we were highly inconvenienced.  The guy at the checkout apologized and explained that Kings Island had made the switch due to Covid restrictions, which infuriated me.  Because I knew it wasn’t Governor DeWine who was pushing a cashless system.  It was Cedar Fair Amusements who were using Covid as an excuse to go cashless.  An advantage to them that I explained above. That’s when we left the park to get food somewhere else, which became a nightmare all its own for similar reasons.  But needless to say, that was the end of our day at Kings Island, and it will likely be my last time going for a while.  Going cashless for me is a breaking point, a take it or leave it a moment, and I’d just soon leave it. 

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The push for a cashless society comes from communist China.  They are already doing much of what Kings Island is working to do, so why not do it.  Why are they doing it? Well, it gives them control over their people.  It allows for the concept of a social score to accept or deny financial transactions.  For instance, if you speak out against the communist government in China on social media or some other traceable way, they can lower your social score, which might prevent you from riding a bus or going to see a movie.  Just think of the censorship of Twitter and YouTube but apply it to things you need to do in life, like go to the grocery store.  If you have a terrible social score, you may not be able to buy food.  That is how China plans to control its population of over a billion people, and it’s why many American corporations are leaning toward a cashless society.  Having that kind of consumer control is very attractive to some of the variability in any financial transaction.  I have seen this cashless thing attempted at several tradeshows and other venues around the country, and so far, it hasn’t been working very well.  There are still many people who still want to use cash, so vendors have to make accommodations.  What it always comes down to is whether or not someone wants a customer.  The consumer desire drives the behavior, not the other way around.  It is for that reason that cash will always be king in America.  Cash is freedom.

I give an example in the video above about me wanting to buy a beer at Kings Island.  Typically, I enjoy going there to look around and think.  If I pay ten bucks for a beer, I pull the money out of my pocket and pay whoever is selling the beer.  The transaction is between the seller and me.  No bank in New York even knows about it.  They might understand that Kings Island sold a beer, but to whom and for how long someone like me took to drink it, nobody knows.  And I like it that way.  So do a lot of other Americans.  Part of drinking the beer is a minor rebellion in it that is specific to American culture.  Just drinking a beer to be drinking one is pretty dull.  Also, using anything but cash means you must trust the system and all the employees who handle the transaction.  While traveling around, it’s happened to me that my wife might go to buy something, and she gets to the counter to pay with a credit card, and the company has shut down the card.  That happened to us while I was traveling in Japan, I had made a suspicious purchase, a tiny one, and the credit card company thought it was a stolen card testing it out on something less risky before making a more significant purchase.  My wife in the states was the one who got stuck without a way of paying until we could resolve the issue with several phone calls and a lot of embarrassment.  Carrying around cash as a secondary or primary way of paying is an obvious solution.  But if we have a cashless society, you must trust the entire system to get everything right, and we all have stories we could tell.  The burden shifts to the consumer while the corporations and governments of the world get the ease of control they so much desire. 

I expected a lot more out of Kings Island, and for them to blame the decision on Covid was just too low of a blow to accept.  I generally love Kings Island and Cedar Fair Amusements.  All I could think of was when they announced that they were not leading in the world but was only copying what the communists in China have already been doing. It diminished them significantly to my mind.  It felt like a betrayal.  My family was out of that park within 10 minutes of that attempted food exchange.  They do have cash conversion machines that can put a value on a card, but then your cash becomes like a gift card, and you must start figuring out how much money you put on it for all your transactions, and the whole thing becomes a significant pain in the neck.  Not that a few hot dogs and a hamburger cost $40, but they were making people stand around and use all these cashless systems was too much.  So, we left, and I can’t say I’ll be going back any time soon.  I go to Kings Island to enjoy myself, not to go to communist China.  Because that’s essentially what it has become—too many rules, too much control, and way too rigid.  And lazy.

Rich Hoffman

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