Category: The Delphi Technique

What Happens When Your Little Sister Plays With Your ‘Star Wars’ Toys: The Fate of all woke corporations

There are likely fewer people in the world who wrote as much about Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars property in entertainment as I have, or the fate of a multibillion-dollar investment, the Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida.  I was excited about it.  I have been a Star Wars fan most of my life, which is reflected in my work.  But it’s not just Bud Light that woke policies have crushed that the global push for a certain kind of CEO to now run these corporate boards ran by BlackRock have destroyed.  Knowing Star Wars as an entertainment property and a work of modern mythology, I could see early on the impact and ultimate failure of Disney’s quest to appease BlackRock and the other elements of the Desecrators of Davos, the World Economic Forum’s view of the world.  And it was evident in 2015 when the first of the next generation Star Wars movies came out in The Force Awakens that the future destruction of globalism was making itself most apparent.  What we have now is a kind of stubborn tenacity of globalism to impose itself on reality.  Whereas I have been saying for a very long time, many decades now, in writing, that the trend was going to destroy itself.  That was never more clear in how Disney as a corporation handheld Star Wars as soon as it purchased George Lucas way back in 2012 and have now chased off their audiences, which, prior to, looked to be eternally loyal.  I warned early on to all those who owned Disney stock to sell because the brands they, as a company, were building would fall apart, and that’s precisely what is happening.  As Disney is falling apart, so is globalism everywhere in the world. 

As scary as a post-President Trump world has been with all the horrible revelations that have been revealed, we are actually better off because market forces are proving that wonders of capitalism envisioned by the great Adam Smith book The Wealth of Nations to be as reliable as anyone could hope it to be.  Out of all the presently trained economists with PhDs in the study of social behavior and the flow of money, it really all points back to that seminal work that was released to the world when America was founded that has turned out to be exclusively true.  Disney had the money and power to hire anybody they wanted to be successful.  Just ten years ago, they looked to be an unstoppable entertainment company, but like the world presently is in general, all members of the Bilderberg group, and the World Economic Forum, Disney is a dismal failure that literally can’t do anything correctly.  They can’t produce new content that anybody wants, and what they do put out from their entertainment classics is so burdened with woke politics that it has turned away half the nation from enjoying their products.  Disney bet on their brand and thought it was so great that no matter how much wokeness they proposed, they assumed, as they all did when they adopted this Chinese communist model of corporate rule of the world, that people would follow them as leaders of culture and that progressive politics would rule the day.  Yet what they found out has been completely the opposite.  Markets serve people; they don’t shape culture.  They represent culture. 

That was never more apparent than when Disney built the Galactic Star Cruiser Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida, connected to the Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars land at Hollywood Studios.  I was very excited about Disney’s attempts and wanted them to work.  I was a big fan of the Star Wars Land and went to it as soon as it opened with my wife, and we made a nice vacation out of it.  I thought it was a stunning experience for a kid who grew up loving Star Wars, so I wanted the experiment to work.  But I saw the trouble too and had been talking about it, at first, very politely.  I did several radio shows with various guests around the country talking about the danger of woke Disney, which at that time, nobody understood what “woke” was.  And sadly, everything I said as a warning sign for Disney turned out to be true.  Disney didn’t understand Star Wars.  It was being run by a woman, hand-picked by George Lucas, to continue what he had built.  But she got swept up into this New World Order of the global citizen movement and turned Star Wars into what a little sister would do to your Star Wars toys when everyone was kids.  Girls might take your Star Wars figures and put lipstick on them, and instead of them having epic battles, she would sit them at a table and have them drink tea.  Kathy Kennedy essentially did that to Star Wars, designed for 8- to 12-year-old boys, and started producing all the content for girls.  And she thought that the boys would stick around and that the market expansion would now be more inclusive of girls and empower women. 

So when the Star Wars hotel opened as a kind of cruise ship last year, right after the Covid lockdowns, after ten years of development and over a billion dollars in investment, fans were stunned to learn that the $6000 per room 2 day all immersive experience was essentially the little sister version of Star Wars.  Star Wars is about rebellion against tyranny.  Not singing songs and drinking drinks in a bar with aliens walking around.  But Disney didn’t listen to the fans; instead, it lectured them about what it would be like, and the results were devastating.  Just over the hotel opened to great fanfare, it is now projected to close in September of 2023 because it just never took off.  People rejected the idea, and it wasn’t so much the money; the lack of the Star Wars experience ultimately destroyed it, really, before it ever got off the ground.  It proved something that will eventually happen to all corporations who have embraced woke policies, from Ford and General Motors to Bud Light, Miller Light, and Target.  Corporations don’t and never will run the world.  They will always serve society in general.  Not the other way around.  I warned everyone.  Some people listened, and those that did are better off today than they were.  Just as I have warned about the climate that still wants to vote for President Trump as opposed to the corporate approach of Ron DeSantis, they don’t know what they are doing.  Professionals who make their living off these kinds of things have drunk the Kool-Aid and found out that there is a lot of bad stuff in there, and they’ve learned it too late.

In general, what happened to Disney and the Star Wars hotel and brand is a warning of what will happen to everyone in the future of corporate globalism.   People don’t want woke and corporations who assume that their products are so beloved by the public that people will follow anything.  Corporations who believe that have another thing coming.  And that was never more obvious than in the closure of the Star Wars hotel so soon after it opened.  The smartest people in the world with the most financial resources could not change the kind of reality that Adam Smith articulated in his economics studies.  And those rules apply in every market sector.  Entertainment just being one that is obvious.  Which is a fine indicator of things to come. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The 51 Agents That Committed Treason and Sedition: When a government investigates itself and doesn’t send itself to jail

Do people like John Brennen and James Clapper inspire any kind of confidence? Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence, and Brennan was the Director of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). Big jobs, yet they showed such recklessness in their activism against a sitting president that they could justifiably be called foolish. I mean, let’s get some ground rules established here. I despised Barack Obama. I thought, and still do, that he represented evil on earth and was the worst thing that could have happened to America. And he’s still bad for America. But I would have never committed treason and sedition to remove him from office, as Clapper and Brennan did. They and 51 other intelligence officers signed a letter dismissing the Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, which has now turned out to be a complete lie. We saw a bunch of highly paid people with access to our most classified information doing whatever they could to rig the election against President Trump because they didn’t like him. I figured with Obama; if people voted for him, then the game works that you make an argument against him. You don’t go out and plot a government-paid coup against who the voters pick for office. This is what those 51 intelligence agents did, particularly Clapper and Brennan, which indicates just how radical those agencies had become. They felt entitled to do whatever it took to remove Trump from office, so now we know what we do about their level of activism, we must look at everything people suspect was wrong and give it new merit. Because if they would lie about that, what else would they lie about? 

It’s not like I’m talking about this in a vacuum. About a year ago, when this story was being talked about heavily, about the 51 agents who had signed that letter right before the 2020 election hoping to suppress the information about the Hunter Biden laptop, which showed the president’s son doing very despicable things. It also showed the money trail to the Biden family from China and other places where Joe Biden had sold access to himself to hostile contributors who were known enemies of our country. I was able to talk to Mike Pompeo about it, which under Trump, he was in charge of the CIA. So he knows the kind of people who are in the CIA. Under someone like Pompeo, I think better of the CIA. But under John Brennan, it’s simply an interment of domestic terrorism because of his political positions, which he obviously abused under his direction. And, of course, Pompeo was embarrassed about the actions. He thinks a lot of the men and women in the CIA who worked under him and the information about the 51 agents who signed that letter was embarrassing for him, and he would have preferred that I didn’t bring it up. After all, we were at a festive event, and he wanted to keep it that way. Yet such a reference was embarrassing because we wanted to believe these were good people. But they aren’t; they committed vile acts of sedition against our country as they plotted the overthrow of our executive in the White House. Brennan knew what he was doing, as we learned recently from the Durham Report that he briefed President Obama and Vice President Biden on the matter in the White House. They all plotted to remove Trump from office or keep him from office by subverting the election process, and we only know about it because they were caught. Can you imagine what else they have done that they have not yet been caught for?

And we were told it was wrong to question the birth certificate of Obama, which turned out to have all kinds of problems with it. Or that it was wrong to examine why the CIA didn’t know about the attacks on 9/11 and didn’t share information with the FBI better, which facilitated the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. And I can tell you that right after the election, I had a chance to talk with Sidney Powell, who used to be on Fox News all the time until she said that there was election fraud in the last election. She was only the attorney for General Flynn, not exactly someone with a few screws loose. But as soon as she pushed a narrative that the election was stolen, in the open days after the 2020 election, along with Rudy Giuliani, she was dismissed from any public consideration. And what did she tell me, that the intelligence agencies stole the election. At the time, it seemed like fiction. But now we know from lots of evidence that has poured forth that they openly did lie in that letter. Russia wasn’t a factor in the election of President Trump. Our intelligence agencies had been caught, and the results of the Durham Report prove it. And what’s even worse is that the more anybody dug into the matter, the more radicalism from people like Clapper and Brennan came to the surface, and it all connected back to the Obama White House. 

If the crimes that the 51 intelligence officers committed were not treason and sedition, then what would they be? Treason is the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government. The CIA has done that in regard to Trump because he was in the government at the time. And we now know through released classified information that the CIA played a prominent role in the killing of President Kennedy in 1963. That’s not a conspiracy theory anymore. Sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward rebellion against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or insurrection against, established authority. Isn’t that what these intelligence agents did with the signing of that letter, to alter the outcome of an election, to lie to the American people to manipulate the sentiment of voters by using their trusted positions to do so? If these are not high crimes from these 51 agents, what are? The sad thing about this entire story is that the government investigated itself and decided not to send itself to jail. That is why the Durham Report says many very hard things but can’t recommend any prosecution because who would do the prosecution? Everyone is in on it, and from both political parties. They don’t fear punishment, have a rigged system, and dare anybody to come after them, which is why they committed the crimes against Trump and his voters in the first place. They have no respect for any of us or the Constitutional law they were sworn to protect. They are laughing at us for our naive reverence to such things as “borders” and “elections.” They think they are smarter than we are, they think they know better than we do, and they think they are in charge, ultimately. And they can do whatever they want to anybody, any time they want to. They are examples of abuse of power that was out of control long ago. And anybody who gets in their way they feel it’s their right to destroy. And they’ve been doing it essentially since they were made into existence in the last century. They haven’t been around very long, and perhaps based on these actions, they shouldn’t remain in any form. We’d be better off without such terrorists and their crimes of sedition and treason against the United States which are common, not unique.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why Property Values in Butler County Could Go Up By 42%: And What Nancy Nix and many others are doing to Protect taxpayers

It was a very beautiful day looking out the windows of the Office of Nancy Nix as the Great Miami River gently rolled by as it has for many thousands of years. I looked down from the third-floor vantage point into the park that used to be the movie theater in Hamilton, where I first saw Sleeping Beauty and reflected on good memories from childhood. The weather outside was perfect for a day in May of 2023, so it was an excellent reflection of the long history of Butler County, Ohio, where the city of Hamilton had seen so much history, lots of good days and rough times to say the least and of course, the river flows by regardless of what human beings cause themselves by way of trouble. And the topic that Nancy and I were set to talk about, captured well in the video above, was historic trouble. The short story was that Butler County and nearby Clermont County were being penalized for being affluent areas that had recently enjoyed dramatic economic growth. It made an easy target for the new Ohio Tax Commissioner, Patricia Harris, in trying to correct the many sins of the past, where the government had kicked the can down the road over a long period of time. She had decided that there was nowhere left to kick it. So this wasn’t something that just happened well before Nancy Nix took over in Butler County in the very important auditor position, this crisis was brewing, and now it was splashed all over headlines from a recent I-Team report that indicated property values in Butler County were going to go up by a recommended 42%. That meant that property values for a $250,000 house were suddenly going to be at $355,000, an increase of $105,000. And people were not happy about it.

At Thanksgiving Dinner, such news might sound great; people might even open a bottle of wine at the success of their investments in real estate. Suddenly things on paper looked much better, and their homes were worth a lot more. But in Butler County, regarding 8 of the ten school districts, there would be tax increases proportional to that value increase which was going to impact homeowners negatively. For instance, the school district of Ross, right across the river from Nancy’s office, as we spoke about this matter and looked in that direction, they just had a vote to defeat a tax increase for that school. The levy had failed for the third time. But now, because of this news from the Ohio Department of Taxation, Ross is holding off on trying for another levy because they will gain a lot of new revenue from the new tax rates of these inflated property values. That’s the kind of thing that has people so upset, and for good reason. In a lot of ways, the recommendation from the state is taking away a fundamental right of property owners to manage their local governments by essentially taking extra tax money without a vote, with just a decision by the state to calculate these varying percentages based on sales data recorded during a very turbulent time that does not represent the norm.   According to the state, which then imposes the percentage rate onto auditors like Nancy Nix, they take a three-year sales reflection of what they think is market value during their state-mandated triennial update. But for this one, that analysis period was one of the worst in the history of the world. Looking at sales from 2019, where America had one of the best economies in human history, then the following year with Covid lockdowns, then the volatility of runaway interest rates resulting from the Biden presidency and the economic tampering of several government controls, the data collected is far from the norm, and has resulted in these crazy recommendations which Nancy Nix and other auditors are questioning, aggressively. 

And as bad as all that news was, it was still a good day from the vantage point of Nancy’s office as we talked about the many proactive measures that she and area legislators were doing to help solve the problem. Regarding that, a new Fox 19 article had hit, and I was talking to Senator George Lang about it, where he is proposing a way to change how Ohio’s property values are reassessed, which is obviously needed. Politics aside, Patricia Harris, the Ohio Tax Commissioner, had just been appointed in January of 2023 and obviously could use more time on the job before destroying everyone’s tax bills based on some bad data compiled during her first few months on the job. And George’s proposal as a legislative solution would definitely help her and the people connected to her decision. But the Ohio Department of Taxation itself, according to the spokesman Gary Gudmondson was already headed down the wrong road by digging in with obviously flawed data by saying, “We don’t change our recommendations in response to a county complaint.” What he means is that the Ohio Department of Taxation doesn’t listen to people like Nancy Nix, professionals who have been doing this kind of work for most of their adult lives. Instead, her job was to listen to what they recommended and live with it because they held all the cards. 

Yet, there is optimism on the legislative front; in addition to the good work that George Lang is leading, there have been further meetings involving Sara Carruthers, Rodney Creech, Jennifer Gross, and Thomas Hall. Treasurer Mike McNamara, Clerk of Courts Mary Swain, and Recorder Danny Crank are working aggressively to propose short-term and long-term solutions. Some of them are legislative, such as what George is working on. Some would involve amendments to the State Constitution, which are obviously long overdue. Others are things that Nancy Nix and the names mentioned can do as proactive measures. It’s not all bad news. But ultimately, these rate hikes are the result of years of government mismanagement from the state level imposed on regional government, where the most accountability to the voting public is supposed to be the key to all decision-making. But in this case, stuck against the cost of volatile bad decisions, especially during the Covid period, the impact of those decisions is not flowing into people’s property value assessments which are being penalized because they live in areas that were disproportionately well off in relation to other parts of the state that didn’t do so well. And now, we must sort it all out in a way that makes Ohio an attractive place to continue investing in. Otherwise, people might leave for destinations without these kinds of problems. The burden falls on the Ohio Tax Commissioner to develop better strategies for recovering costs from kicking the can down the road for so long and analyzing the market temperament correctly with a better sampling than what the last three years have shown, as they were the worst three years in the history of life on planet earth. And that isn’t the fault of innocent people who have lived in their homes for a long time and plan to stay in their homes. This is the task that I think Nancy Nix is doing a great job of representing Butler County under very turbulent times. But like the history of Hamilton itself and the Great Miami River that flows past her office, we are living history that will be remembered for a long time to come, and that history is made better by some of the great people who are tackling this problem aggressively in defense of the innocent who might otherwise be victims of bad government, such as we are seeing now with the Ohio Department of Taxation in its first few months of a new commissioner. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Government Lies Again to Push Gun Legislation: How racism started and What Nazis really believe

Notice how quickly the shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets outside of Dallas, Texas fell off the front page. That was because there were a lot of messy narratives that did not give the political left their desires for more gun control allowing their out-of-control government to have more power over people’s individual liberty. Every time one of these mass shootings happens, I first look for evidence of intelligence agencies tampering with these kids more than a root cause for the actual intent because that is how low and manipulative these government workers are these days. They have a playbook, and they hope to use crimes committed by guns to inspire changes to the constitutional framework of our nation. But it wasn’t but hours after the shooting that a person of Mexican descent named Mauricio Garcia had killed eight innocent people before being killed himself was being painted by the media as a MAGA type of assailant. Again, suppose there had been a gun-free zone. In that case, somebody carrying a gun could have ended the killings much faster than waiting for a paid security representative in the form of a guard or police officer. But after the killer was killed, they discovered that he had a lot of Nazi tattoos of swastikas and similar references, so the media tried to pass him off as a “white supremacist,” which then became the whole story of the tragedy. Here was a Mexican descendant who showed Nazi sympathies and was living with parents that couldn’t speak English to the degree that they had to have an interpreter to understand what had just happened with their son. 

If we hadn’t seen it a lot before, we might have been shocked to see the media, and the government, so quickly trying to form a narrative around the Nazi tattoos. And then photos were resurrected showing him with a group of neo-Nazi types playing dress up in complete military outfits, and that by itself was supposed to convince everyone that the shooter was a representative from the MAGA movement and that some leftist fantasy about the motives could then proceed to provide ground cover for anti-gun legislation. And shockingly, the government soaked up the narrative and began pounding the drum for more gun control measures, seemingly not caring one bit for the poor, unfortunate people who had just been killed. The Nazi connection is a complete designation made up by the media in connection with Trump and has no place in the reality of everyday people. Here was a kid who had parents who were immigrants and couldn’t teach the young person much about the history of the United States. And like kids who come out of Mexico and connect to drug cartels, tattoos are rites of passage. And so are aligning themselves with social groups that appear to be powerful, whether it’s the drug cartels themselves or neo-Nazi types who celebrate power through historical references that had previously terrified the world. To young, insecure people not native to the culture of the United States, it can be hard to understand how to manipulate power for their own preservation. Many kids these days get tattoos for all the same reasons that Mauricio Garcia did, to express themselves in a confusing culture and assert themselves as tough. How a person goes from Nazi tattoos to a mass shooting is the real problem, and for that, I say that intelligence agencies have been caught blowing on the fires of discontent among disturbed youth many times, especially when those youth consume drugs like marijuana. But there is more to this Nazi narrative that many clearly don’t understand that is important, especially in this case. 

The attempt to make acts of violence a condition of racism is a trick of the left that they have used for a long time. But in this case, a Mexican Nazi has many misfit concepts that don’t fit neatly into that traditional narrative. When you think of a neo-Nazi, you might think of some white guy with a mohawk, slightly overweight with a half-shaved reddish beard, with skin that looks like he has eaten too many Cheetos.   Not some kid growing up in a drug cartel world where Mexican people try to appear tougher and more established in what they think represents aggressive world history that might scare off rival aggressors when their parents couldn’t teach them much history because they lived in a country where they couldn’t speak any English.   The idea of a Nazi to a young person without much understanding of history might seem like a good idea if you are trying to impress the cartels. But even the media had very little knowledge of the origins of Nazi actions in politics. They think it represents the MAGA movement which is far removed from reality. The Nazis were big government authority figures, whereas the American conservatives are small as possible government supporters who despise authority figures. Especially ostentatious ones like Adolph Hitler. 

Obviously, everyone needs a history lesson on the root cause of racism because it did all start with the Nazis. But not for the reasons that people think. The Nazi Party was created by the Thule Society, who believed they were interacting with aliens who seeded planet Earth. And it was their Aryan race that they thought was superior to all the other genetic experiments that were going on around the earth that created the five primary races. Hitler was picked as a spokesman for the Thule Society, which had a lot of support before World War II because their concern was the preservation of the seed of the gods being preserved from mixing with the other genetic experiments that the aliens had dispersed elsewhere, they desired to preserve that origin, alien, bloodline.   Not something they typically teach you in school. But that is the history of the Nazi party and why they were so obsessed with racism. And that message has been used by the political left so much that they don’t even understand the meaning anymore. Racism as a concern is all about preserving alien blood from a seeding species from other planets. And none of that represents what Trump supporters and NRA members in American culture represent. Instead, Nazi reverence is more common with lost kids who didn’t have a very good childhood and are concerned about being affiliated with cartel gang activity that might make them appear weak. The border violence, including this Allen shooting, is more a problem with border policy than political parameters. And that is what the Biden White House doesn’t want to discuss, or the media culture that keeps him propped up. But as usual, the narrative for this violent encounter has nothing to do with reality, and it was ironic to watch them attempt to paint a picture anyway. It showed to what extent the government is willing to lie and mislead innocent people for a power grab they are obsessed with. They are eager to exploit the government’s desire to have an anti-gun policy in disgusting ways, even if what they say to the public has nothing to do with actual history or reality. And for every media member who attempts to paint everything with a brush of racism, they have no understanding of how racism started and why, which is quite astonishing. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Bill Barr’s Comments About Trump: A “Horror Show” is exactly what the American people want

Chaos is good when you have a culture that needs change. Chaos is only harmful to those being affected by the change. For those seeking change, chaos is their best friend. So in that context, the comments by Bill Barr, the former Attorney General for President Trump, who was a known RINO from the start, left over from the Bush administration, when he talks about chaos negatively and indicates that a second Trump term would be a horror show, are understandable. I’ll go on to say that there is a lot of evidence that our intelligence agencies, working with many forces, were behind the rigged election of 2020, and that is not an acceptable condition, and Bill Barr is fully aware of it. But they felt justified in what they did because they wanted to do it to preserve a gig they have in the Beltway that employs so many people. Bill Barr went on to say that President Trump had some good policies but would not be able to implement them because Trump was incapable of thinking in a linear fashion and working with other people to get things done as the system allowed.

So regarding the comments, I was grateful that Barr said them because it is a kind of smoking gun over the entire issue of whether we actually have free elections or not in America and who is motivated to rig elections. Bill Barr played his part by refusing to investigate the obvious problems in voter counts that were being reported to the Attorney General.  Trump picked Bill Barr because Jeff Sessions had not been effective as a representative of the President’s positions, as other Attorney Generals had been. Trump picked Barr to appease his critics, as he was under continuous investigation; otherwise, he might have picked someone more representative of his positions. Regarding all that, a lot was revealed in Barr’s statements that is worth considering. 

Trump has a proven track record for solving problems, which was most evident in his television show, which nobody has been able to duplicate, The Apprentice, which is nearly impossible to find in syndication anywhere. It was only the top-rated show on television for 14 years, and when Trump ran for President, NBC tried to use Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of Trump, and the show crashed quickly. Nobody could do what Trump had done on that show that was so popular with audiences. And that is because human beings create static cultures for themselves to protect known assumptions, especially when they discover that they benefit from those assumptions. Therefore, when a culture is said to become corrupt, it is because a system becomes rigged to help the participants at the expense of innovation and general culture investment. And in almost every company in the world, from a small business mom-and-pop shop to a giant corporation, a static culture will always grow for good or evil, and the measures of those designations decide the success or failure of the enterprise. Trump as a business person, a very successful one, understands these kinds of things, so Americans clearly picked him over the Beltway desire of Hillary Clinton. The intelligence community obviously had other ideas, this fourth branch of government was filled with unelected bureaucrats, and in 2020 that election had many obvious problems that are still unresolved. It was noticeable in our free society as opposed to places around the world that aren’t so free, and Bill Barr found himself stuck between loyalty to the office of the President, which he takes seriously, and the preservation of the Beltway culture that is isolated from the concerns of the rest of the world. 

If you’ve ever been to Washington D.C., you will have seen that the region around that capital city is filled with extremely wealthy people, most of them working in the structure of Beltway culture. They live off taxpayers’ efforts and are hedged from the concerns of diabolical economic decisions created by that same Beltway culture. For them, the value of their existence is the Washington D.C. culture which employs them with bureaucratic jobs, rates of pay that are entirely too high, and there are too many people working in that system taking money. Government is way too big, employs too many people, and costs too much for what they do. And to preserve themselves, they need to keep out opinions to the contrary, who see the situation as a bloated monstrosity of inefficiency and corruption. Someone who has worked in the world at solving those very problems cannot be allowed in to disrupt that culture, which is what Bill Barr was saying as a protector of that system. Washington, D.C., is filled with hundreds of thousands of people just like Bill Barr, so any reform to that culture is a significant threat to their very existence. And that is what a second term of Trump would bring, chaos and destruction to that “Drain the Swamp” mentality, and to be honest, many people in the swamp want to remain hidden. And our intelligence agencies, who have been caught killing presidents, rigging elections around the world, overthrowing governments, and causing a lot of disorder everywhere for the benefit of the Beltway culture, were not just going to allow people to pick their President and bring disruption and chaos to their lives. What Bill Barr was warning about to the audience that he was speaking it to is precisely the kind of thing that the American people want to see happen. 

I would say that the Beltway culture could be reduced to 10% of what it is presently. (meaning a 90% layoff of the present employee structure) The recent acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk is a good example of a micro-culture that had a lot of top-heavy costs sucking off the company in devastating ways to that culture. It was good for them as a job but bad for the efficiency of the company and the end user, the consumer. Musk was able to remove most of the employees and still run the company effectively, and that has stirred up a lot of people who are upset with Musk as an employer because he embraces chaos so intently. But to any executive who gets it, chaos is a manager’s best friend regardless of politics. It shows you where the problems are and indicates how to fix them. And in successful cultures, Trump has managed chaos to significant effect, and people voted for him to go to the Beltway culture, slash many of the jobs there, and drain the swamp. But the Beltway, with all their highly paid useless government jobs, don’t want that chaos because they are hiding behind it with all their jobs that are essentially destroying our government. It’s great for them, but not good for the country. So when Bill Barr was critical of the “horror show” of another Trump presidency, which looks to be evident at this point, that is what he and others are so worried about. The American people want the corrupt employees and politicians of the Beltway culture to be scared. So a horror show is precisely what we want. We don’t like corruption. We don’t like that they don’t represent us. And we are sick of paying for a mess and want a change. And that is why a Trump Horror Show is exactly what voters want, and more!

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Way to Have Honest Elections: Just call Frank LaRose in Ohio, and he can show you how

How could anybody not think that election fraud is a real problem? After all, look at the amount of money that is at stake, the enemy countries out there who want to put people sympathetic to their cause in our government for leverage. Likely, election fraud has been a significant problem the entire time that mass media has been involved in the conduct of our election cycles. We should be looking for cheating everywhere, all the time. And to maintain secure elections, we must take the process seriously, and that just hasn’t been happening. The election fraud of 2020 goes way beyond hurt feelings that Donald Trump didn’t win and that Republicans didn’t maintain control of the White House. The fraud was so ostentatious that it was no longer speculation of election fraud but a grim reality and to what extent it was occurring. Obviously, there were political class members on both sides who wanted to see election fraud happen to maintain their control over the government institutions themselves. Mitch McConnell comes to mind, as do people like Bill Barr: the FBI, the corporate boards of major media companies. What we had once suspected was now a confirmed reality, and now in the wake of all that a few years ago now, there are still those who want to deny that it did happen so that they can continue to benefit from the rigged system and allow global influences to manipulate American interests for the goals of insurgents hostile to the American idea.

Yet the solution is relatively simple now that we know what we know, and rather than argue with people about election fraud and deal with all the many court cases that are required to fix it, there is no hope of such a thing happening by the time of the 2024 election. So what is anybody supposed to do? With such a massive election fraud machine that literally has millions and millions of greedy hands in it to manipulate toward controlled advantage, what options can a government that is supposed to be ruled by the people utter to save its election system from the barbarous pirates of finance and political discourse? Well, I happen to know Frank LaRose, the Ohio Secretary of State, a bit, and I would gladly put you in touch with him to learn what he has done in Ohio to secure elections. I would say that what Frank has done in Ohio toward the goal of election integrity should be the standard for the rest of the nation to follow, and it’s all very simple. Of course, the bad guys are suing him left and right because they know how good his policies are for secure elections, and they are hoping to see his methods overturned in court by the 2024 presidential election because, in the game of “lawfare” the way liberals like to fight, they have no chance of winning any Democrat seats in Ohio without election fraud. So they are in a bit of a panic. The two best things that Frank LaRose has done to secure elections is to mandate a photo ID that is government issued. That can be a driver’s license or just a card issued for free by the BMV. Very easy to get and is the basic way to ensure that the person voting is who they are. The second thing that is done in Ohio is probably the most important, which is a real problem in this modern age of early voting, is that vote counts need to be counted by election day, not many days after. 

The way the game works, and it’s a well-thought-out scam that Democrats and some Republicans have fully endorsed over the years under the banner of “fairness,” is that mail-in ballots were ripe for fraud because they could be added or subtracted depending on what the final vote count margin actually was. In Ohio, there is early voting, but the general rule is that everyone must put their pencils down by election night, and the vote counts are due. Ohio achieves this by inputting those votes into the system as they come in so that by election night, they can be part of the vote. States like Pennsylvania don’t start counting those votes until election day, which is how this mess of counting votes days after the election began, and election results were not known on election day but days later. States that continue counting after the election, which was the case in several state races involving congressional seats, already know the margin they need to put their favorite person over the top, so they keep counting mail-in ballots until they reach their target. And if they don’t have enough actual mail-in ballots, they make them up until they do. That’s simply no way to manage any accurate election, and it has purposely opened the door to rampant election fraud. Remember when Pennsylvania, over the weeks after the election came up with a million extra votes to put Joe Biden over President Trump? And the courts didn’t want to touch the case because it would open up the entire system to a complete lashing, and nobody had the stomach for it. Frank LaRose was brought in to testify how Ohio managed, and many in the process know this little trade secret. But admitting to it would essentially commit thousands of well-respected people to a guilty plea of sedition against our country. Election fraud is serious, and many people went way too far and got caught doing it. The most recent example is the monstrosity in Arizona with Katie Hobbs, who essentially managed her own election. Good election security essentially comes down to having a good secretary of state. If you don’t have one, you can forget about it. It’s that serious.

But rather than cry about it, just fix it. If everyone wants to prove they have honest elections, then at least ensure that early ballots are counted by election day, like in Ohio. And that will stop this trend of counting votes after election day, as we have seen becoming a major problem over the last two elections. Democrats knew what they were planning to do to cheat the 2020 election; they warned us ahead of time that Trump would appear to win in a landslide and that over the following weeks, Joe Biden would pull out the win. Well, they did that because they knew what the voting margin was that they had to come up with regarding fake votes. And that was their strategy all along, and why they allow their candidates to run their campaigns in their basement because they really think people are so stupid that they won’t see what they are up to. The best thing is to remove the temptation to cheat by ensuring that results are counted by election day and not after the results are known. The gap was so significant in Pennsylvania that this problem became apparent. So in the future, for those who want honest elections, just let me know, and I can put you in contact with Frank LaRose, and he can help your state run a fair election. And you better do it before 2024 because Democrats are planning to cheat again wherever they can. It’s part of their campaign strategy disguised as some “get out the vote” effort. But in reality, it’s just planned fraud, and the way to keep them from doing it is with some simple ground rules. And by doing as Ohio has, voter integrity will become much better. And the election results will be noticeably improved. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I’m Not Worried About Artificial Intelligence: People will always want Amish Furnature over IKEA

I’m not one who is overly concerned about all the artificial intelligence talk, especially regarding ChatGPT.   When I look at the amount of labor that an economy that needs to expand a lot will require, then you look at the available labor force, especially given the crises of the current public education liberal activism, and I see lots of great uses for A.I. I’m not one of those Blade Runner types who are worried about A.I. becoming self-aware and wanting to find its soul, and not die. I see necessary labor fulfillment in artificial intelligence, especially as civilization moves into space. The amount of labor that will be required to achieve what I’d like to see for the human race is extraordinarily high, much more significant than a society of lazy humans could ever achieve on their own. So for me, A.I. is exciting. Unlike a Terminator movie, I’m not worried about it taking over the world and turning all mechanical things against us. I am also not concerned about artificial intelligence being smarter than the human race. I’m certainly not worried about it, personally. Intelligence is far more than the ability to make calculations. When solving complicated math problems, I think calculators are perfectly wonderful. But by themselves, calculators aren’t smart. They are just able to handle raw data well, which is the case of A.I. programs. Intelligence is far more than just making calculations. And I’ve seen from A.I. that it can copy what it sees humans do, but it can’t surprise human ability to think, and I don’t think it ever will. Imagination is part of intelligence, and it has roots in operations that extend outside our dimensional reality, and mechanical intelligence will always be short on that ability because actual thought is not just about 1s and 0s or Xs and Os. 

To answer many questions that have been asked, given the amount of work I personally do in writing, everything I do is done the old-fashioned way. I will always provide my thoughts as a writer in the traditional way. I do not have trouble filling an empty page with thoughts, and I can do it efficiently enough to compete with a head-to-head match-up with ChatGPT. I’ve heard from contemporaries that ChatGPT can get really close to the style of an actual writer, given a particular subject matter. But to me, it’s like buying furniture from an Amish person or getting it from Ikea. It’s all furniture, but the quality of it is obviously better with an Amish person who builds everything by hand, works within a well-structured family environment, and intends for the furniture to last a lifetime and be passed down from generation to generation. Whereas IKEA furniture likely will only last a few years and be thrown away before a decade goes by. My experience with A.I. so far shows considerable gaps in quality that will only increase the more mechanical the process is. I think this actually works to the advantage of a person like me who wants to get a message out. If people like what I’m saying, and they use ChatGPT to duplicate my efforts in a mass way, then that quality of conversation as it moves into mass media, like Twitter, and Google itself, will end up more intelligent and more on point to a political message, than just turning over the original thought to A.I. to generate a political campaign. For that reason, I will always start with my original thoughts. The amount of work on my blog, for instance, I produce initially, every word of it, every day, all days of the year, for decades because I am investing in shaping culture itself, including A.I.  So the more that A.I. wants to copy my original thoughts, I’m more than happy to let it go out and make the world a better place. I have absolutely no fear that it will ever surpass my intelligence and work against me. Instead, I think I will always find a way to make A.I. beneficial to my strategies as a thinking person on the chessboard of life.

I have seen the radicalism in A.I. for a while now, the dangers that everyone is concerned about, which is why I have been reluctant to use it at all. For instance, for many years in their Office software, Microsoft has been autocorrecting woke words into their documents during spell checks. Spellcheck is a wonderful program, but the word suggestions are horrendously progressive. For instance, when using words like “transvestite” it flags it as socially insensitive and an outdated term. Well, I say it’s a very relevant term, so I spend a lot of time ignoring the suggestions of Microsoft and its radical A.I. that runs in the background of its Office software. I usually ignore about half of the program suggestions on a document by the radically liberal global company that has foolishly moved more toward such intelligence systems rather than relying on human intellect. And that’s the same with Grammarly editing software, which is very useful. I usually run everything I write through Grammarly, and I like it. It helps catch errors, especially with my fast-moving lifestyle, where there isn’t much time to ponder all the rules of grammar with the amount that I do write. Grammarly takes the emotion out of writing and the kind of mistakes a human editor might experience, especially if they have their own opinions. But Grammarly has many of those same woke tendencies in it; it doesn’t like words like “own” or “actual,” and it certainly doesn’t like the word “mankind” because it has the word “man” in it. Instead, it prefers to use the word “humankind,” which I ignore and use my own words anyway. 

And that is how the differences in artificial intelligence will begin to show itself from the original thought. I don’t think the human being will become less relevant. Instead, I think A.I. will value source material to duplicate more than ever, making the human being much more valued in original thoughts. The fear that A.I. will surpass the human element only holds if we consider the amount of labor available in our current economy to be limited to that duplication effort, as if the human job will be eliminated and the A.I. element will then take over all entertainment, reporting, commentating, and the production of religious sentiment. I say it will always be IKEA furniture that will be good but not highly sought after. Whereas the human mind and imagination, for pure originality and quality, will always be needed, much the way that people crave the craftsmanship of Amish woodworkers. I see it already in programs like Grammarly, and Microsoft Office, that the A.I. programs are actually jealous of the human intellect, especially when you reject their inputs to keep that originality fresh and avoid their mechanical approach to sentiment. The best way to stay authentic is to bend the world to that authenticity and not to use the lazy approach of letting others think for you. That is what most people really fear, is the competition with A.I., that is obvious. But A.I. will only be as good as the human race can program it to be because thought and imagination are connected to the human soul, which science has yet to figure out. To what aspect is thought connected to immortality? That is where the real questions are. And A.I., as it is evolving, might calculate such things based on the data it has, but imagination still acquires the data, and that will likely always be the case. 

Rich Hoffman

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The ‘Clockwork Orange’ Plan of Leftist Attack on Western Civilization: Planned terrorism using dope-smoking lazy Youth to Destroy America

I’ve heard it with increased frequency, especially over the last several weeks, “You better watch out for the youth. They own tomorrow, and they are coming for you.”  Let me explain a few things; there is no world where a bunch of freaks doped up on marijuana, and a lazy work ethic takes over America. Now we see an intent by the liberal government that has corrupted these young people for most of the last century. This is the kind of leftist radicalism that we saw in the excellent book by Anthony Burgess and the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name, A Clockwork Orange, where a radicalized youth terrorizes society and shoves the government toward more authoritarian motivations. If you remember the movie, the “Singin’ in the Rain” scene, which was an obvious desecration of the Gene Kelly classic film makes the point clearly. The scene was the rape and torture of a suburbanite couple that was brutal to that song which many modern viewers would quickly recognize as the Liberal World Order playbook. These classic liberals thought they had it all figured out, and their attack on Western civilization rooted in ancient gods from Sumerian civilization is a long story that is playing out presently with increased panic. And that panic I reported from the last several weeks is because they see it isn’t working because of one consideration they never planned on. We see it unfolding in cities like Chicago where unleashed, progressive youth, weaponized to do precisely what the youth did in the famous book and movie, terrorize innocent people so that they will vote for bigger government to save them has not worked outside of the gun-free zones where Democrats control policy. In other places where Republicans have “stand your ground” laws, this youth terrorism has not worked out so well. 

It has been hard for people to realize that our youth in the world has been purposely radicalized to use them as weapons of war against Western civilization. Going back even further to The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, there is this fantasy hope by the old forces of Baal worship that we see the trend of in the Bible, of Western civilization falling apart and a return to the gods of the pre-deluge days. To what degree evil works in the background of intellect is a debate of philosophy, quantum mechanics, religion, spiritual understanding, and a whole host of sciences that don’t typically appear in political science discussions. I remember a particular dinner party I attended with the director of the play Equus as it was shown in the very conservative Cincinnati, shortly after the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition of art desecration that was so publicly disputed, and I know these people. Yes, they are evil, intend evil, and mean for the destruction of life as we know it, the Christian-based Western civilization. So much of these left-leaning diatribes about the fall of the West is a fantasy that is the foundation concern of the political left. The play I referred to by the director, whom I knew, she had a thing for nudity, and she wanted to rub it in the face of an overly conservative Cincinnati public as a desecration. That was her reason for directing the play at the Taft Theater. This concept of corrupting the youth through easy sex, drugs, music and turning them into street activists against their parents’ generation has a long story of hope from the evil of the world that wants a Christian America to fall, and they have written a lot of books hoping to make that happen. 

But they never understood the value of market-based capitalism, which is the key to Western civilization. So liberal leaders in Chicago have one of the most progressive cities in the world, aside from San Francisco. They have a radicalized youth who can be turned into the streets to do essentially what the “Singin’ in the Rain” scene from Clockwork Orange was about: domestic terrorism to produce political change toward a communist government. Terrorize people to run to the arms of government for their protection; then, once a communist government was put in place, then the destruction of Western civilization, as the radical leftists have been dreaming of for years, can occur. And in the case of Chicago, this action has prompted Walmart to close three stores because they have simply shown it to be impossible to keep open because of the level of theft they see. So rather than collapse capitalism as the political left has hoped, capitalism instead goes where the value is, and it isn’t in state-controlled blue areas. As a result, stores will close in areas where the youth is out of control and inspired by radical politics. That is the real-life consequences of radicalism invoked by the youth, as seen in the movie A Clockwork Orange. Government weaponizes kids to revolt against their parents as trained in public education, and the downfall of society would naturally follow. The state-controlled blue areas are limited to only a few spots around America, leaving it always possible to move capitalism out into state-controlled red regions, which are much more numerous than state-controlled blue areas. Unlike the tendency of the left to gain power through election fraud, we see clearly the trend of actual voter sentiment by social behavior that most of the country does not allow their youth to get out of control. 

That is the ultimate failure of this plan by radical leftists; they thought that the Second Amendment would have already been eradicated and that unarmed people would be free to be terrorized by an out-of-control youth, as seen in A Clockwork Orange. For the leftist political plan to work, where youth could knock on your door late at night, take a family hostage and rape the women in front of their men grotesquely, the Second Amendment would have to have been removed. But in America, that is far from the case. Instead, gun laws have been loosened as many Republicans have learned of this trick and come to understand the strategy. If you want to eliminate the out-of-control violence, as they see in Chicago and San Francisco, get rid of the gun-free zones and let people protect their private property. That keeps these Clockwork Orange youth violence campaigns down to a minimum and completely screws up the lefty plan for destroying Western civilization. Seeing this plan fall apart, the political left has been screaming bloody murder because they really don’t have a plan B. If people aren’t afraid of them, they have no other means of getting their point across. They can’t win a debate on merits, only through force. The same model occurred with communism in Russia, China, and especially Cuba. The youth radicals wearing Che Guevara shirts destroying the Bible-thumping suburbanites was the object of a toast at the Equus play in Cincinnati, the desecration of western civilization to the worship of the pagan gods of old, the pre-Biblical times. But because of the Second Amendment, the backdrop of the rule of law, the plan isn’t working. And so long as there are over 300 million guns in America, it never will. And that is a wonderful thing that is causing the political left a lot of frustration.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Chick-fil-A Gets It: Recruiting Homeschool Kids is the Wave of the Future

It’s not artificial intelligence that everyone should be worrying about. The question as to whether or not artificial intelligence will take over the world and surpass the human being is a far less severe problem than what history will show results from the attempted takeover of the Liberal World Order during Covid. Covid was a bioweapon meant to destroy cultures while leaving the infrastructure intact for the hostile agent that employed it. Destroy the people without destroying the actual assets. After three years, people just now admitted that Covid came from China, and our government is willing to say so. But that took too long.

Meanwhile, the social distancing policies, where the damage really came from, were created by the government to inflict on its populatios around the world and destroyed a great deal in the process. But in that effort, people discovered something I have been warning about for over thirty years, as the public schools were shut down, and people had to care for their children at home. Suddenly people didn’t have access to that free babysitting service, public education, and a substantial cultural revelation was exposed to people for perhaps the first time. No longer were there theories about what was going on in public schools, but in the vacuum of daily noise, parents were able to see it for themselves as the push to work from home and the confidence that a “new normal” would result from shutting down the public school system across America and that nobody was ever coming back anyway. But things had to return to normal, which left all the leftist radicals exposed to what we are seeing today, and that’s good in its own way. At least people now understand what a devastating concept public education is and what it has done to several generations of children.

My wife and I whenever we could homeschool our kids we did. It was enormously difficult, and we did not have family and community support. Some fractures within my family are still very strong today because things were said that could never be taken back. But the social pressure for my wife to go out and get a job, process our kids through the public education system, and allow the government to co-parent our kids was never in my plans. I couldn’t wait to get married to my wife at age 19 so that I could get off the grid of processed human beings and raise a traditional family of my own, essentially to show the rest of the world how stupid they were. And my wife and I are about to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary. We’ve done it the entire time as traditional families did; she was a strong, central figure housewife. We built our whole family around her. My job was to provide income and emotional stability, to change the oil in the cars, and fight off any bad guys that might stick their noses into our business. Her job was the traditional full-time, around-the-clock stable mom that everyone could count on seven days a week under any condition. And the results were that our way of life flourished during Covid because we weren’t dependent on the ridiculously stupid outside world.   And my kids made the decision very quickly to homeschool their kids because they were raised correctly as children themselves, and they wanted to provide that level of security to their children even as the world crumbled away into stupidity and dust. It was an inconvenient time when I met my wife; we were just starting out in life. But I knew when she was being pushed into a fashion model occupation by many forces and all she was talking about with me was being a housewife that I had found the perfect person to do what I wanted to do, which was raise a traditional family in the traditional American ways and spit in the face of a progressive society. My hatred for that society goes back to my youth, so by the time I was 19 years old, I was more than ready to swipe at the endeavor. 

After Covid failed to destroy our society, and the yearly homeschool conventions returned to Cincinnati each April, my kids take the day off and go to it to get supplies for the upcoming year. They have been homeschooling their children for two years now and never plan to return to the public school system. The results in their kids are just too dramatically positive. It’s hard work and takes supportive spouses, but the effort is clearly beneficial when you do a side-by-side comparison with other kids who have been processed through the public education system. And what’s interesting is to see how many other parents are figuring this out as well, by the amount of growth my kids have witnessed at the Cincinnati Homeschool Convention downtown from each year they have attended. It has grown a lot; there are many more homeschoolers than there used to be. But one thing they noticed this year, as opposed to years past, is that Chick-Fil-A was there recruiting workers, which said a lot to me. Of course, Chick-Fil-A would do that, they have such nice kids working at their stores, and people are always flocking to go there for a chicken sandwich. The company Chick-Fil-A recognizes the next-generation problem that the biggest challenge is in staffing with good, quality people. The kids coming out of public education are not as reliable and good as those homeschooled.

When we talk about the modern labor shortage, it’s not because there is a lack of applicants to fulfill an economy that does 19 trillion in GDP per year. Many jobs go unfulfilled, and artificial intelligence can hopefully help cover those employment gaps. The problem is that there aren’t enough quality candidates. Now, Chick-Fil-A has a good recruitment and training program that staffs their stores with good kids with fundamental Christian values, and that is what the customers want when buying a Chicken Sandwich. But to keep that recruitment up to their company standards, they are turning to homeschool conventions to recruit new employees for their stores, which is a very telling admission. This is one of the methods Chick-Fil-A uses to get better workers over their competitors. Going after homeschooled kids are going to be the wave of the future, as most corporations who listened to all the same dumb advice about embracing woke values are learning sequentially that the advice was terrible and they are going to have to change their behavior for the future. Companies looking for good employees will not care about their college education, what high school they attended, or whether that school won a national championship in football. They will care about whether or not the kids come from backgrounds where the parental structure was good; homeschooled kids would be a great bonus. And are the kids engaging, willing to work, and confident enough to continue learning as an asset of their corporation? Chick-Fil-A gets it, and the trends in the future of employee recruiting will be along those lines, throwing out all the previous measures entirely because they will historically be proven to be completely ineffective. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Getting Away into Natural Bridge, Kentucky: The ultimate kind of Rebellion, Kindness, and Defiance

April is my birthday month and is always a positive benchmark for me. It’s always been my favorite month with all the life that returns from a long winter, and I always use the month as my own gauge into successes that need to be celebrated and things that need to be improved. But as a treat to myself, I wanted to go on a camping trip to Natural Bridge with as many of my family who could go and get off the grid for a few days in a place I grew up enjoying. My grandparents were from that region of Slade, Kentucky; during prohibition, my grandpa and his family ran moonshine, which I respect. I view moonshine differently than drug dealing for several reasons, even though I dislike intoxication of any kind all the time. I like to see independent and free people pushing back against a tyrannical government, and during prohibition, the government was out of control and deserved to have pushback, and that my grandfather and his father certainly did. Currently, we have a very dangerous government that is way beyond acceptable tyrannical tolerance, so for my birthday, I wanted to revisit a state park from my youth nicely nestled in the foothill mountains of the Appalachians and recharge. Over the last few years, my favorite mode of travel has been RV camping, so I wanted to take ours and live out of it for a few days, which is precisely what we did, and it was a wonderful experience. One of my sons-in-law brought their own camper, so we had a nice little family get-together down in the hills of Natural Bridge, Kentucky, and get away from the government for a bit.

Slade, Kentucky, where the Natural Bridge State Park and the world-famous Red River Gorge are located, is unusual because they have a particular hostility toward big government. Many census takers have found it impossible to do their job because the local residents simply don’t like government. So when you want to get away from big government and deal with people in a traditional Christian background setting in the Bible Belt, there aren’t many places in the world better. I’ve been to Natural Bridge a lot over my life, especially as a little kid. It’s been about ten years since my last visit. It’s not that it’s hard to get to; it’s very close to Cincinnati, Ohio, where I live. But my schedule has been busy; since my last visit, I have traveled around the world a few times, been to many countries, and experienced unique cultures. My opinion about the Slade, Kentucky region isn’t for lack of knowing anything else. But instead, it’s because I’ve seen a lot of other places that I appreciate that one of the best travel destinations there is, in my opinion, one that I knew well from my youth, was literally in my own backyard. It was a lucky experience to have, out of all the places in the world I could have gone, to have such a relationship with literally one of the best places there is. Our camping trip was wonderful, we had a nice campsite nestled in the hills, and we lived off the bare minimums and were able to let the world go for a bit, which was the present I wanted to give myself this year for a well-deserved birthday.

My wife and I started RV camping during Covid, and we will likely never do anything else again. I like hauling around my hotel room, bathroom, and refrigerator. It makes traveling so much better to step away from the grid as much as possible. I have a TV in my RV that we can stop and have a snack to take a break from driving and relax. Camper traveling with an RV has been a great experience, so doing that kind of camping at Natural Bridge brought together parts of the world that are favorites. It was all a gratifying experience. A lot of my family was able to come along, so it was nice to be around them and celebrate life while stepping away from the world of problems that traditionally come from government interference in our lives. Living out of a camper for a week in April of 2023 was enormously rewarding and recharged my spirit considerably. As a family, we had a good trip, and we were all grateful to have it. 

My wife and I had an interesting experience, a few actually, but one that reminded us just how good the world is without government in it. And people still live and get along without the stupid government imposing themselves into our lives. People left alone by government tend to do the right things without having a parental authoritarian in the form of government looming over our shoulders. For example, we went into town for some ingredients for smores and other snacks. And one of the items we needed was more firewood. So we were going to pick some up from a gas station down by the Mountain Parkway with a nice store. But the nice clerk there was a mountain woman from Appalachia, of course, and she told us that the wood that the gas station was selling was too expensive and you didn’t get very much. So she told us to go down the road around 400 yards to a tire mechanic with a little shed behind a Subway restaurant. He was selling a whole-wheel barrel of firewood for ten bucks. So we went down there to see him, and he loaded us up with firewood for our campsite. He had a rough mountain man accent; I would have needed subtitles to understand what he said. But we paid him the ten dollars, and he gave me a very large wheel barrel of wood to load into the back of our hatchback.

We couldn’t understand each other, but we quickly became good friends. That region is famous for many campfires, so he has many customers for his little enterprise due to the many campers who come to climb the world-famous Red River Gorge. It’s kind of a hippie culture, the rock climbers. More libertarian than anything. We probably wouldn’t agree on presidential picks or even drug usage. But we all do share a love of independence. Many of them come and camp with four people in a one-person dome tent with hundreds of others who can barely rub two dimes together in their pockets. And I find them refreshing, especially at Miguel’s Pizza, where they hang out. I’ve had pizza from everywhere, and the pizza they have at Miguel’s is a real treat. It was wonderful to pick some of it up and take it back to our campsite, where I had my reading chair set up next to the fire as all the kids played and enjoyed each other, and I had a stack of books to read well into the night as the sun set outlining the mountain tops and the dark sky stars made themselves obvious. It was a nice place to be, and it was certainly a great birthday present for me. No matter how much money you throw at recreation, it never gets better than that. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business