Category: Wilmington

The Overton Window and The Jonestown Tragedy: Richard Trumka’s Progressive Push

I’ve said it many times, I read a lot. A whole lot. And over 2010 one of the books that most jumped out at me was Glenn Beck’s The Overton Window. My daughter had bought it for me for Father’s Day and I read it in one day.

I hear people like Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO talk about the “RIGHT WING” and you hear what comes out of his mouth and you have to wonder about his sanity. As far as a union leader, and a person close to the White House, which he says he speaks to daily, I would be ashamed if that guy where my boss or leader. He clearly doesn’t understand basic economics and its people like him that create the message that millions of union workers chant.

Here is Trumka speaking in March of 2009. He has no idea how the bill he’s speaking about will “expand” the middle class, and he doesn’t have any idea how this will drive up the labor costs. He just makes statements that people seem to blindly following without question. Something he accuses Beck and other people primarily on the political right of doing.

You can read here how he believes the best way to expand the middle class is through further taxation. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/afl-cio-boss-raising-taxes-is-best-way-to-create-jobs/

America is supposed to be a group of individuals, not a unified collective sum like Trumka speaks about. The Federalist Papers, which went on to become The Constitution were written to protect American from people like Trumka, and Obama. Those people and people like them taken by themselves are not bad people, but they have a dangerous ideology and they disguise it with a message the masses can understand. So it is not a far stretch to say that when I saw Trumka speak on February 26, 2011 that the best way to create jobs was to raise taxes, which I know from economics is false, yet people chant and cheer in approval, and I witnessed the union protests all across the country, it reminded me of Jim Jones, of the Jonestown massacre from 1978. Jones had several thousand supporters that followed him from Indianapolis Indiana, to San Francisco, then to Guyana South America. Jones was an admirer of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. That’s why they chanted this song at their church rallies in the early 70’s.

Jim Jones is a tough story to swallow. Because it is the extreme example of what collectivism can inflict on people. Jones was a proud socialist. What you are about to hear is the actual death tape from the Jonestown Massacre. Jones turned on a tape recorder and gave a final speech while his thousands of followers drank poisoned drink to their deaths. He calls it “revolutionary suicide” to an inhuman world. You will actually hear people perishing in the background, so if you have a soft stomach, don’t listen to this. This behavior is far from a joke. If you listen you will hear several people step forward and speak about the greatness of Jim Jones, their “Daddy,” and of the merits of socialism and communism.
The following clip is from the film The Guyana Tragedy and is a reenactment of what you will hear below.

Here is the actual death tapes. Now consider as you listen to this, these people speaking are just moments from their death. They know it. Listen to their thoughts and what they intend.



So what is the lesson here? Well, madmen have a way of lying to themselves and distorting the reality of the world around them. And such people are attracted to socialism, communism, progressivism and all those collective “ism’s.” At that point it no longer becomes a simple argument about economics and the best way to handle economic issues. It evolves into a struggle between good and evil.

That’s where I start seeing startling comparisons from people in the modern labor movement. What they are saying are simply the words their leaders speak.  Richard Trumka is a powerful union leader and in this recent case involving these labor protests, what he says in public, over a microphone, ends up coming out of the mouths of his followers.

Trumka, like many people attracted to those “collective ideologies” are prone to climb for power. History shows that it happens in every case. I don’t know of a single instance of a collective society that survives outside of a tribal village. The individuality inherit in the human being seems to break down true collectivism, and social experiments to water this tendency down in our youth have failed with terrible results. This is the reason the Tea Party has risen as a permanent movement, because many people are just tired of the “social experiments.” Many want to return to the original blue print that paved the way for the greatest nation on earth.

The Tea Party is a push back against the tendency of “collectivism” that has gotten out of control.

Whether or not he is aware of it or not, Trumka’s actions show that he is power-hungry and idealistic, and is essentially no different from someone like Jim Jones. It is quite possible that if that congressman from California had not went to Jonestown and been killed, Jim Jones and his followers would have lived for years without a mass suicide. But the scary thing about it is that Jones had to retreat to South America to have his utopian society. And the congressman was doing in that society much of what the Tea Party is trying to do in American Society. They are intervening and attempting to break up the dangerous collectivism that is consuming the nation.

Progressives are insistent in the modern age to not leave the country for their utopian society. They instead are intent to change the country itself. Here Trumka reveals what he is all about, which concerns me a great deal. It concerns me because watching his followers on Saturday; they seem to think he truly believes in this whole “middle class” protection. Yet he states otherwise.

Now this doesn’t mean Trumka is just like Jim Jones. Jones when he was in Indiana seemed like a reasonable guy. Thousands and thousands of people wouldn’t have followed him if they thought the path would take them to their sweaty deaths in a South American jungle within a decade. But Trumka’s followers behave almost identically to the congregation of Jim Jones, and that is what is troublesome.

Watch and listen to these clips from the Saturday Protests. And compare the behavior to what you heard from Jim Jones’s Congregation.







This brings me back to the Overton window concept introduced in Beck’s book. People can say what they want about Glenn Beck, but from what I know about the guy, he genuinely wants to get at the truth. His agenda is the truth. And that’s why he wrote his book, The Overton Window.

As I was reading The Overton Window, I realized that here is a guy that Time Magazine called the most dangerous man in American. Here is a guy hated by all these various progressive groups. Here is a guy that has become massively popular in a very short period of time. Here is a guy that has an agent that is very liberal. Here is a guy that knows a few rich people yet has not forgotten his humanity. Here is a guy that has hit the bottom, and realizes that it’s the little things in life that makes things precious. Here is a guy that would never, ever, under any circumstances be a Jim Jones. He might have the power to be, but he would not sub come to it. Glenn Beck is the kind of man who you could put a pile of gold in his lap, ask him to watch it for you till you come back, and when you returned 2 years later, he’d give it back without anything missing. Since he has a unique insight to how the game is played at the level he’s at now, the book, The Overton Window is a particularly rare opportunity for a reader. And I found the book and its concepts uniquely rich. It may not be the most profound literary work in history. But it is very bold in its attempt and it succeeds. What it is successful in doing is capturing the confusing political landscape that we are currently involved with revealing through a cleaver story what drives all the groups involved in creating their own Overton window that will pull society in their desired direction.
Here is the definition and description of what a Overton Window is as described in Wikipedia.

The Overton window, in political theory, describes a “window” in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on a particular issue. It is named after its originator, Joseph P. Overton.

At any given moment, the “window” includes a range of policies considered to be politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too “extreme” or outside the mainstream to gain or keep public office. Overton arranged the spectrum on a vertical axis of “more free” and “less free” in regards to government intervention. When the window moves or expands, ideas can accordingly become more or less politically acceptable. The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:

• Unthinkable
• Radical
• Acceptable
• Sensible
• Popular
• Policy

The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it. Proponents of policies outside the window seek to persuade or educate the public so that the window either “moves” or expands to encompass them. Opponents of current policies, or similar ones currently within the window, likewise seek to convince people who these should be considered unacceptable.

Other formulations of the process created after Overton’s death add the concept of moving the window, such as deliberately promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous “outer fringe” ideas, with the intention of making the current fringe ideas acceptable by comparison.
__________________________________________________

This site has an interesting twist on The Overton Window by describing it in four planes instead of just left and right, which I like.
http://www.correntewire.com/the_overton_window_has_four_panes

What these extreme left groups have done over time is they pulled the Overton window radically to the left with key phrases like, “workers’ rights” and “tax the rich.” Or “all conservatives are Hitler.” 100 years ago at the start of the progressive movement these ideas were considered radical. But in the election of 1912, Eugene V.Debs had doubled the Socialist vote from 500,000 in 1908 to 1 million in 1912. This wasn’t some guy from Europe; he was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. In fact, the Socialists had their 1912 Convention in Indianapolis; the same place Jim Jones started his socialist church. Ronald Reagan toyed with joining the socialist party when he was a young man in Hollywood. It was after he traveled to England and witnessed what socialism had done to England through the Labor Party that he turned far to the right, out of fear for his country. But those people, those 1 million people who voted socialist in 1912 are out there, and they attached themselves to progressive ideas, they had children, raised families and found themselves drawn to the Labor Movement in America on the backs of the unions. Now many of those people aren’t bad people, but they are attracted to the collectivism of socialist concepts by their family culture and genetic make-up, because let’s face it, some people are more comfortable hiding in the masses and are not inclined to stand on their own.

Those poor, unfortunate souls are the people who end up following someone like Jim Jones in the extreme circumstance. And to a lesser degree, they find themselves repeating word for word what someone like Richard Trumka utters, without any care as to the relevance of his words. Trumka knows he can’t talk to an economist about how he represents the “middle class” or how “increasing taxes on the rich,” “creates jobs.” Those are just buzz words to stir up the followers. What Trumka is really after is moving the Overton window far to the left as was the trend during the entire 20th century. It happened because people weren’t aware of the threat and it just crept into our culture subtly. Trumka said it himself; he’s not in the labor movement for wages and benefits. He’s using the labor movement as a platform to change society, and that isn’t any different from Jim Jones who wanted to change the world through religion.

The Tea Party wants none of that non-sense. The Tea Party wants people like Trumka off our back, and wants to pull the Overton window back to the far right so that the recoil will leave the political spectrum back in the middle where it belongs. The caution is there because half the nation isn’t drinking the cool-aid of Trumka. Half is, roughly. The problem is that other half are made up of people who have evolved to expect an entitlement culture, so those aren’t the kind of people who will carry a nation by themselves. They’ll need a fanatical leader to lead them. The Tea Party has no such leader. Glenn Beck could disappear tomorrow and someone like Doc Thompson in Cincinnati would just take his place, or maybe the young man in the radio broadcast above. The movement is essentially leaderless, because it is built upon the ideas of self-reliance, which was what America was intended to be.

The real threat and real money being poured into politics isn’t coming from Rupert Murdoch, or the Koch Brothers. George Soros, and all the Hollywood left has poured far more money into political manipulation so there isn’t any room to talk. Yet if Trumka says “the conservative right is for the rich, and we are for the working man!” Look at all these contributors to the radical left! Yet all these people point to the right and say it’s “Wall Street, the rich, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, all are blamed for manipulating the American people when in fact it is these people that have committed the act of their accusations.

“The working man” is another false premise captured by the labor movement and placed into the minds of Americans by the Overton window. In Ohio 655,000 people work for a union, both public and private. That’s only 13.7 percent of the 4,787,000 million people who are employed in the state. That leaves over 4 million people not represented by a union, and don’t particularly want to be represented by a union. And most of those people are not in management. Most of those people are the real workers, and is proof that such extreme rhetoric as exhibited by people like Trumka to an army of people built on entitlement. Yet, because of the Overton window, the media, and the regular everyday people accept that “workers’ rights” represents union work, because that’s how the term was marketed.

The times we live in have these two ideologies colliding before us. And unlike in the past, people will have to choose. One side is the side of life, and one side is the side of doom. So we must choose and choose wisely. Because the time has passed where both sides can’t coexist together now that the radicals have made a move and shown their intentions.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Battle Cry from the Fly Over States

It was an absolutely frigid day in the streets of Wilmington, Ohio just to the south of the Murphy Theater when Glenn Beck came onto the frozen stage and proclaimed that he thought the term “We Are Wilmington” could become the mantra of the entire nation. He said this because of Wilmington’s tenacious nature.

Inside the Theater during the 8 PM show, Beck made the announcement of his E4 Project to be launched in 2011, and it was these words that intrigued me from the moment I first heard them. Since my day in Wilmington at that event, I haven’t been able to shake the simplicity of the terms, yet at the same time the potential power they could possess in a restoration of our national value. They are Enlightenment, Education, Empowerment, and Entrepreneur. I explain them as I heard them in the video below.

As the snowy days passed and I worked out in my back yard with my bullwhips, I began to feel the urge to step onto this battlefield and help anyway possible.

I can start by spreading the message at a grass roots level. After all, progressives have built a complicated infrastructure that hides behind contemporary art and media that seriously confuses the position of most Americans.

On one hand Americans are viewed simply as faceless consumers, with advertising and didactic entertainment aimed at manipulating the consumer to their various products. But at the same time, we ask the same overly stimulated minds to be reasonable and vote with intelligence. That’s where progressives take over on the tired minds of the modern American.

So a focus on something like Beck’s E4 Project can help bring the issues to the mind of those weary consumers, and provoke them to think about the world around them that exists in a more subtle way.

2011 will be a lot of fun, and a time to proclaim to the world, “WE ARE WILMINGTON!”

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

America’s First Christmas in Wilmington

It was impossible to take in everything that happened in Wilmington, Ohio when Glenn Beck came to town. I’ve documented my experiences here:
And here:

Glenn did a tremendous amount of very good work that I think captures the spirit of Christmas better than anything done on TV for years. For that, I want to capture for prosperity the essence of that truly wonderful event.




Here are some samples of the media coverage.





It was a wonderful day!

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Greatest Gyro in the World: WE ARE WILMINGTON!

It is a reasonable illusion for an outsider to believe that people came from all over the United States to see Glenn Beck in Wilmington, Ohio. And anyone that wanted to see Glenn had a chance, because he was all over the town.

Click below to see him address the crowd that was standing in 10 degree weather, about -5 with the wind chill.  See the Blog spot of this video on The Blaze.com, one of the best news sites on the internet. 

That address was after a 2 hour radio show, a book signing, his 5 PM show for Fox, then this little speech just prior to his big 8 pm show. In between all those events he took the time to meet many, many people and hear their stories. He made himself incredibly accessible for a personality of his stature.

The critic might listen to this clip and think that bringing 3 new jobs to a book store, and the prospect of a few more jobs here and there isn’t a big deal. They might also wonder why the crowd wasn’t noisier, because the audio sounds like a small crowd. I can say this much……it was quiet in the crowd because everyone was frozen. It was too painful to clap, and the roughly 1000 or so people in the middle of Main Street stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk and extended all the way back to the theater where Glenn’s tour bus was parked. For people with such criticisms I’ll say one thing to you……what are you doing to help out your fellow man? What are you doing to help the world around you….besides complaining? I have never in my entire life seen a personality like Glenn Beck do anything of this caliber before. Oprah comes to mind as the closest thing. But I know Wilmington, and I have known many people that have lived there for years, and to see the transition that Glenn Beck made on Mainstreet USA in downtown Wilmington, Ohio is nothing short of extraordinary.

But the event was not about Glenn Beck. It was about spirituality.

When I first arrived that morning I realized that something had happened in that town. The event was similar to a fair, where the street was blocked off from outside traffic. At the south end of one city block right next to the hotel, was the stage you saw Glenn speaking from. At the other end was a street vendor. In between those two things was a book store, a church, a comic book store, several craft stores, and the majestic Murphy Theater with the “Broke” tour bus parked in front. And the street was full of some of the most bright eyed and thoughtful people all gathered in one place that I can ever recall experiencing. The only way for me to describe it is that it reminded me of the good feelings you get from people when you attend church.

When people go to church, they are always on their best behavior. They tend to be kind to each other as though the eyes of God will take notice and grant them entry into heaven. So people drop their discriminations and anxious feelings at the door of a church and show a side of themselves they don’t show during the rest of the week. I have noticed that much of that image disappears quickly when church is over and people get back inside their cars.

That day in Wilmington, the cold and the nature of the event sifted through the various personalities of society, and all that were present in that street were easy to identify. If society stopped on that day, and the government stopped issuing social security checks, or stopped building highways or any of the services we’ve all grown used to, it would be those people who would be the leadership that would save society and help it rebuild.

Not that everyone was running around with crosses and praying to Jesus. In fact, the only time I saw such references were in actual churches. But, the people behaved as though they were in church, their manner was not instigated out of fear from the gaze of God because they were generally good people to begin with.

I believe more people made eye contact with me on that day in Wilmington than in months of traveling in heavier crowds. It’s because the concentration of people at that event shared in common a love of life, and a lack of fear from what others may see in them.

I also spoke to more people than I have in quite some time. Normally, I dress in a way that people find unapproachable. I normally wear Gargoyle Sunglasses, with an outback cowboy hat just about anywhere I go in public if I’m not traveling by motorcycle. It’s an old habit. Since I’m a thinker, it keeps people from wanting to interrupt my thoughts with useless chatter. That might sound cruel, but I’m being honest. I don’t enjoy being interrupted when I’m thinking, which is all the time. But, I do enjoy the company of people who are genuinely good of heart, and are functioning not from fear but out of sincerity. With that said, many, many people made sure to speak to me and my wife. They didn’t go out of their way to do it, and weren’t doing it in a fake gesture of hopeful redemption. They did it because they wanted to.

I’ve spent entire days at amusement parks like Kings Island, Ceder Point, Universal Studios, and all the Disney Parks, in close proximity to thousands and thousands of people, and I spoke to more people in Wilmington than at all those playgrounds of summertime pleasure. Ironically, the only place I’ve had such an experience of anywhere I’ve traveled was in Key West.

And that brings this simple banter of letters to the ultimate conclusion. People did not go to Wilmington to see Glenn Beck. Glenn was simply serving as a focal point of positive energy that thousands of people were willing to brave the cold and isolation of that small Ohio town for a chance to experience something authentic.

I could see by the people shopping and carrying bags of crafts and other homemade mementos that many had found that authenticity in stores ran by the good people of Wilmington. Others had found authenticity in the Churches, specifically places like the Sugertree Ministries, and the by now well-known chalk paintings. But my wife and I found authenticity in a little Mediterranean restaurant called simply enough, The Mediterranean Restaurant and Café.

It was a time of day where the sun had dropped below the highest buildings and the air instantly become colder. My wife and I were hungry and frozen solid. I saw a Kentucky Fried Chicken at the north end of town so we headed away from the crowded street packed with people trying to get their books signed by Glenn Beck at the bookstore. We passed the inauspicious Mediterranean place naively when my wife said through chattering teeth, “why don’t we eat here? We can go to KFC anytime.” I looked down the slight hill at the KFC sign seeking familiarity and I realized she was right. We came to Wilmington to have a bit of adventure on that Wednesday afternoon in the cold, and going to KFC would be short changing our experience.

So we stepped into the entrance, which was like a strange world because the first thing we saw was an empty hallway with a door on the immediate left. A sign on the wall said, “Welcome Glenn Beck.” I opened that next door and an enchanted world of warmth embraced us. There was also a huge line that extended all the way down a pathway that led to the kitchen. There was a fire in the center of the room in an open pit fireplace, but the line coaxed me to turn back into the cold and head to KFC. That’s when a few of those people I mentioned before spoke to me. “The line isn’t so bad. We’ve only been in line for about 20 minutes,” said a kind woman in her upper 50s. Then a man about four feet down the line addressed me. “I love the hat! That’s a great look you have there. Hey, the line moves fast. Don’t worry about it.”

My wife and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and decided to stay. We proceeded to head to the back of the line. The place was packed but nobody was angry or in a hurry. The people filling the dining room all had lights on in their eyes. I didn’t feel anxious to stand in a line. I typically hate lines, but in that room, with the whole day ahead of my wife and me, the warmth of the room and the good nature of the people, the wait in that line was actually part of the fun.

From the line we could look out into the large dining room equipped with ceiling fans hanging from the high ceiling. The décor was standard Mediterranean, the colors were earthy and on the light side for the most part.

Finally, after our toes had found their feeling again, the hostess greeted us and took us to a table that would normally seat four. I found it odd that because there was only my wife and I, the hostess didn’t wait for a table equipped for just two, given the length of the line behind us. She seemed unconcerned, and I wasn’t about to argue, because the aroma in the room was enchanting to our already hungry stomachs.

I looked up and hanging on the wall above our heads was a sign that said, “BELIEVE.”

For the next hour my wife and I both ordered gyros, which we’ve had from various places all over the United States. And what the waitress put before us was a creation of some remote artisan, not just a cook in the kitchen. The gyro and fries were truly exquisite and I found myself licking my finger tips just to recover the memory of the taste long after the gyro was gone.

We spent the rest of the day after that meal visiting sites all over town. We saw a lot of wonderful energy at the various events. The day came to a sad end when Glenn Beck came out on that stage like the host of a fine party and thanked everyone for coming. While outsiders of this experience would mistake that Glenn Beck was the focus of the event, all that were there know otherwise. Glenn simply held a party in the town and invited America to come and be a part of it. Once there, each person found something special unique to themselves.

And Glenn Beck knew it all along. That is the genius of a man that thinks outside the box. Like any truly good host, Glenn set the mood, and the rest was done by the people in attendance.

So was it an audacious statement that Glenn made, that Wilmington could be way out ahead of the rest of the nation in spirit, and that it could serve as an example to the nation of what our country should look like? I say no, because I found a unique treasure in the form of food in a quant Mediterranean restaurant on Mainstreet that overlooks the courthouse. The treasures of this world are not along paved roads and easy to reach places. All those treasures have been claimed in their ease by the rest of society, and the corrupt among us guard them like dragons sleeping on piles of gold. New treasure must be found away from the Washington DC’s and New York Cities. They won’t be found in the streets of LA, or in Beijing, China.

New treasures are found in places like Wilmington, Ohio and the thousands of small towns all across this country, otherwise known as the fly-over states. Glenn Beck was right…….again. All of us that went to that frozen sacred place and soaked up the new found treasures of that town can now utter ourselves to deeply comforting sleep each night with the secret knowledge that “We are Wilmington!”

The next time I want a gyro, my wife and I will drive out of our way to go back to The Mediterranean Restaurant and Café in Wilmington, Ohio, and we’ll enjoy our new found treasure and skip the KFC.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com