Tag: Atlas Shrugged

What’s Wrong with the Fox News Poll on Gun Control: Trying to position cable news for life after 2024 with smoke and mirrors

You can clearly see the influence of Suzanne Scott, the new CEO of Fox News regarding their recent poll on gun control released recently in the wake of two mass shootings that occurred within 24 hours of each other. Fox News has moved noticeably in a more liberal direction under her leadership as opposed to Roger Ailes. Knowing that liberal gun banners have sought to push an assault weapons agenda while the NRA is on its heels in internal struggles at the top of the organization to redirect their losses in the Russian hoax story and pull Trump toward gun control to split his base and weaken his power going into the 2020 election. Fox News was happy to play along being a New York based media company in the heart of progressive society, they have moved radically to the left and their poll on guns reflects this trend.

Their headline was that most of the people they polled back gun restrictions after the most recent shootings. They also aimed to show a slipping support for Trump and the NRA. Obviously Suzanne Scott’s staff in the boardroom of Fox News is looking beyond Trump’s presidency if not for 2020, because they will want the ratings bump they get from his campaign events, ultimately the cable news outlet need to figure out who they are after 2024 and they think the country is changing in a more liberal direction, that many of the heavily college debt driven young people will not care about guns, or even family, and will be more Bernie Sanders than Donald Trump in their economic and social thinking. Suzanne Scott is clearly not Roger Ailes, and it shows.

The big number in the Fox Poll is that they say two thirds of their contacts state that they would support an “assault weapons” ban which I think is highly unlikely. I would say that is something of a suppression poll similar to the type of polls that showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump in the general election or the ones that think Joe Biden will beat Trump head to head. The numbers may be accurate if you are taking your sampling at a local liberal college, but not if you were doing so in a steel factory or a competitive shooting event. Its not so much what the numbers say, it’s the kind of people that were polled. For instance, 100% of people polled in New York City would likely reflect the Fox News sample. They are already used to a non-gun culture and lots of progressive ideas. But in Eastern Ohio or Kentucky, the results would be much different.

The sampling itself was taken between August 11th through the 13th so the material broadcast by Fox and other networks was fresh on everyone’s mind and consisted of 1,013 registered voters, 222 by a land line and 791 by cell phones randomly selected for inclusion in the survey using a probability proportionate to the size method meaning the phone numbers for each state were proportional to the number of voters in each state. That means that by dividing the number of polled recipients by the number of states and not taking into account the nature of those states, the results would tend to lead toward a favorability of gun control anyway, which of course Fox News is pushing so that they can take credit for moving the needle on gun control during President Trump’s first term in office and changing the market demographic for that five year plan which takes place after 2024.

The big flaws are in conducting recipients who still have a land line, which is to say, most people these days have cut that cord a long time ago. Land line phone owners are not a good statistical sampling of the modern electorate. Its like saying to people who ride bicycles if they prefer that mode of transportation over a car. A land line owner is probably over 60 or they are very poor, and their opinions are radically shaped by current events, like within a week old. With all the news recently from traditional networks being all about gun control, it is not surprising that these types of people would be sympathetic to such an idea. Then of course there is the cell phone sampling, where only certain types of people answer their cell phone when a number they don’t recognize comes across their screen. Again, 791 people who answered their cell phone during an unusual call across 50 states is not a good sampling of gun control sentiment among real voters. The poll method is an old model that does not represent modern trends, and that is where the rubber hits the road in detecting the motive of this Fox News Poll.

Mostly, I would say that people who read here for instance are getting their news sourcing from Fox News over to Alex Jones, OAN or even Louder with Crowder on YouTube. There is a reason that many of these modern commentators who lean to the political right have been deplatformed from social media—it’s because that was never the plan from the left. They thought Facebook, Google and Twitter would push people to the left, instead it has given people on the right more of a voice and they are cutting their cords with Fox News and the cable companies that support them and turning to streaming online. The freedom of choice has gone in the wrong direction and this has particularly upset the Google radicals who thought they understood the game.

Fox News viewers really aren’t that impressive, and they dominate the other networks by having 2.3 million viewers between the hours of 8-11 PM each night. The YouTube channel of Steven Crowder is on par with those numbers and that is just one lone personality. Given the impact of talk radio, blog sites like this one, and alternative media such as Alex Jones on his own website that is still pulling in impressive numbers despite all the effort there has been to stop him. There isn’t any real polling coming out of those audiences and it is there that the real sentiment on gun control rests. Fox News tried to have a poll by doing what they understand in an industry that is dying and they are trying to sell that off as a fact. But its just a poll taken from backwards derelicts who are out of touch with reality and are by their very nature the products of the modern news cycle for which they provide the content. But that content does not represent reality.

The shocker is that even with the Fox News poll trying to pain the picture that a majority of Americans support gun control, which they don’t, the real trick is in trying to get Republicans to play ball with Democrats to give a legislative victory that they can run on in 2020. By puffing up their feathers at Fox News with what they hope the President will be suckered into supporting, they are trying to shape policy from a New York perspective that goes against the rest of the nation, that secretly support Trump through new media. If Fox News could do that they fantasize, they may survive in the marketplace beyond 2024 because it will take the wind out of the sales of all the new media out there that is beating the crap out of traditional media. And that is where the real fight is. There is no appetite for gun control from real voters, because they see the game. But the establishment is trying to shape opinion at a critical time while they still can. Hopefully, the President won’t fall for it.

But if he does, he does. It won’t change reality.

Rich Hoffman

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Where in the World is Jeffrey Epstein: We will never know, or will we trust the answer

Nothing about the Jeffrey Epstein case surprises me, including the conspiracy theory that the whole suicide by hanging himself was a fake to get out of prison and to hide for the rest of his life on some island somewhere so that the state didn’t have a case against him to proceed forward. Epstein had a lot of money and that can buy justice. A lot of people would be willing to turn the other way for lifetime wealth that paid off their houses and let them live free of occupational burden. It was only Friday that court documents were unsealed proving what I’ve said about the guy was true, that unveiled high profile friends who were part of Epstein’s underaged sex ring, people like New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, investment banker Glenn Dubin, Britain’s Prince Andrew, Senator George Mitchell, MIT professor Marvin Minsky, and even Bill Clinton. There were a lot of heads to roll and one of the victims now all grown up, Virginia Gluffre was naming names and they all point to many of the leaders of the modern progressive political circles that extend well into our court system. Jeffrey Epstein was the key testimony that would bring a lot of people down so they had to get rid of him.

The body that the ME Office in downtown New York had could have been anybody. It would only require a few people at the jail to play along with a body switch and coroners are unlikely to do any DNA testing on such a presentation. Their only job would be to pronounce Jeffery Epstein dead. So such a body switch is probably more likely given the money involved and the conditions of the case than someone getting into the jail to kill Epstein. Whatever the case, it was just too costly to allow Epstein to provide any testimony on a reduced sentence that would embarrass most of the financial contributors of the Robin Hood Foundation and the social circles that have spawned off it.

I pointed out the Epstein case many years ago, decades, so my position has been consistent. I’m glad he has been taken off the streets even if he is dead, or just pushed into hiding for the rest of his life to avoid embarrassing testimony. So many people’s lives would be ruined, even if they deserve it. The conspiracy theories that have spawned off this case are natural. People don’t trust the authorities who are in charge. We don’t trust the government to give us a straight story, even when they try to. Who in their right mind is going to believe that a high profile billionaire who is in jail and has the dirt on so many people is just going to hang himself in solitary confinement when he had been on suicide watch, especially one day after damning court documents were produced, and that the security camera would “malfunction” leaving no evidence of what happened, and nobody was apparently looking? People aren’t stupid, but authorities think they are, which is why there is no trust. People smell a rat, and it isn’t in Baltimore.

We are essentially talking about the same people who were involved in getting the FBI to alter an election in favor of Hillary Clinton which had its roots deep into the Justice Department, even the Obama White House. People are still trying to get their minds around that story which is unraveling as we speak. The proof of their corruption is out, and we know the names. The trouble is the people who would normally prosecute such a case are the ones guilty so at this point, legal action has not occurred. Knowing all that, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Epstein was either killed or taken away never to be seen again to live on some island in the middle of nowhere. A better deal for him rather than spending the rest of his life in jail. He has the money to make that deal and once this case started getting traction in court that would embarrass so many liberal leaders, I’m sure they were looking to make a deal.

After all, if you are Epstein and have a major sex addiction that only underaged girls could satisfy at least 3 times a day, the best security to enjoying that activity is to get powerful people to indulge in the activity with you. Once there is shared guilt, there is security in it for someone like Epstein which is leverage. When you get as many powerful people involved as he did, that is guaranteed leverage for the rest of his life. Its less likely that he would trade that leverage away by killing himself with the cameras turned off. Its more likely that his friends would produce a body that looked like him, they’d switch it out, and they’d all win by taking away the testimony of the man himself. Epstein of course would never be able to participate in any kind of societal function again. He’d have to hide away forever on an island perhaps in the Caribbean, but that’s better than jail. The plan before a week or so ago was to beat the whole thing and get out of jail. When Virginia Giuffre and other young women from the Epstein sex island experience persisted, somehow the pressure had to be taken away, and that was the central figure in all the testimony, Epstein himself. He had the money and the leverage to make a deal that would alleviate a lot of embarrassment for New York’s liberal high society, leaving them all glad to be complicit.

The main question remains, who, and why. What we know is that the key to the Epstein case is now no longer available, no matter what conspiracy theory one might subscribe to. The central figure of all this evil has been removed. Yet we aren’t just talking about sexual perversion with these issues, and massive problems with sex trafficking where intense sexual appetites were being shared with social circles that are at the center of our entire society. Young girls from all over the world were being purchased from their families and brought into the sex ring not just for Epstein to enjoy, but many in the top tier of political power, so the story doesn’t die with Epstein. He was just the glue that held it all together. The desire to commit the evil is what is at the core of this whole story. If it wasn’t Epstein who did it, it would have been someone else.

The whole thing plays out badly, it makes rich people look bad, it makes politicians look bad, and it certainly is an embarrassment to our entire legal system. Where is the justice for these poor young girls who are now young women? Well, I think we can see clearly why Democrats and other progressives are always trying to participate in social engineering and telling us how moral they are by advocating for open borders, drug legalization, and high taxes to build a big bureaucratic state, it’s to run cover for their intense sexual appetite and excessive social perversions. And they never plan to get caught, and when they do, they always get away with it because they control the legal system. Their commitment to gay rights and women’s issues is only to serve as a mask for their sexual exploits that they hope to conceal behind their good tidings. And when there is a risk, they find a way to make a deal to keep the embarrassment off the front page of the newspapers. Don’t be surprised if 20 years from now as an 80 year old man, some fishing boat doesn’t run aground in the Caribbean and find Jeffery Epstein in a hammock sipping on a mixed drink, and enjoying life to the fullest far away from Manhattan society and the news culture of the United States. Nobody else in the world will care, and that is the best mask of all.

Rich Hoffman

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The Tattooed Loser Zachary Castaneda: Dealing with pure evil when prisons can’t hold them

It took over 24 hours for the mainstream media to begin to wrap their minds around the tattooed freak Zachary Castaneda who went on a stabbing rampage just a few blocks from Disneyland in California about 30 miles south of Los Angeles in Orange County. Four people were killed and two others were injured as the Hispanic gang member who should have been in prison unleashed havoc on the innocent and robbed businesses for no other reason apparently other than he felt like being a menace. He lived with his mom in the apartment complex where he killed two of his victims and had a wife who just filed a restraining order against him and divorce so she could get custody from this train wreck of a person. In all practicality Zachary should have never been on American streets. If there was ever a “red flag” he was it, yet there he was killing people not with a gun, but with a knife and the system had no idea what to do with him. While the politicians at state and federal levels were trying to make themselves feel good about the recent mass shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio here was this loser proving why nothing they could or would come up with would do a bit of good, and they just couldn’t get their minds around it. There was no wall to wall coverage of the violence the way that the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting was covered. I sent the story to several reporters and Fox did eventually cover it a bit, but only reluctantly.

Its not that Zachary Castaneda was an immigrant that was part of the gang culture that is exported out of Mexico and Central America with great abundance these days, it’s the grim reality that there are hundreds of thousands just like him roaming around in every American city now and all of them are potential nightmares for our legal system that clearly doesn’t know what to do with them. This particular gang member was released back into society off California bill AB109 which mandated that for some prisoners who committed crimes on or after July 1st of that year in 2011 when it passed, that a term of four days be deemed to have been served for every two days spent in actual custody. This of course was to take the relief off the prisons that were overcrowded putting a bunch of very bad people back on the streets mixing with the rest of society.

The same people who were clamoring for gun control after the recent mass shootings just didn’t know what to do with this Zachary Castaneda case. The criminal was smirking in his mug shots almost as if he was glad to go back to the prison system. For many people, freedom is just too much work, you have to work for your food, you have to be civil to other people—you have to do stuff, and doing stuff for the lazy, the evil, and the perpetual failures that they are can be too much. If they can just take from other people, they can get along for a while, but for people like Zachary Castaneda, prison is the only real place that he’ll ever feel at home. They bring your meals to you, you get free housing, and there are plenty of like-minded people to share time with. The problem is, there isn’t enough prison space to hold all these people, and its too expensive to care for them. And with our immigration issues that are coming out of the drug culture to the south, he’s just one of hundreds of thousands just like him, covered in gang tattoos who have the morality of roadkill and would just as soon kill someone as say hi to them. This is a major problem in our country, and it will be for a long time.

Authorities are still trying to figure out why the young 19-year-old gunman in the Gilroy Garlic festival had a clown mask in his car while promoting the book “Might is Right.” The kid was apparently distraught over Latinos and Silicon Valley whites moving into his neighborhood. It was on the same day as the Castaneda case that it was revealed that the Gilroy shooter had a far more complex set of motives, and intent than had been previously announced, and none of those considerations fit into a nice 15 second lead in to a television story. These events required context which nobody really had. This level of violence and nonchalance was completely foreign to everyone covering these stories leaving many more questions than answers.

However, what we have to understand is that we have now in America a large population of very evil people and we don’t have prisons to put them in. As a free society there will undoubtedly be interactions with them. There is no way to avoid them especially if they come to festivals or even places of businesses looking to kill us just for being there. We’re going to have to admit to ourselves that we have a big problem and that there aren’t any easy legislative fixes. The only fix that is possible is at the social level where we can begin to create proper parameters of conduct for how we live and treat each other. And when we see those parameters being breached by some evil person, then we’re going to have to deal with them appropriately right then and there. For all practical purposes, open carry and much more CCWs need to be utilized so more people are armed and can take down some criminal like Zachary Castaneda immediately instead of being stabbed to death with no defense. The only way these criminals of mass murder can commit these crimes is because they are armed where others are not, leaving the evil doers to conduct havoc on the innocent.

Obviously, the news reports understood the grander complexity of the Zachary case, but what they don’t understand is how to connect it to the Gilroy shooter. Everything doesn’t fit into a nicely wrapped package of ideological understanding. The Gilroy kid had elements of white supremacy in him, yet he complained about whites. His radicalization appeared to be similar to those who have joined ISIS looking for meaning in their lives. And like the Las Vegas shooter where nothing came together to tell the story the way authorities wanted it to, now there is this gang member in south LA going around stabbing people to death just as the political left thought they had everyone so scared of guns that they might support gun control. Even as these stories broke and reporters were scratching their heads as producers scrambled to find a narrative they could put on television, it was released that the Bruce Ohr 3025 was released which showed clearly that the entire Russian investigation into President Trump’s campaign and early presidency was a complete hoax ran by our own FBI. Our own government was trying to pick winners and losers in the election to shape our country not by representation, but by force. In effect, the FBI was acting no differently than the kind of evil shown by Zachary Castaneda or the Gilroy shooter. Yet we are supposed to deal with all that evil equally and for that, we must admit to ourselves that there is only one way out, and that is with a gun at our hips and an understanding of how to use them.

Rich Hoffman

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More Mass Killings in California: But why isn’t the media covering it?

OK, so a loser angry at the world committing robberies and stabbing people to death across Orange County in two different cities occurred yesterday evening, around 4 PM in Garden Grove and ended at Santa Ana at a 7-Eleven. Four people died in the rampage and 2 others were injured, which is more than the latest California shooting incident yet there was no wall to wall coverage on the cable and network news outlets. It was hardly covered at all. The perpetrator was yet another young person, this time a 33-year-old tattooed freak. He was a white guy, we don’t know much else about him at this time, but unquestionably he was a loser. So why no coverage, doesn’t everyone care about the poor people who were killed? Well, unfortunately, no. The problem with this killing spree was that it was not centralized to an emotional center people could relate to, like a school, a bar, or a Walmart, and that it didn’t involve a gun. No gun legislation or “red flag” law would have prevented these murders. Rather, this is evidence of what I have been saying for a long time, and why we need looser gun laws, not stricter ones. This is a social problem and we will see more of it, and nobody can handle that, because they are all a bit guilty in this matter. You can’t pass a law to protect us from ineptness, which has caused all these social problems. And that is why laws banning guns in any way at all will never stop the mass killings. If lunatics like this guy in Orange County want to kill people, they’ll just grab a knife, or whatever is available.

I hate to be right about all these things all the time. I was talking about the dangers of socialism in our public schools before Glenn Beck had his show on Fox in 2009 which arguably fed the Tea Party movement dramatically. The concerns have always been there, it didn’t take leaders to bring about the dialogue. Rather the conversations were going to emerge regardless of any particular person, whether it was me, Glenn Beck, or Donald Trump. People could see these things coming and they were concerned. And for good reason. Now we are seeing what we were all concerned about. Young people in the millennial category are disasters, results of epic social failures, drug legalization, a breakdown of the family, a loss of religion, and explosive and irresponsible entertainment culture, terrible educations specifically liberalized which didn’t prepare them for the real world—I could go on and on all day long. The bottom line is that these people are now in our mainstream culture and are decision makers. They don’t have unifying music like we might have had growing up, they have chaos and anger and they’ve had it their entire lives and now they can use weapons and function without their parents, and they are dangerous.

There is no way to put the lid back on the bottle. This generation of violence is going to have to play out. These kids are going to have to get older and be replaced by a newer generation that isn’t as bad as they are. I see hope there, perhaps the young people coming of age during the Trump administration will be better since as a nation we are talking about these problems openly. As much as people are upset at all the divisive rhetoric on social media these days at least the talks are happening. For these young killers, including this 33-year old stabbing murderer, they grew up where only the left was speaking, and they thought that was the path of the future because that was the only side they heard. They weren’t proud of America because nobody was defending it ten years ago when these kids were in their formulative years. Drugs were being pushed. Crazy music. Homosexual themes, loose sex, no religion except for environmentalism, socialist economies, selfless activism to drive leftist agendas, all that was in full swing and these kids are the result of those activities and beliefs.

We see even now all the radical bra burning hippies who were outright flower children in the 60s who are now heads of newspapers, colleges, and the publishing world, they are as radical as they were as young people only now they are in charge. For the foreseeable future, these modern millennials will get better but they will still believe the same things as they get older, and they will be dangerous for at least the next 30 years. They could snap at age 21, or 33, or 55—we will never know no matter how much “red flag” laws are passed. We will be helpless to solve the problem because we never dealt with the real issue. The problem was behavioral change activated by liberal, progressive values and the reaction that the human being had on those values. When those values don’t match up to reality, of course they will be traumatized. And when they are traumatized and nobody can help them out of it, they will sometimes lash out in violent ways. So we might as well get used to it. You can’t outlaw behavior, obviously.

We’re not talking about everyone of course. Most everyone feels some kind of anxiety about something or the other. But it only takes less than 1% of these troubled young people to become mass murderers that everyone fears. What you put in your mind ultimately makes us all, and most of what these murderers will be proven to have in common was bad stuff put in, so bad stuff came out. You can’t have a society that does not value life, come out being good. If the things we talk about is how bad capitalism is, or how we should kill babies with abortion, or how we should get stoned to escape from everything, what kind of world do we think these kids are going to make once they are responsible. This loser in Orange County was behaving just like a player of Grand Theft Auto would. Don’t tell me that video games have no influence on the behavior of young people. That 2018 study they keep pointing to is just as truthful as the FBI trying to tell us they weren’t spying on the Trump administration or that they weren’t trying to instigate a coup of his government in favor of Democrats.

The bottom line is that we are there, we are at a time where we have made these kids and now we have to deal with them as a society, and not just for a few years, but for the next half of a century. It will take a long time to correct the course that all these liberals have created in our society without much of a defense by conservatives. And this is the result. Killers on our streets, violence everywhere and a society numb to the shock of it all. And a media that is so much as conspiring activists that they won’t cover these stories because it doesn’t fit the gun control narrative that they all want. Because they all have a sense of it, that when average everyday people realize what a mess all this has been and they want to know who is responsible, Democrats do not want a society of guns to come after them to change out the ranks of power. They hope that like other places in the world, they can maintain their positions once the public finally understands what has happened to their country. Some do now, enough people to vote for President Trump. But those numbers will grow as these senseless murders go without offerings of real change. That’s when the wheels will really come off, which I would say has already started well in advance of this latest incident. I saw the wheel wobbling long ago, and now its too late. We will have to deal with the results.

Rich Hoffman

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Want to Stop Mass Shootings: Declare Democrats as insane and unable to buy guns and make smoking pot a serious crime

Here is the problem with the mass gun shootings, for one, we have chemical problems due to intoxicants, depression medicine, pot, and other bad combinations that are altering decision making. The other is purely political and how those interpretations are interpreted by young, and inexperienced kids. Both shooters, Patrick Crusius from the El Paso incident and Connor Betts from Dayton were young people. As the mainstream media tried to focus the attention on a “white nationalist” movement they are missing the real problem. For instance, both shooters were Democrats, or at least leaning in that direction and were likely very influenced by the victimization culture uttered by the current crop of presidential candidates. In Crusius’ case, he was more of a traditional progressive. Below was a part of the manifesto left behind by Crusius:

“In the near future, America will have to initiate a basic universal income to prevent widespread poverty and civil unrest as people lose their jobs (to automation). Joblessness is in itself a source of civil unrest. The less dependents on a government welfare system, the lower the unemployment rate, the better. Achieving ambitious social projects like universal healthcare and UBI would become far more likely to succeed if tens of millions of defendants are removed.”

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/08/el-paso-terrorist-is-a-hard-core-progressive-and-white-nationalist-wants-universal-income-and-universal-healthcare/

Connor Betts from Ohio was affiliated with an Against All Gods movement which is an atheist organization. He was also a pot smoker who wanted socialism and he wanted to vote for Elizabeth Warren. Those are all important aspects to the causes of school shootings. Obviously, the other shooter Crusius was a left leaning activist more on the side of what we might call an American Nazi, which to remind everyone is still on the political left of where the country is. The focus on racism that comes from the left on the political spectrum is exclusive to them. It has nothing to do with the conservative positions as they are known in America. What we are dealing with are kids who abuse drugs, have family issues, and have just come out of heavily liberalized educations in both public schools and college. They are very much the creations of the political policies of Democrats and have nothing to do with the Trump administration other than Democrats desperate to beat him in an election have turned up the utterances of desperation from their party likely pushing these pot smoking video game players out into the world with guns they know very little about to take matters in to their own hands.

Gun control isn’t even a consideration, first because constitutionally, it’s just not on the table. We have the Second Amendment to protect ourselves from losers like these guys. When political mismanagement occurs, which is certainly the case in producing young people like these killers, we need to be able to defend ourselves from them. While the police acted well in both shootings the fact remains that they can’t solve these problems fast enough, so the solution can never come from the state to end these problems. Only in dealing with the cause of these problems will, and blaming Donald Trump for pointing out the obvious problems that the political left have created, such as racism, socialist yearnings, (Conner Betts really wanted socialism) and the attacks against white males, can we begin to solve these problems. After all, if you are a white male and have been told that you are part of the problem, you have been trained to be a leftist in school, and are under the influence of drugs, what are you going to do, work hard to have a family, a steady job, and a house—or are you going to become a mass shooter and end your life on the earth in a blaze of glory?

Mass shootings are the result of failed public policy. When our society is failing in creating a youth that values life and American lifestyles you get losers like Patrick Crusius and Connor Betts. And there are likely thousands of them out there in a culture of millions, and any of them could be the next mass shooter. The state created these people so there is no way that the state could be expected to manage them through gun control or even mental deficiency detection. Any marijuana user who is also combining the effects of that drug with depression medication could be the next volatile bomb that will grab a gun and mass kill whoever is in their path.

But that has not been the narrative, the only thing anybody in the mainstream media wants to talk about is some law that might mask their failure in society in producing these kids in the first place, but it won’t solve the problem. Only in reestablishing a sense of morality will the problem of mass shootings be reduced. But there isn’t any hope when a kid like Connor Betts who doesn’t believe in any kind of god, our legal system has no reach for him. After all, how could he swear to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, so help him God? There is nothing to compel him to tell the truth to anybody so long as he has those kinds of beliefs, and once he takes such a radical step, there isn’t much to keep him from wanting to kill a bunch of people just to get revenge on his sister for some family dispute.

Specifically, Connor Betts was politically active indicating that he wanted people to vote blue, he supported “the squad” and he hated Donald Trump, instead he supported Elizabeth Warren. Given those criteria as we discuss the definitions of mental illness and if such a criterion should be established prior to gun sales we might as well propose that all Democrats are potential mass shooters and should not be able to purchase guns. Anybody calling themselves a Democrat based on the history of them should be considered a potential mass shooter and scrutinized as dangerous. If we really want to solve the problem of mass shooters, we need to look at the behavior that causes them and start acting on it.

What is most disappointing of all is that so many Democrats and other liberals jumped all over these mass shootings, which their policies caused, to propose more failures they want to impose. They are such a disaster as a group of people and based on their track record, should be considered a menace. What is even worse is that conservatives play into their hands by accepting guilt for the shooting that have nothing to do with reality. It is not immoral to support the Second Amendment. It is immoral to support pot smokers who are atheists and dream of destroying our entire civilization. Those people have decided they don’t want to be in America and live by its rules, they want to change it, to undo it, with either a godless value system or a universal anti-capitalist wage. And these attackers of our public gun free zones were born and bred in our education system and had their tempers poked by members of the Democratic party, and once they had been good and stoked, become the next killers to hit the news and attempt to get the dialogue on gun control which all Democrats want to see, for which they themselves are the threat.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Nobody Can Beat President Trump: The great rally in Cincinnati

It was strange to watch the Trump rally in Cincinnati because it was the first one I haven’t been to once he has come to my hometown. But honestly, even with a VIP ticket, seeing him is an all-day event and I just couldn’t block out that kind of time. So what does that say about him and his presidency? When did anybody ever wait all day to see a president and fill a 20,000-person arena along the Ohio River an hour before the scheduled speaking time of 7 PM? At 6 PM in fact all the seats all the way up to the luxury suites were full except for a those who had left into the concourse to get food. The floor in front of the speaker’s stage was filled and there were still lines wrapped around the arena outside.

I was at that same rally when Trump last came to US Bank just a few weeks after the infamous Access Hollywood tapes that would have sunk any other candidate. But even then, when the media had wrote him off with a torpedo hit and as we have learned, many other sabotages, some by our own government, Trump still filled that arena even as Hillary Clinton couldn’t fill up a park just a few hundred yards down river. I thought then that Trump was going to win but at that time I was one of the few. Yet he packed that place and people were very happy to be there. It was a great experience that I have never forgotten, and it was amazing to see it duplicated just a few years later under much better circumstances. This time he was the president and suddenly everyone wanted to speak ahead of him. Even one of the best Supreme Court Justices in the country, Sharon Kennedy of Ohio spoke a few hours from Trump’s ostentatious patriotism on full display once he arrived.

So why, what is the reason that Trump can do this while nobody else can? Why are the Democrats still pushing an impeachment narrative even after all the premise for such a thing had legally been tossed out the window? Why? Well, the answer is celebrity and not just the kind that Hollywood produces. What Trump has built over the years is the real kind of celebrity that actually built Hollywood at a distant part of their history, which they have lost. Celebrity is when a person, an actor, or a representative comes to embody the unspoken thoughts and words of a significant number of the population. That is why Trump had crowds in October of 2016 when Hillary Clinton could barely fill a spot 10 times smaller. Hillary Clinton in her final push tried to bring in celebrities to push her over the top yet couldn’t. Trump won the election anyway even though the forces against him were phenomenal. And at this present rally in the summer of 2019 people saw in Trump parts of themselves that they didn’t have a voice in any other way. So, they lined up to see him making an entire day of the event and they were happy to do it. They are an untouched market in America that no professional consultants had spent time trying to understand. They still don’t get it, but US Bank was the measure of their failure. It filled when the media thought there weren’t any supporters left and not only did Trump fill it easily, he did so hours before the show even started.

Think about what people were waiting to see, a 70 something year old man, a politician, talk for an hour or so. There was no music to accompany the show, the whole thing was just Trump talking about current events and world affairs. There is no conventional wisdom that could explain it, so unconventional study is needed to even begin to comprehend it. There isn’t any Democrat in the United States or in the world who could do what Trump did in Cincinnati or anywhere, even telling basically the same speech over and over again over the years. To be a celebrity who can generate that much excitement, who in their right mind thinks that anybody is going to beat him in 2020? I said in in 2016, nobody. And I’ll say it again now, there isn’t anybody who is going to beat Trump for a return to the White House in 2020. It is astonishing that an arena that big could be filled by anybody. Carrie Underwood sold out that arena, but that is for a full concert. What Trump has done is simply incredible.

Celebrity is a vote all its own. Even with the cheating that Democrats are known for throughout history, whether it is stuffing ballots, getting dead people to vote, or trying to qualify illegal aliens and prisoners to tip the scales in their favor, they have nobody like Trump. Not a single celebrity in Hollywood. No athlete, no musical artist. Nobody. People showed up to see Trump speak for over an hour and they spent the day doing it because they wanted to. And in a country where votes still matter, even when cheating does go on, people are speaking with sheer numbers of support even as the media and establishment culture tries to suppress that information from them. When Trump speaks to people directly people reward him with support, because that’s the only voice they really have—the celebrity that they gave to Trump because he represents their true values.

Deservedly, those who work against Trump should be concerned. Those who have taken their shots to end the Trump presidency made the whole story about him as a person, but what they failed to understand was that Trump is the representative of the people who elected him. People don’t follow Trump as some dictator they follow him because he represents who they are and without him they have no other voice. Enemies of Trump don’t want to just stop him because they disagree with him, but they want to silence the voices that back him. They don’t care what those voices really want out of their government, they want to pretend that they are in charge and can lead them toward some progressive objectives.

Those against the Trump presidency are in denial of what really makes Trump tick. In a representative government has there ever really been anybody who really was more authentic and representative than President Trump? Who thinks that people stand all that time to see an old man talk about current events? Its not so much him, but that he is their vehicle to bring forth their own voices, and for that they will wait all day for just a short shot in the spotlight. I have seen those events before, but this latest rally in Cincinnati was different, it was even bigger and more spectacular, and more of a statement about the real state of the nation. It wasn’t a racist event, it wasn’t a dictator, it was just a celebrity who represented the real people of the nation and no representative from the other political side can go toe to toe with him. And for that, it was an event to celebrate and be grateful for.

Rich Hoffman

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The Democrats Hate Profit: Working against the American Flag for change none of us want

When people ask me why I am writing a book about business, specifically about the necessity of executive culture in all places of employment, called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, well, the debates by the Democrats that have taken place over two days during this past week tell the whole story. There are many aspects of American culture that have been pulled into this anti-profit path that was very obvious during the debates, and for those who do get it, they have forgotten why profit is important to our culture and really don’t know how to defend it from criticism. So, I feel compelled to help settle the matter any way I can. Although I have been talking about the socialist slide of Democrats for many years, and how our schools and most government interactions support the Marx theories, even I was surprised how open the Democrat candidates were to reveal themselves as socialists, perhaps even communists. Times have certainly changed and I’m not at all happy to have been proven right on the matter.

Profit is not a dirty word; it is a method of payment. Profit is how a company gets paid for services rendered, after they’ve covered all their other expenses. There needs to be something to benefit their time and energy on whatever it is they are making. If they are rich, then that means that lots of different people, or companies want to give them profit for the offerings they provide. Yet at the core of the Democrat platform that protests against the notion of profit is that very value system that points out good work from bad conduct. Bad conduct isn’t very profitable, so that value system is something that Democrats wish to get rid of, so they can continue to build a dependent class of people who will always vote them into power and if you think about it the whole notion of such a thing is disgusting.

Getting back to President Trump’s assertion that people who protest the American flag and the motives of American life should go back to wherever they came from, whether they are first generation immigrants or third, if you are not honoring the American flag and what it stands for, then probably you should go to a country that endorses your political theory. Because as American citizens we all have an obligation to at least agree on the basic foundations of American life and what they are. And what they are is that we are a for profit country that is always looking to expand as an economy. If we can’t agree on that basic thing, then we can’t be said to all love America. I don’t think people who protest the idea of profit could be said to love their country, not if all they want to do is to change it into something else.

I don’t think Democrats were always this way, I grew up around a lot of farmers and many of them were what we might call Kennedy Democrats. They were certainly flag waving Americans, they understood market prices for their crops and the needs to save up money to buy a new tractor or some chickens so they could have eggs because a fox got into the chicken coup. There may have been some of these Marxist type Democrats out there in the world, apparently in our universities and larger education system, but we didn’t see them at parades on the 4th of July and at Memorial Day festivities. This hatred for American profit is a new thing that I would say comes directly out of our education system and has been a massive failure based on how much tax money we have wasted trying to educate our next generation youth. If the result of all that money is what was on stage this week with Democrat presidential candidates, then the whole experiment has been a massive waste of time.

The debates were supposed to be a kind of job interview for an executive seat in our government to manage the country. It’s a CEO job in official function and the candidates should have treated it that way. But if you are all about anti-profit, then you really aren’t wanting to do the job as an American CEO of a high government title. You can’t have a political philosophy that wants to undo everything then turn around and declare that they deserve an equal seat at the table of consideration if what they are proposing seeks to destroy the country we all love. And that’s essentially what the Democrats want to do. Why would you want to change something that has worked so well for so many people? Their argument is that it doesn’t work for all people. Well, show me some other place in the world that does do better for all people, where so many diverse people can come together as they do in the United States and accomplish anything, let alone the most powerful economy on the planet. And the reason for all that goodness is that America is a country that supports profit, the work done by people well and are rewarded for that work in such a fashion.

Secretly what Democrats want is for the government to decide winners and losers for the power of the vote, not for the effort of hard work and good conduct. When they protest profit, they are protesting a reward system that promotes good behavior instead of a centralized authority. When the government is big and has the power to give out wages whether earned or not, we have fundamentally changed the nature of America into something else and that is a grounds for conditional action on behalf of those who love our flag as it is today.

I associate with lots of different people every day. Some of them come from all over the world and have lots of different ideas about how things should be. I talk to liberals even though they have values that seem like they belong on another world. And I know lots of people who call themselves conservatives at all places along the degrees of value. But what they all have in common which makes them so I can at least speak to them is that they understand profit and loss. None of the people on the debate stage for the Democrat representative for the Executive Branch of our government did, they were completely unrelatable and it makes you wonder if they are even aware of it. You would think they would be. But maybe they are so out of touch that they just don’t get it. And these are the best that Democrats have to offer?

It is further astonishing that this same group of people have made it so that we can’t even talk and that people like me are considered radical by their crazy definitions for things. Again, it is the education system that has paved the way for this mentality but when it comes down to real people working and living in the real world, the support doesn’t go too far for these radical ideas. So why do they have them? Because they just don’t get it? Or that they are so radical and polluted in their educations that they can’t see the forest for the trees? Or perhaps, and this is what I think, they simply hate America and want to destroy it for us all. That is the question of this election and our tolerance for it will be decided on election day.

Rich Hoffman
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What Comes Around Goes Around on the Wild, Wild Frontiers of Thought and Culture

It’s always a good day for me to attend the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio where I rejoin old friends and meet some new ones at that annual event always set during the last weekend of July. In many ways I am happiest during that period because the world is as I’d like it to be and I get to dress the way I’d like for the event. This year was a little different however because its one of those transition periods for me. I’m in the middle of writing my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and have been working on several themes that were born right there in Greenville over the last several decades. As a lover of Ohio history and of frontier life in general I find great solace in the small towns up and down Rt 127, from Hamilton, Ohio all the way up Celina on the Grand Lake St. Mary. Lebanon, and Eaton come to mind as well, and of course Greenville itself nestled there in God’s country with the smell of corn dogs and ice-cold Coke offered from the various venders. But more than anything I enjoy competing with those old and new friends and pushing myself in ways that I don’t get to do in regular life, and the results are always rewarding, such as in this very close example shown below of our Bullwhip Fast Draw competition during the finals.

Yes, it’s fast. I have been practicing Cowboy Fast Draw for quite a long time now and have a pretty good feel for how fast is fast. The events shown in our Bullwhip Fast Draw are around .600 of a second down to about .450, almost as fast as the pistol shooters who were also there at the event. I spent quite a lot of time with them as well. Yet it amazes me how fast the Bullwhip Fast Draw competition has become, and how fast we have become in conducting all the various steps literally in the blink of an eye. For a lot of people, the blink of an eye is about .015 of a second. So, we are moving very fast these days in performing a task that really should be nearly impossible. But you never really know until you start pushing yourself with competition which is one of the big themes in my new book.

I am an optimist, really an unshakable one. I’ve seen more than my share of tragedy and heartbreak, but my optimism has always been intact no matter what’s going on. Over the years this Annie Oakley event has been that reset period for me that no matter what has been occurring, it gave me an opportunity to be around people who aren’t losers and activists of malice and just enjoy good people in a good flag waving country. Many years ago, I broke away from the entertainment aspects of my relationship with the western arts and went to apply my skills to real life problems, that were very controversial. It was quite a thing to do before Donald Trump was president, but now isn’t considered so radical, because the country is snapping back into shape, thankfully. The evidence is everywhere. This year at our Western Showcase event a really good Lone Ranger impersonator stopped by and did a show which I enjoyed quite a lot. As I listened to the Lone Ranger creed from him, I couldn’t help but think of myself and some of the decisions I had made along the way leading up to that moment.

In 2004 I released the book The Symposium of Justice which featured a bullwhip cracking vigilante that was at war with the corruption of his hometown. But in the years thereafter I found that many of my themes were quite real and that as an author, I couldn’t just write about them, I wanted to be the real-life character of my stories. So, I turned my skills to the real-life problems of my community and many reading here know the rest of the story. Up until Donald Trump emerged from the Tea Party to become President of the United States, I felt I needed to be the real-life characters I had written about. But that has changed due to the sudden shifting of the winds. The western arts no longer feel like a dying thing as it used to, but something that is reemerging and becoming new again. That makes me very happy. Not only does the world need it, but it confirms many of the things about people that I have long suspected and those are the clear contents of my new book that will likely come out next year.

It has been sad that so many people who still believe in things like the Lone Ranger’s Creed have stayed out of the fight that has needed to be fought. I couldn’t just sit around and think about it. I wanted to do something about it and I am proud that I have. But hearing the Lone Ranger impersonator go through the creed this year in front of our audience was for me very refreshing. Some of my favorite quotes are “That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.” And “in being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.” Or, “That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather it and light it himself. Those are all good quotes and who could argue them? Well, Democrats for one, and many of today’s youth who get their morality from Grand Theft Auto rather than the Masked Man as they used to.

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That is why I love the Annie Oakley event so much. It is a break from the disappointments of today’s culture and the youth being born from it, from the primitive cravings of body piercings, tattoos and shaky morality. Of loose sexual standards and a proclivity toward drugs and intoxication. From lazy losers who want socialism over capitalism and champions of expanding government who will issue them mailbox paychecks for just sitting around and letting mother government drop food in their mouths without doing anything to deserve it. For one day a year I get a break from all that and I cherish it tremendously. If I could have every day like the days I get in the middle of God’s country every year in Darke County I would take it eagerly. Unfortunately, that is not our reality, but it should be. Most of the people who go and participate in those events there don’t have the same kind of reflections that I do. They just go and enjoy the festivities without giving it much thought. But not me, I see the potential and reflect on what we used to do well and how we could do it again. And perhaps a new day is emerging. Whatever comes I at least feel good about what I’ve done to make the world better, which I will always do. But I get the feeling that the world is getting more favorable to those grand old traditions and that the thugs and losers of life aren’t winning any more, they are being swept away into the garbage heaps of history, where they belong and that makes me the happiest of all. For the first time in many years I think that tomorrow will be better than yesterday, and that is very encouraging.

Rich Hoffman

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You Can’t Hide Bad Behavior Behind Imaginary Racism

One of the changes I’ll be making on this site is the perspective that it speaks from. For instance, most of the time that I have written on this blog site it has been from an underdog perspective, as a member of the real “Resistance” where our country was literally being taken away from us. Normally, on a day to day basis I only associate with really smart people who are plugged in to what is going on in the world. However, and we all go through these things, I have had a family member in the hospital for an extended period and I have been pulled out of my natural state routines. So I have had to speak to people who really don’t care what’s going on in the world or they weren’t part of any “resistance” which is how I think of the Tea Party movement. Even in the entertainment community for which I have several very good friends, the trend is to not talk about politics because nobody wants to be divisive. Yet I continue to spend a lot of my time on what is actually going on and would consider myself well above an elevated state of pop culture knowledge of world events. And from my perspective a truth that everyone can relate to has emerged from the Trump administration and a new kind of politics is emerging. People can say that they don’t like Donald Trump, but history will remember his presidency as a great victory in global politics and the way we do business as a republic. So it is from that perspective that I will have future articles here and elsewhere. I am quite confident that history will catch up.

The biggest element to have fallen in politics recently is this whole notion that everything is racist which has any kind of measure to gauge success against. The Elijah Cummings issue of the 7th District in Maryland is a great example as President Trump has pointed out with his tweets so far this week describing the mess that Baltimore specifically is in. Like most big cities, Baltimore has not seen the benefit of the vast amounts of money that has been poured into its budgets. When a problem like gun violence or homelessness is targeted as an objective to go after, Democrats, all of them, just don’t have a management approach that solves any problems. Their philosophy makes more of the detrimental behavior we see not less of it, and in the case of Elijah Cummings he is a great example of it. While he runs a lot of the investigations that have been going on in Congress for a number of years, he hasn’t been able to solve the hard problems of his district with any amount of money that have been tossed into it. Just like my argument about school levies, anywhere where progressive politics is the theme of management effort, failure is attached.

To hide this obvious evidence from the public progressive politicians have decided that they would use “racism” as a shield against their failed approach. Watching Chris Wallace on Fox Sunday this week was quite a shocking bit of reporting from what I think is one of the best in the business. Wallace couldn’t get it through his thick skull that Trump’s comments about Cummings district were quite valid, just as the situation was for what we call “The Squad,” the four congresswomen who are progressive activists who have also been the target of President Trump’s outrage. Trump is a guy who made his living building elegant buildings and golf courses. To him roads with pot holes make them dumps, so from his measurement, which is the same as most people, places where homicides are up, respect for the police are down, per capita income that does not rid an area of homelessness and drug addiction are dumps, and I think we can all agree. The only thing that progressives have to defend themselves from such a striking judgement is to proclaim that it is racist to have an opinion, which is of course ridiculous.

What was outrageous about what Wallace did as what I think of as a great reporter is that he played straight into the race narrative which I found in my recent interactions with “normal people” (people who are more concerned with the kind of grill they have in their back yard than what is going on in politics) is that race was accepted as a measurement of value, which its clearly not. People have accepted this notion that people of color should not be criticized in any way about anything and if you really get down to it, that is why a lot of these inner cities are failing and people are dying in filth and poor living conditions under addicted circumstances, is because nobody—especially white people—feel they can have an opinion on the matter. Now it has become obvious that Fox News is not a bastion of conservative value. Quite the contrary, Wallace himself is listed as a Democrat and the network as a whole has moved far to the political left now that Rupert Murdoch has taken a back seat to the new CEO Suzanne Scott. One of the big decisions under Scott was in hiring Donna Brazile who was fired from the DNC for rigging the election in favor of Hillary Clinton. So Fox News is not headed in a good direction. They are still more conservative than the rest of the media outlets that are mainstream but that’s not saying much.

As I said, I know a lot of people in entertainment and talk about a double standard. Many of them are afraid to have conservative opinions because they won’t get work, even though most of the audiences for modern media content lean toward a conservative nature. Yet Joss Whedon who is a big time Disney film director, responsible for the Marvel movies and even co-wrote Toy Story thought that he could send out an anti-Trump tweet saying “We have a racist, fascist president who’s using armed thugs in law enforcement & illegal militias to keep us cowed & hopeless & he’ll take the 2020 election by armed force & blatant, treasonous criminality & that’s us now, we’re the country with concentration camps so happy 4th.” For that Whedon wasn’t dropped from any film projects, Disney hasn’t distanced themselves from him, they just let it go. But as conservatives, if any of us said just a fraction of that one time, we’d be raked through the coals and tortured in the court of public opinion.

Of course, it’s ridiculous, but what’s important to understand is that the real anger that is coming from Whedon and Wallace along with many others is that they have come to realize that they do not have their finger on the pulse of America. They have an ideology that has been built on ideas of failure over time and they used the quiet nature of America who live and let live to justify their phony belief system. Meanwhile, bad ideas weren’t challenged which impoverished places like Baltimore in the wake of nobody thinking of criticizing the place wanted to be called names for pointing out the obvious. But that is changing and President Trump knows it. Not only that, but for the first time that I can think of a person running for a second term of office isn’t afraid to point it out because there isn’t any real competition for Trump in the 2020 election and all these Democrats know it. All they have for a defense is to cry racism even though it was they who put women and minorities into these political roles then expected nobody to criticize their bad behavior just because of skin color and sex. The stupid assumption was on their original strategy, not in the reality of the situation. The world is conservative and getting more so. The covers have been ripped away and not even Fox News is safe. And that is a trait that they will all have to get used to because the country and the world is moving away from their sentiments, not toward them.

Rich Hoffman
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The Merits of Dueling

The Merits of Dueling:

As I have said, I have been working on a new book called the Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and I’m about halfway through it.  For my readers of a long time here who have been sending me a lot of emails missing the daily articles, they will return.  But I offer this little sample of this “gunfighter” project to give a taste of what is to come.

The concept of getting “satisfaction” from a personal insult went a long way to establishing honor and proper conduct among business transactions, in the time before modern rules as we know them today. As we have seen often where various religions and their value are not unified, and therefore cannot be expected to hold up in a court of law, there needs to be a mechanism that brings about honor and to hold it into the context of moral conduct where villainy will quickly grow like a weed in a garden of dreams. Dueling in the classic sense, especially in the New World during the time of the American Revolution was an answer to this problem. And if there is an argument against the American Constitution for changes, it was in the original rules of the nation that mechanisms of honor were already established before the courts were needed.

In doing business in the orient, particularly in Japan where honor is still a respected trait, business transactions are accelerated because the interactions mean something with one another. This is obvious at the airports around Tokyo among men and women as respect is a universal language that makes interactions between people start on common ground. In the West we have allowed our own culture of respect to drift away into the more centralized regulation of the state which outlawed the practice of dueling essentially so that lawyers could profit off the instillation of justice. The cost was that individual satisfaction for an insult did not get the respect it deserved while the emphasis was on protecting society from itself by settling matters in a court of law. This has led our culture to adapt into a more passive aggressive society where trust isn’t always easy to find in other people. It could be argued that we were all better off when we tried to openly kill each other to protect a slight against our individual names.

Dueling was so common at the start of America that the governor of South Carolina wrote a book on it to make sure everyone did it right called The Code of Honor: Or Rules for the Government of Principals and Second in the Art of Dueling in 1834 by John Lyde Wilson. Dueling in the time of the Revolutionary War was quite common. While it was slowly going out of style at the start of the invention of a republic form of federal government once George Washington took office, in the South, particularly in Charleston, South Carolina where so many important battles occurred in defining freedom during the start of the new nation, dueling was so common that the governor felt compelled to create some legal means of settling disputes, which sounds barbaric compared to our modern legal system, but in hindsight seemed to generate more responsible people on an individual level. This certainly helped in business commerce, because if a business deal went bad, the parties may find themselves in the streets fighting to the death to obtain their satisfaction.

The important aspect of satisfaction is that the emphasis was on the individual reputations of the participants. It wasn’t some third party “state” that decided justice, it was the people at the heart of the conflict, and in many ways, society was more honorable. People had to treat each other individually better as a result. The more the states intruded on management of the affairs of people the more passive aggressive disputes have become leaving business conduct to suffer greatly. After the Civil War it was particularly immigrants from the South who moved West in search of gold and other opportunities, and they took with them the concept of dueling that had been very much a part of early American life. Dueling with fast draw had with it a way of bringing honor where there wasn’t yet law and it forced people to treat each other better and more honorably which is why there is still reverence for it.

At the state level we can all see today that the concept of taking honor and responsibility for good conduct away from individuals has been a mistake. While dueling was a violent concept the amount of people who died from it were arguably much less frequent than the kind of violence we see in modern times. That is why thinking in the way of the gunfighter is better than in the modern context of leaving disputes to be settled by those not directly responsible for the conduct, such as lawyers and the state as a legal entity. These days instead of getting satisfaction for an honor tainted we say “see you in court” instead of settling the matter right then and there. Then of course those who can pay for the best lawyer become the winners in most cases and the state enjoys the revenue and job opportunities that come from settling disputes. But what is lost is the individual responsibility for the actions taken and the merit of an honorable exchange. Taking the example of the famous duel between General Gladsten and General Howe in 1778, both Generals in the Revolution and were in a dispute over troop possession. They took to the streets of Charleston, South Carolina where many such duels were taking place at the time and when the time came stared each other down waiting for the other to make a move. After taunting each other for a good bit of time finally General Howe fired his pistol and clipped the ear of Gladsten. Gladsten in response, who was thought to be the John Adams of the south and inventor of the famous “Don’t Tread on Me” flag deliberately fired his shot into the ground inviting Howe to try again. Eventually the two men shook hands and that settled their dispute with only a minor injury occurring to Gladsten’s ear. Otherwise, the business between two major Revolutionary War figures was settled respectfully, something that certainly wouldn’t have occurred if the two had fought it out in court with lawyers acting as their pistols and fancy words spoken in legal jargon as bullets.

The point of the matter is not that dueling is a desired trait, or even that we should bring it back in the form that it was. Killing another person isn’t a desirable outcome for any dispute, but the finality of it tended to put in the participant’s minds the seriousness of an issue and this mindset certainly set the West and its expansion ablaze with activity that couldn’t have been regulated by any legal system at the rate that human ambition was expanding at the time. Honor was preserved by the potential for dueling and this threat allowed for proper respect when a nation needed it most. We could learn a lot from this period today where honor among business transactions is desperately lacking, particularly within the American borders. Other countries have their honor driven rituals and it is noticeable during business transactions. In the United States however, we have allowed our laws to be governed by lawyers and judges who take away the responsibility for personal conduct and place it in the hands of the state, and many of our businesses have followed. The impact has been a loss in honor among business interactions that has not been desirable. Yet honor could be restored if only we stepped back into hindsight and dusted off the values that did emerge from dueling and upgraded that sentiment for our modern needs which starts in thinking like a gunfighter.

Rich Hoffman

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