Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
Tag: Ayn Rand
Hate Crime Legislation to Ban Guns: The Government attempting to disarm the Second Amendment to cover for their own crimes committed
One of the gun control measures that congress intends to pursue when everyone gets back in session and is being floated around more and more recently is to take guns away from people convicted for a hate crime. In fact, it was Columbia, South Carolina of all places who just enacted a first pass hate crime ordinance which is going in the same direction as what is being floated on the federal level, and it is just ridiculous. The trouble with the proposal is that it is purely reactive to the current circumstances of mass shootings, which I have said many times are the result of Democrat policies as an origin, and that it just opens the door for banning guns based on hate speech, which is entirely defined by whatever political party is in power at the time. Such a ban opens all kinds of doors toward future encouragement and abuse of the law no matter how good the intentions are of the people proposing these measures.
My brand of conservatism was common all through the twentieth century. It was the world that changed, not me, and that hard turn to the left that started really in the mid-1950s and culminated into the 60s was a bad decision based on the current condition of the world. I often say to people that I was born in 1968 as a solution to that left turn. I grew up knowing both of my farmer grandparents. Both of my parents stayed married and didn’t embark on that social experiment of divorces that was becoming so popular in the late 70s and 80s. And even more unusual, my mom was a stay at home mom, and she took all kinds of hell for doing it. She was a volunteer at my school to help the teachers with all the kid’s social events and all the other moms simply hated her, because she could be home with her children and had time during the day to do mom stuff. As a result, my view of America and Republican politics in general was not at all different from John Wayne’s America, or any of the typical westerns that were popular on television and at the movies during that period. So nothing I say is all that outlandish, only if it is compared to the screw ball politics of our current time, just as a disclosure for reference.
Hate crimes are a modern invention by Democrats to seek minority votes and to capitalize off tensions that always arise when cultures of different values are mixed together. Most of the time those tensions can be worked out with a little understanding but occasionally things get out of hand and bad things happen. Democrats especially are guilty of stoking those fires of discontent until someone snaps and thus, you have a hate crime. If everyone would just leave everyone else alone, there would be a lot less hate crime in the world. But activist politics pushes the issue and before you know it some panicked teenager raised in a house full of illiteracy is running their car through a crowd of progressive protestors committing a hate crime.
The trouble with hate crime is that it is entirely politically motivated, so that if an enemy political party wants to push your buttons as a target and you respond, you could be said to have committed a hate crime. And under these new hate crime proposals, the authorities have a right to then come and confiscate your guns. If that’s not bad enough, the natural next step is to extend that effort to hate speech, which essentially could be just about anything that President Trump says on a daily basis, because he is from the winning political party and the losers are hen pecking at him because they know of no other way to win an election. Because of that we are seeing massive amounts of banning going on social media platforms, such as Alex Jones has experienced along with many, many others. I understand shadow banning, that is certainly the case with me on Twitter and YouTube. I don’t worry about it too much, but I can see that it’s happening for sure. These are already dangerous elements in any society so we can clearly see that all this hate crime legislation opens the door for gun confiscation by whatever political party is in power, and it just can’t be allowed.
It is not radical to say that the reason we have guns, guns of all sizes and power is so that we can manage our own government. There may come a time, and it is obvious today, that we may have to take back control of our government through the use of guns. Government cannot be trusted without a check on their power, ultimately by the people of an electorate and the electoral system. Even with guns we have come perilously close to complete tyranny as the evidence of the last presidential election is testimony in itself. The FBI sought to help the Democrat party elect their presidential candidate and keep Donald Trump out of the White House, which didn’t work. But when he did, they actively played a part in subverting that election, the evidence is everywhere as revealed most explosively with the Bruce Ohr situation at the Department of Justice. That case is still unraveling, but it is very embarrassing to our government. Going back a few years we saw a similar situation involving the IRS where they targeted Tea Party groups as a way to punish them for existing, using tax laws to encumber the leadership. It was a gross abuse of power and nobody was ultimately held accountable. I was wrapped up in the middle of all that, so I saw it firsthand. It was abuse by our government, pure and simple and honestly, if I was not a gun owner, they probably would have come after me even harder. By my experience, I would say that my ownership of guns has preserved more liberty and saved more lives than if I had not had them. Let’s just say that.
As to the other proposals such as red flag laws, well the tools have always been there. Since the most recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio police and the FBI are finally doing their jobs and picking people up for the messages they put online about announcing their mass shooting intentions. The red flags have always been there, but police and the FBI were just too lazy to act on them. There wasn’t a political will to enforce the laws that were on the books, otherwise the El Paso shooting and the one in Dayton would not have happened. The red flags were there, but the cops were out eating donuts and thinking about something else. That is another reason we can’t trust our government; they are not consistent and driven by performance. They are mostly inspired by politics and when something is hot, they act. When things cool off, they sleep, sit in their cars looking up pornography on their computers, and they have massive affairs with each other. (I know a lot of cops or have over the years. I know what I’m talking about.) They do a good job when pressed and people are looking. But left to their own devices, they aren’t the most motivated bunch.
We can’t trust government to define hate crimes or even hate speech and we certainly can’t surrender our guns to them. The guns are there to ultimately protect us not from thieves and despots, but from the tendencies of government itself, to cover their crimes when they commit them from the burdens of history. And if someone like you or I are witnesses to that burden, we will then become the targets, which is what all this hate crime legislation is opening up as a possibility, for which we all must say no. For myself, I live by the Cowboy Way, I treat everyone no matter what their sex, color or country of origin the same and with great respect. I don’t need a government that is always trending toward criminal behavior to define for me, “fairness.” I’ll keep my guns, and if someone wants to come and take them, then that will leave no other choice but to call for a change in the government itself and return to a time when John Wayne made a lot more sense instead of the race baiters and hustlers of our current times who seek to hide their own illegal activity behind more laws and regulation.
Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
Maurice: A creation of Democrats and a problem only guns can solve
Here’s another case, this Maurice Hill from Philadelphia where police were serving a warrant to him for multiple crimes, and he just opened fire on them injuring 6 officers. Nobody was killed, but that didn’t stop gun control advocates to use this shooting as yet another opportunity to alter the Second Amendment. Only what they ignore is that Hill was a hardened criminal with an extensive history of crimes on gun violations, drugs, DUIs, aggravated assaults and even launting a police animal. As many have said since his arrest including President Trump, this Maurice Hill loser should have never have been on the streets, yet he was. So how exactly would more gun control laws have helped with this situation? Hill was a criminal, was he just suddenly going to obey the law and turn in his guns that were not obtained legally—because he was a criminal.
Of course, the answer is no. The grab for guns by politicians is only for cosmetic reasons. Now that guns are invented, they will always be available to someone somewhere. The problem that the law-abiding public has is how do they defend themselves from such characters when they decide to wield their menace upon us all with malice and sheer evil at a moments notice. What are we supposed to do, retreat and give them our life and possessions, and hope that a simple police force can bring justice to our circumstances in overcrowded courts and a generally apathetic legal system that would rather not be bothered? No, that’s not a good way to live. It’s nice to have police to keep most of the crazies in line, but there will always be people like Maurice Hill who are beyond any kind of criminal reform, but weren’t considered bad enough to lock up in a jail for extended periods of time, because we just don’t have the room for them in jail. And so long as that condition exists there will always be dangers to us all as they roam the streets that no law can protect us from.
Maurice was very much a creation of Democrat policies, illegal drug sales, bad neighborhoods filled with fatherless homes, a prison system that considers drugs a minor offense so even when he was in jail, it was only for 2 and a half years. In a good world Maurice would have been locked up. Many from outside the United States slander our prison system because we have so many inmates, but that is also the cost of a free society, some people just can’t handle it, and when they act against the freedoms of other people, they have to be removed from society. You don’t see these problems as much in other places in the world because those societies are nowhere near as free as what occurs in North America. There aren’t as many cultural opportunities to be a criminal like Maurice was. In his little neighborhood of Philadelphia he was big stuff, a big fish in a small pond, and that fueled his criminal intent. And we could say that most American cities have lots of Maurice types who will try to kill us on a moment’s notice over a loaf of bread, and when they do, we have to have prisons to put them in, or guns to defend ourselves from. Because they aren’t going away.
What’s ironic is that the same people who built Maurice also are the ones calling for gun control, as if anything they suggest would actually work. They have the audacity to suggest that if only we gave up our guns and submitted to background checks that people like this criminal would not have been such a threat. Or that if we had massive gun buy backs in the inner cities that we might get guns off the streets of places like Chicago and Philadelphia. But they would be wrong. Guns, especially in the hands of the most aggressive members of our society is clout, and nobody is going to give up their clout in criminal circles. If they don’t buy the guns from a legitimate dealer with at least some traceability, they’ll simply get them on the black market. And the more laws there are, the more regulation and taxation that is instilled in the industry, the blacker the market gets. As I’ve pointed out many, many times, Defense Distributed makes a great milling machine that can make your garage into a perfectly good machine shop that can manufacture AR-15s without any serial numbers. Guns will be with us forever; they are part of our modern world. So when bad guys have guns, good people also need them to defend themselves from criminal activity.
Police are not fast enough. To be honest Maurice Hill shouldn’t have even been able to be served a warrant. The real justice that we can’t even discuss is that someone should have taken care of the drug dealer a long time ago, since the legal system we do have couldn’t touch the guy. But since the good guys around Philadelphia were following the rules, nobody was going to stand up to Maurice and his thugs in that particularly bad neighborhood in Philly where drug dealing, and other crimes were as common as traffic lights. Because we had an environment there that did not support shoot outs in the streets between good guys and bad guys, the bad guys ruled the hen house. And that is the reality that nobody is addressing, especially gun grabbing liberals who breed people like Maurice with their insufficient policies and scandalous behavior.
Do we want a society that has shootouts in the streets between bad people and good people? Well, yes we do, because the option is to surrender our freedoms over to a government that either makes people like Maurice or worse, makes people who just don’t think much for themselves at all. When people castigate the wild west thinking that does occur in Western Civilization where free ideas clash sometimes violently, we need to understand that this is better than the option of just giving it all up for a totalitarian state such as what we see in China, or Venezuela for that matter. Freedom does spawn violence, because not everyone is equipped to deal with self-government. But that doesn’t mean that everyone should lose such a concept. Only that those who can’t need to be either locked up in jail or eliminated in the competitive environment that is Western Civilization. But we can’t take guns off the streets legally so that only people like Maurice have them to tyrannize everyone they encounter.
The solution is the opposite of gun control, not just in the situation with the drug dealing Maurice, but in all these mass shootings. While it’s true, we do have a dangerous society and violence is increasing. I would contend that the situation will get worse, largely because of the failures of liberal policies, especially in the inner cities of all American cities. There are Maurice types everywhere, they are a dime a dozen and the prison system simply can’t handle them. Liberal society has made too many of them. When Democrats say we must do something about people like this, I would say to them, stop making them. Stop breaking down families, stop supporting radical political ideas, stop feeding the growth of evil in society. Then and only then can anything be done to stop the violence. But until then, we need guns so that when those shoot outs in the streets happen, the right people win. That is the world we are living in.
Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
“Its Only A Flesh Wound”: The Dayton Mass Killer and his liberal, cocaine driven murders
OK, I’m happy to say I told you so dear reader. Within hours of the Dayton mass shooting rampage that has so many calling for gun control, we learned this week that the killer had cocaine in his body, he even had a bag of it on him at the time of his death after he was shot over 24 times by police, and he was on anti-anxiety medication combined with alcohol. Which is exactly what I had said happened knowing very little about the evidence at the time but understanding the condition of the murders. Yet we are supposed to believe that gun control would have averted the killings. And we are supposed to put our complete trust into a police force that put so many bullets into the dead body of the attacker that they actually shot some of the victims with their own bullets. The whole ordeal was actually and remains a mess. It was liberal philosophies that made the shooter who he was and it was state controlled law enforcement that obviously over reacted and put more people in danger due to their “training.”
The killer Betts had 52 gunshot wounds in his upper and lower torso. Many of them were exit wounds but think about it. More than twenty shots fired in any crowded area would be a potential for more people around the target to be injured, and at least 2 bullets struck other people. It is humorous that when explaining this to the public Police Chief Richard Beihl had to describe those wounds as “superficial wounds.” It kind of reminds me of the Monty Python movie The Holy Grail. “Its only a flesh wound.” Of course that police training entailed shooting at the subject so that so long as he was near his rifle that they had to keep pummeling him with rounds of fire and that each of those bullets would bounce off the pavement and be a potential projectile flying into innocent people running away from the crime. They had to make sure that Betts was dead. Ah, but they were under pressure, the police. After all, wouldn’t everyone panic under such a crises and hindsight is 20/20. Well, no, not everyone panics under those conditions.
Sure, there were lots of cops that were around late that night in Dayton patrolling the entertainment district and they engaged the shooter in 30 seconds. But with so many cops also comes the understanding that they all knew this guy was a mass killer who had just attacked people on their watch, and they wanted to make sure some of their bullets got into the body of him so they could claim credit for bringing an end to the carnage, by creating more carnage. 52 bullet holes, that is just out of control, and more about getting their name in the record books than actually stopping the crime. With so many police officers firing into the cocaine liberal Betts, nobody could have taken the next logical step and moved in to remove the weapon from the attacker while he was down, minimizing the risk to the area. I have argued and will continue to, that most CCW holders would have done a much better job and not let their adrenaline get the better of them, as the police obviously suffered from. A typical NRA member with a CCW would have been much calmer and created less carnage in stopping the bad guy.
But that’s not the story of the day, its all about how to detect mental health, and the gun control advocates desire to do background checks and have red flag laws. Would a red flag law prevented this liberal Elizabeth Warren supporter from smoking crack and mixing anti-depressant medicine with alcohol and who knows whatever else, then making a terrorist out of himself? I would argue that just calling oneself a Democrat is a kind of declaration of insanity. Should all Democrats be flagged as potential terrorists? I think historically speaking, we could make that case. Is that where all this is going? Because any time a mind is altered with intoxicants, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, anti-depressants even, they are all potential minds for becoming killers. Most of them won’t of course. But where do you draw the line?
Just like the cops that shot their guns over 24 times into a body within the confines of a crowded street, politicians show they have even less good judgment on the matter. Most of them want illegal drugs legalized so they can get the tax money for their giveaway projects, and they don’t want to consider what those intoxicants do to our society. Maybe everyone who drinks a beer or smokes marijuana should be “red flagged.” I could live without drinking or doing any drugs. I would much rather have a society of gun owners carrying them around in public than a bunch of drunken heathens intoxicated in their spare time and thinking about dumb things. The lessen here is that no politician, especially on the Republican side where they should be leading the way, is addressing the core problem—drugs cause mental depletion, so no mental health scan under normal conditions will root out a potential killer. And we certainly have seen from the FBI to the local law enforcement that they are only human, and they panic too under duress and they may shoot you just for being nearby. So is the proposal of more government patrolling the streets viable, no. Is more government doing background checks and administering red flag laws viable, no. Would an assault weapons ban work, so that government could be the only ones with high powered weapons there to serve politicians who have a lot to hide in the world. Absolutely not!
So what are we to do? Well, first of all, lets admit to ourselves that drugs are a problem and our government should not be endorsing the practice of intoxication—of any kind. People will still want to drink their beer and whatever, but we must stop promoting that activity as normal. And we certainly must understand that endorsing cocaine, depression medicine and marijuana will lead to a less safe society. We cannot give up the Bill of Rights so that people can just sit around and get wasted. I understand that the political class likes intoxicated people who can’t think, because it makes it easier to garner their vote. But the consequences are obvious, and this Betts killer was an obvious example of when such a situation goes wrong. I think a legitimate look into every mass killer would tell a similar story as Betts. He was obviously a clear-cut case, he was a liberal likely caught up in the modern antics of political theater, and being a drug user, had lost his ability to rationalize outcomes. So, he became a mass killer with the obvious hope that it would inspire gun control, which is why he used the high capacity magazine. He was after all supportive of gun control, and his natural aim of throwing his life away, and those of many others, was to force the issue. But all those thoughts are derived from insanity provoked by drug abuse. Given our current culture which accepts that condition, there is always the potential for countless killers to emerge. And until we deal with the drug use, no law created by anybody will stop them. Obviously, we can’t count on law enforcement to save us. Apparently to them, collateral damage is a perfectly acceptable criteria so long as they stop the mass shooters when they do appear.
Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
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
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
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.
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
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
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
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
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
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
House Bill 6 in Ohio is a Good Thing–if you want free markets, then provide them
There has been a lot of criticism about the passage of House Bill 6 which is the “Ohio Clean Air Program” because both sides of the political spectrum are missing the point. The bill essentially is a government bail out of the Akron-based First Energy Solutions nuclear power plants. The hippie liberal communist environmentalists don’t like that the bill strips away cash credits for “renewable energy,” such as wind power and solar while raising $200 million per year to cover the costs of the plants as a government heavy highly regulated industry that continues to lose money to the point where they won’t survive past the year 2021.
On the other hand there are the free market capitalists who don’t like that the utility company has donated over $1 million to Republicans to keep fossil fuel energy production alive, where the Obama era administrators sought to kill the industry in 2008 with more government mandates. Given the climate of government intrusion to begin with, and the need for good, reliable energy in Ohio, H.B, 6 further allows for local townships to vote by referendum any wind or solar powered take over of land and other assets to launch their “renewable energy” proposals, meaning the government can’t just decide to put up wind power plants by force. People in local areas would have the right to vote on them, which has the radicals infuriated. But equally infuriated are the capitalist who think that the whole deal is just another example of crony politics, where politicians will do anything for the donor base.
Here’s the deal, and I have been talking about this for a very long time, our utilities companies are monopolies that are directly attached to government management. And they shouldn’t be. If they weren’t “public” utilities then the management burden wouldn’t fall on government to have to solve, and Republicans in Columbus wouldn’t be tasks to bail them out or otherwise watch them fail down the tubes. And if the companies fail, what’s that do to our ability to produce nuclear power? Letting them fail at this point simply isn’t an option. And putting regulatory barriers on that industry just to facilitate hippie energy isn’t going to solve the problem either. What is truly needed in the long term are true free market solutions, which I suggested in Thorium, where every single home could generate their own power off a government regulated grid, kind of like how each home has their own air conditioning units. The technology is there, but government needs to get out of standing in the way of it, and when it does problems like what First Energy Solutions is going through would then become a private problem instead of a government problem. That is where the real issues reside.
The current state reality of energy creation is that it isn’t privatized, which by no coincidence is precisely why the health care industry is going through the same problem. If health care were privatized competition would bring down the expensive medications that are on the market. Government intrusion raises those cost and puts all the power in lobbyists. Until health care is privatized, costs will continue to be high and no easy solution for providing health care to people will be conducive to reality. Energy is hampered by the same restrictions. Power companies are government mandated monopolies, made that way through the incredibly high barriers of entry into the market. Regulator considerations destroy anything but the deepest pocket investors who then look to government to protect their investment. It’s much like the railroad situation at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. Someone had to build all those railroads, then someone had to manage the trains themselves and the people getting on them. Public utilities do great work, but they are expensive, and they are vulnerable to mass outages which hampers so many people because they must maintain and old grid of power supply that is in this present time old and obsolete.
But until we invent a better means of power generation, such as personal Thorium power plants the size of an air conditioning unit on a home for every home in the nation, government is stuck keeping the old dinosaur alive, which is what H.B. 6 in Ohio essentially is. The future of power generation isn’t the government mandates for solar and wind power plants passed down from the communist oriented Obama administration, its in private investment and personal maintenance, such as moving public transportation from the train to a car.
I love camping and always enjoy the sites of an RV park. Sure, while they are stationed in these weekend warrior hideaways, they are plugged in usually into the campground system of power and water maintenance. But in looking at all those great RVs within most of them are generators and tanks that allow them to function independently while traveling along the vast highways of our nation. It is from them that we should be learning how to push technology into each of our homes and businesses with more independent power generation and to get there we need to allow competition into the public utilities, which of course they don’t want, but that is the ultimate solution. We have allowed government to stand in the way of that energy independence so we really shouldn’t complain when they are called on to manage the trouble.
In that regard I completely support the Republican position on H.B. 6 and the Governor DeWine’s reasoning on the matter. They are dealing with dinosaur technology to supply the energy needs for a sustainable Ohio. The goal thankfully isn’t to pander to the flimsy hopes of the environmental terrorists, or the communist desires to destroy capitalism in the United States through heavy regulations tied to the backs of “Green Energy” but to deal with the two nuclear power plants that we do have, which have already cost a lot of money and do employ a lot of people. We need to use the energy we do have to bridge us into a 21st century solution. Likely the utility companies won’t like that solution but that is a bridge to cross when we get there. But we do need to get there.
Independent energy has to be the answer for the future, and free market competition to bring down the costs. Government needs to be out of all these economic transactions so that real free market solutions can come about, just like it did when the telephone utilities were deregulated. That is how the cell phone came about. Imagine what would happen if utilities were deregulated to allow for new methods of power generation to emerge. It amazes me how good some of the RV power generation innovations are these days. Imagine what it would look like if every home in the nation had their own source of power. Think of the lack of destructive impact to any economy that happens during every major storm where power grids get knocked out and hundreds of thousands of people are out of power for days, putting many people at risk. The option could be that every home treated their power supply like they do their air conditioners or heating services. A few downed trees wouldn’t kill the power for several neighborhoods. Instead one or two homes might be affected who could solve their problem with a simple service call from a competitive repair person. If we really want free market conditions, then let’s get government out of the utilities market and put them in the hands of the private sector.
Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
The Great Trump Poker Game
In case you haven’t heard, there are even more text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok that show directly that the Clinton campaign was involved in the FBI cover-up of DNC tampering into the 2016 election which Donald Trump won anyway. But now the skin is off the cat and its quite serious. It doesn’t seem that way to the mainstream media outlets because largely they refuse to cover it, but people like James Comey Clapper, Brennan and many, many others involved directly with the Obama White House are in deep trouble, and they deserve to be. It’s getting worse for them week by week and is why they came out against President Trump from day one, because they feared this day, where they no longer controlled the flow of information in government and could be tied to many crimes they knew they had committed to stay in office against the wishes of an official election. Meanwhile the state visit of the Trumps to Buckingham Palace in London was something even the most cynical person against Trump should have been very proud of. For those who have always supported Trump, it just made us prouder of his presidency.
What makes the Trump’s so good at these oversee visits with rulers, kings and queens of the world is that they’ve been there before. Long before Trump became president, he had become the very definition of the rich and famous, so looking comfortable among the most elite of the world is nothing new to him. And Melania is just such a great first lady, always looking and acting like the best that America has to offer. I can’t think of a single Democrat or Republican who could pull off one of these visits with the Queen of England so well, as if it was second nature to Trump. Which of course it is. I mean before the White House he and Melania actually lived in a tower of gold named after him. That lifestyle has certainly put him at ease in events like this one in London and I am personally glad. His approach certainly represents the way I think America should sell itself to others. Not just as an equal partner, but as a respected leader of the world and something others should feel a need to live up to.
But that is also why there was so much opposition against Trump to begin with. For many decades the plan was to diminish America’s role in the world and to cheapen our leadership in every way possible. So when we elected Trump to the Presidency the powers that had been engaged in all this diminished activity were inflamed to protect what they had been destroying. They certainly didn’t want Trump to repair our status around the world, which is precisely what has happened. Do you want to know how you can tell that Trump is unbeatable in 2020? Just look at how he has been playing the game. If his presidency were a poker game, which I’d say it is, he held great cards from the beginning, and now that the River has been revealed he has a 100% chance of winning the hand and the massive pot in the middle. The reason is that the Democrats went all in with what they thought were great cards, even cards they stuffed up their sleeve. But Trump had the aces and during the flop two more aces were revealed along with a King a Queen and a Jack. The King was the Mueller investigation, the Queen was the Strzok and Page FBI text messages, and the Jack was the phony Russian dossier paid for by the Never Trump establishment helped along by the Republican John McCain. And the other two Aces were the tax cuts and the great economic numbers that came from Trump’s policies. The two Aces Trump had all along were his great ability to lead people and generate excitement wherever he went, and his ability to be independent of the stuffy establishment with his own personal wealth.
Trump always had a great hand but once the Mueller Report was finished and the economy was continuing to truck along boldly, there wasn’t much anybody playing the game against Trump could muster. They had nothing and what’s unusual about politics played at this stage is that Trump knew how to play the game all along without all the advisors who whisper in the ears of leaders and usually guide everything in the direction they desire—who are completely controlled by establishment objectives. That made Trump a very unusual political figure, and one who couldn’t be beaten playing the game conventionally. And Democrats don’t have a candidate on the horizon who can match him.
That seemed to be the understanding of the English who finally did this state visit and put forth all the pomp that would be expected by such an occasion. When Trump was first elected, I was in London and saw how the local news had been covering him. I was at Big Ben and saw the massive protests around it trying to steer English politicians away from embracing the new American president. So, no doubt, the Queen waited to see how things went, so no immediate plans for a state visit were entertained. Now, two years later, as all the gas has gone out of the opposition forces, Trump is going to be around for a while, so the English might as well embrace it, so that had even a bit more sauce for this fine meal. Capitalism was making a comeback and any world leaders who didn’t want to be left behind understood that they needed to make friends with this American president, which is why the smartest of us elected him. We were tired of the bowing and apologizing that had been going on and decided to take matters into our own hands, and Trump was a great hire.
Personally, I was very proud of the Trumps at Buckingham Palace and the performance of the whole family on that very important trip. Even while the theater of pomp was in full bloom, the Russians called Trump up to indicate they were withdrawing their support from Venezuela. Mexico was reeling from the proposal of new tariffs, which will cripple their already deficient economy, and China is being bent over backwards from the tariffs that are now in place and is really bringing much needed pain to their economy. Its good to have an American president who understands the Chinese book on strategy, The Art of War. Finally! It’s not hard to beat them at their own game, we just need people in leadership positions who get it, and Trump does. There is just so much to be proud of even the biggest Never Trumpers that there are realizing that their efforts are futile. Trump has all the good cards in this game and he knows how to use them, and the best thing that everyone could do is to fold, before they lose everything. The Queen of England knows the story and she was very gracious in receiving the Trumps. They may not be her cup of tea, literally. But she is a smart woman and she knows how to play the game too, and for her and everyone, that means giving Trump credit for getting this far and still having Aces. Most of the chips on the table are on Trump’s side of it and as an American, that’s what I expect to always see.
Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
