This situation is so unusual, it was humorous to listen to the Sunday talk shows this week put all their hopes into the new chief of staff General John Kelly in utilizing a proper “chain of command” at the White House. They hope that Kelly will eliminate the “chaos” at the White House as if the Republicans had their act together. Who are they to give Trump any advice? What they really mean is that they hope that General Kelly will use a chain of command structure to slow down the Trump administration into something the bureaucrats are more comfortable with. Well, again, I have news for them and I’m really surprised that more people haven’t picked up on the past writings of Donald Trump because much of what the president is doing now he’s talked about before and the future is quite clear by studying that past. As I’ve said, recently I’ve been reading many of the old Trump books from his last couple of decades of business activity and it’s been very revealing. But in regard to this issue of assigning General Kelly to the chief of staff position the manner of Trump’s thinking can be best seen in the 2004 book Think Like a Billionaire.
I read Think Like a Billionaire when it first came out. At the time I didn’t think much about it. It had some good motivational stuff in it, but it read to me more like a blog posting in novel form. I did get the feeling from it that Trump wanted to inspire people into more successful lives—which made me think well of him. When he wrote that book he was about to marry Melania, Ivanka Trump was still in college and The Apprentice was just entering its second season. Jeff Zucker was eating out of Trump’s hand because the new television star was nearly singlehandedly rescuing NBC from financial ruin. Trump was hosting Saturday Night Live and had his picture proudly displayed on their wall of fame in that historic theater. In 2004 Trump was one of the most sought after celebrities anywhere and the NBC network was very protective of him—because he was their guy.
Re-reading Think Like a Billionaire thirteen years later in 2017 was haunting because so many things have changed since then. Jeff Zucker is now the head guy at CNN. Saturday Night Live hates the Trump presidency and NBC was one of the first networks to go to war with Trump once it became obvious that Trump just might beat Hillary in the election of 2016. Obviously, The Apprentice tried to continue with Arnold Schwarzenegger but it didn’t work because the show needed Trump’s business sense. An actor couldn’t fake it, the person running the board room had to be someone like Trump and the show died quickly into its new season without a business guy in the seat. The New York Times which Trump spoke so highly about in Think Like a Billionaire is now one of the fake news outlets because they absolutely hate Trump now that he is president. Even Mark Cuban was spoken about favorably in Trump’s book. So many who were literally kissing Trump’s ass in 2004 now are his mortal enemies and for some strange reason they actually think it will put a stop to the forward progress of Donald Trump.
One thing that is quite clear about Donald Trump in Think Like a Billionaire is that he thrives with a flat line management style and that is clearly what he’s doing now in his White House. The reason for the success of The Apprentice is clearly due to the amount of people Trump has feeding him information for which he can then make final decisions as the point man. The Trump Organization has always been a very dynamic force where everything flows to Trump as directly as possible. A chain of command is not his style because he likes to be hands on with everything. By having a flat organizational chart it allows Trump to jump from department to department enacting his influence and that is how Trump has been so successful and why he has never been duplicated even though he has put down the blue print for anyone to follow. Trump has been unique because only he has been willing to work so hard to excel under that management style.
Cowardly people often hide behind a chain of command structure so that they can appear to do important things without having the responsibility of making hard decisions. The military loves chains of command because it hides the sometimes bloody evil that occurs in the killing of the enemy allowing individuals to function clean of personal responsibility for institutional assassinations. But the same chain of command allows losers and ladder climbers lacking merit to appear more valuable to an organization without having to actually do anything. You can always sniff out a loser—by their strict adherence to a chain of command structure because it gives them cover in the peaking order of human existence. They are the type of people who fear the sunlight of standing alone in the arena with the audience looking at them waiting for action. Since they tend to not know what to do under those circumstances they seek the cover of a chain of command.
Strong people who are highly competent want the flexibility of moving wherever they need to as objectives are sought to complete resolution. They don’t like chains of command because it slows down their natural leadership ability. Imagine having to play chess by selling a board of directors on the merit of each move. A good chess player wants to be able to move their pawns, rooks, kings and queens depending on what the game gives them—they certainly don’t want to be stuck explaining things along the way. They just want action so they can win the game. Trump has been successful using this method and he will continue to use that flat management method with General Kelly helping him do so. If anything it will free Trump to move more quickly—it certainly won’t slow him down. Kelly’s job is to help increase that lateral mobility while scooping up the leaks in the fast-moving White House. So Republicans hoping that Kelly will slow down Trump need to get their grip on reality. The move to Kelly was to speed things up, not to slow Trump down.
Think Like a Billionaire was a sequel to How to Get Rich—and these are books which essentially give readers a chance to tag along with Trump on all matters of his thinking from choices in cars to women. Trump is very honest and open about his life and thinking with the intention that the reader might learn something to help them also achieve success in life. But essentially the key to both books are that Trump’s management style is extremely flat—as most successful people are. People who struggle through life are those who depend on chains of command. Trump isn’t going to change anything at this point—he thrives under pressure so that is what Republicans better get used to. I would recommend to them that they go back and read these Trump books, especially Think Like a Billionaire. It is an extremely fascinating book now that he is president. Historically, there really isn’t anything like it—it’s a book that has tremendous insight into a person who is president of the United States before he was serious about running. But what it tells best is what is about to happen. It shows a person who is always thinking and always working and now that he’s in control of the Republican Party only people who love hard work will survive. The lazy people will lose their jobs—and that’s how it will be in the Trump White House.
Who wants to be on the front lines of combat with some dude who wants to wear a dress? Or spends their time in R&R doing their nails? This whole notion of putting sexual predilections into the military together to fight on the front lines has been pure insanity. What foreign force will respect troops dressed like Bruce Jenner—prepared for a crazy night on Duval Street rather than ripping off the heads of the enemy and sticking it on a pike with a nice American flag sticking out of the forehead? War is not a game and neither is the military and sexual preferences have no place in it. You can’t mix men and women and not expect some monkey business and you certainly can’t include people who don’t know what sex they are and put them in a battlefield scenario—and expect success. Trump was right to make things clear. Trump is in charge of the military and he has the right and obligation to set things right, and he did.
Of course the progressives have always wanted to weaken the American military because their goal has always been to bring down our borders, to remove our sovereignty and diminish our global sales pitch for capitalism so that a central government led by the United Nations would then run all the countries of the world. One way they planned to execute this task was to get Americans involved in every war possible so that the world would push back and refuse the help of the United States—killing our people and using the negative public relations to further hamper our involvement in places rife with discontent—like Syria, the Middle East in general, all of South America, Mexico, Asia, Africa, all of Europe—virtually everywhere. Progressives have sought global collapse created by chaos which they planted, then they wanted to be the ones to offer a solution of leadership. It is essentially the exact same plan they had with our American healthcare system. Load it with top-heavy costs, collapse it with impracticality, and then resurrect it with a single payer system. It’s the progressive playbook and the whole nonsense of putting a bunch of he/she’s in the military was meant to destroy it as an institution. It was never about equality, it was always about destroying the American military with even more bureaucracy and the essence of the fighting spirit it takes to maintain such a role.
When Trump said on the campaign trail that he would support the LGBTQRSTUV community he wasn’t talking about destroying things just to show fairness to specific groups. It’s one thing to protect people like Boy George from being beaten the hell out of on a public street for looking like a freak, it’s quite another to give him a machine gun and stick him on the front lines in North Korea to force them to the negotiating table of nuclear disarmament. American forces need to be lean, mean, fighting machines meant to evoke fear and compliance—not to attend dance parties and smoke pot. Sex should not be a part of military culture in any way. When asking people to put their lives on the line we should not also ask them to be politically correct. Those two things just are not compatible.
Then of course as there always is in good strategy multiple achievements to reap from such an action as Trump conducted. The liberal people who have been hammering Trump for months with phony scandals and terrible press really care about this LBGTQ crap—and Trump took a punch at it likely on purpose. Doing so not only builds the morale of the troops, but it really pissed off the liberals in the media and that’s what they get. Trump tried to be a nice guy and be inclusive. Since it didn’t work why not just do the right thing and piss everyone off? The left pushed, and pushed and pushed and once all these investigations drug in Trump’s family into the mess he fired back starting with this LGBTQ issue. Why try to work with the other side if they are just going to spit in your eye? They did it to themselves and guess what, the media spent the next two days outraged over the issue and covered pretty much only that while the Senate worked on healthcare legislation and Jeff Sessions started the crackdown on leakers in our intelligence branches. A good strategist knows how to kill many birds with one stone, and Donald Trump is a great strategist. There are a lot of dead birds today.
I’d go so far to say that when Trump speaks he deliberately tries to get people to underestimate him. The guy is very intelligent; you can tell that by reading his many best-selling books. He has deep introspection on a situation and is magnificently observant. I would go as far to say that everything he does is strategy and he’s great at it and many people are being played who don’t even know it yet—in the Republican Party, on the Democratic side of the political spectrum and in the media. I think if the media had been nicer to Trump—he might have let the LGBTQ issue go for a while even though the military obviously hated the idea. But why not make the military people happy and piss off Trump’s enemies at the same time—and get everyone talking about one thing while the other important things scoot by unmolested by stupid millennial fresh out of college who make up most of the new media these days fixated on a progressive idea they were taught in school which was so important—when its really not.
I am personally insulted that these LGBTQ people seek so adamantly to impose themselves on my life. I mean its one thing to be weird and have a mental illness and have compassion for people like that. It’s quite another to bring down our entire society just to make those people feel OK about themselves. I think The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of the dumbest and vile works of art that has been produced in the 20th century and it is essentially that culture that is seeking to destroy the things that I personally value about American culture. If those freaks want to dress up like girls and have sex with each other—have at it in the privacy of your own homes. But if you flaunt it in my face which is built on the basic Christian model of America’s founders—then there are big problems. When two lesbians are in line in front of me at an amusement park with their hands down each others pants kissing—it’s an assault on my basic premise for existence—and I take it personal. I don’t behave that way in public with my wife because little kids might be watching and it’s not good for them to be thinking about sex at a young age. They should be thinking about other things. And these gay rights parades with all their rainbows are simply assaults on traditional America—a traditional America which I love. We always hear what’s fair for those people, but what about what’s fair for me and people who think like me? I’m not OK with a Rocky Horror Picture Show America and I sure as hell don’t want those people in my military representing my country in a life and death situation.
Trump achieved a lot of things by denying LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ people from the military but probably better than anything he solidified his base. It made people like me love him even more. It’s about time someone does the right thing decisively and without a whole bunch of meetings and testimony and just made a decision. The people who are mad about it I’m glad because those idiots have been shoving this shit down our throats for entirely too long. We’ve had to take it and pay for it with our tax money pulling us into an essential evil for way too long and it’s nice to get a little revenge. I wouldn’t feel that way if progressives had not been so aggressive in attempting to destroy a country I love to begin with—and a traditional value system that’s I represent and believe in.
I’ve known a lot of weird people and have been friends with quite a few of them. I do not advocate beating people up or harming them just because they are different. But they are not allowed to destroy the values of our society so that they can operate without guilt among their peers. If you show up at a convenient store all tattooed up and looking like a pin cushion with a hot pink spiked Mohawk, people are going to look at you strangely—because the appearance is something foreign to the value system of our Christian based culture in America. Legislation to prevent people from looking at such people as weirdoes won’t stop the thought because dressing in such a way is weird. So are desires for anal sex with a man or woman. There is nothing good about it. It’s a perversion on values that might be fun in the moment but leads to regrets latter—like tattoos. And that’s what we are talking about with LGBTQ people—it’s a phase of their lives, a sexual decision and it’s meant for the bedroom. It’s not meant for public policy. In the military where soldiers forfeit their individuality there is no private space—so the institution has to have guidelines to keep everyone in the right frame of fighting spirit. It doesn’t matter what other militaries do elsewhere in the world, because nobody is as good as the United States. We are the pace setters. And Trump made the right decision for that institution to do what it’s supposed to do—win fights wherever they occur. The LGBTQ people can live their lives elsewhere, but they don’t have a right to destroy our values just to do their thing. That is why we have to be careful who is in the military and keep our mind on the objective of maintaining a status as a successful country—and not get sidetracked with progressive attacks on our traditional values.
Rich Hoffman
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It was in fact Governor Kasich’s super PAC that got into the heads of the feeble-minded senators at a critical time of the health care debate on repealing Obamacare. The Ohio Governor is of course trying to undermine the Trump presidency for his own run in 2020. But for such a character in politics, as a public employee Kasich only gets paid around $150,000—more or less. That’s for being a big player on the national stage of politics. His Lt. Governor makes a bit more, but not much. I think we’d all agree that whether we like him or not, the Governor is the big job in Ohio from a public perspective and is well compensated. However, and I told them not to do this—but they did it anyway, the Lakota school board hired a new superintendent—a kid from Price Hill and paid him $169,000 as a base salary—well over what the governor of Ohio makes. Lakota is the eighth largest school district in the state of Ohio and it is in one of the most affluent areas of the country—and its located where my home is—so I care a bit about this issue. Already if West Chester residents look at their tax bill the entire township of West Chester—where half of Lakota is located—they pay roughly 21% to them. They pay a whopping 61%–roughly—to the Lakota school system and that school is just throwing away money on these overly paid administrative employees—who make more than the radical progressive governor of our state.
Obviously, the scaling is way off in these unionized public-sector schools. While the administrators aren’t typically formally part of the union they often come out of that system and have pay expectations formed by their experiences in the public sector which has been roughly 30% too high for several decades now. I mean it’s not Miller’s fault he’s been told he’s worth more than he really is—it’s our school board who thinks they need to pay this money to meet some invisible standard that the public education system has created in the industry to “compete.” But in public education there isn’t any competition. Builders build homes. Real estate agents sell the homes and support school levy’s to attract new “family aged’ buyers. The cycle runs its course. And over the next twenty years new homes are built elsewhere and people move to those new districts and wherever that is becomes the new “hot” school district.
Lakota is not a “hot” community anymore—as far as education. It may be a stable excellent community but it is not the latest thing in the real estate world. It has more people living within the district that do not have children attending the school system than it does new families moving to the area to buy a new house freshly built on previously productive farmland. So the necessities have changed for the community as a whole where the school system is just one of the reasons for moving or maintaining property within the Lakota school district which encompasses Liberty Township and West Chester Township, Ohio. Among the top reasons for living in the area are highway access, standard of living—many of our neighbors have household incomes over 100K a year so we don’t have to deal with too many slack-jawed losers while pumping gas and eating at restaurants. There are great commercial offerings and the government is small enough to not pillage the homeowner continuously—except for the big open hands of the top heavy over scale pay of the unionized Lakota school system. People put up with them out of sentimental value, but that only goes so far and news reports that they were paying a superintendent—which is mostly a political role anyway–$169,000 per year doesn’t help. The job is at best worth half that for a 45-year-old employee such as Matt Miller. If we paid him more than $85K per year we’d be getting ripped off.
Well, it just so happens that this year there are several school board members who have seats expiring—and it’s safe to say that none of them are exactly conservative bastions of valor. They care about Lakota itself as a microcosm but have been part of that culture that asks for a lot more than Lakota really plays in the success of the community for which it resides. The people who make Liberty Township and West Chester Township great places to live are the people who live there—the community is not great because of Lakota schools. The school board members who are up for re-election just don’t seem to understand that. So this is an opportunity to run against them and challenge the board to have more people properly representative of our district helping to manage the finances. There are lots of people I know who would be good for doing this job but most of them are older and really don’t want the pain in the ass of attending all the ridiculous meetings and the procedural lunacy that usually takes place. But for those inclined to number crunching and wanting to help with the situation, I’ll make a deal with you. If you guys will run, I’ll help you with the campaign. There are three seats open and I’ll help three candidates as a team if we can find the right people. But it would have to be hard working good people who think correctly about this matter. If those people are willing to come forward I’ll help with making it not so scary to run and win the seats.
The filing deadline for prospective candidates is August 9th, which isn’t much time from this writing. I was catching up on summer news over the weekend and Lakota is somewhere down around #400 on my priority list (only because they cost me money) so I didn’t notice that the hit piece reporter Michael Clark had moved to the Journal News and I hadn’t followed up on the Lakota hire for superintendent. I spoke to a few school board members over the winter and they seemed like they had a good read on the situation so I left them to their business. But after catching up on the news about Lakota over this previous weekend it was obvious to me that these people haven’t learned anything and they need better management of such a volatile and expensive resource in the Lakota school system. They are used to runaway train budgets saved only for the fact that Lakota has a projected decline in enrollment which takes the pressure off an immediate levy request. But these people just don’t know how to budget a check book and the proof is in throwing money at this new superintendent hire. If they’ll over pay for him they’ll do it for everything.
I know most of the normal people around Lakota’s district view a lot of this as a serious pain in the ass. But Lakota charges so much money for what they provide that we have to deal with them before they are too problematic. The ideal candidate for school board would be people who have some evenings to give each month to this monstrosity of educational burden and a genuine love of numbers and how they roll together. Jenni Logan does a good job as treasurer at Lakota and is good to work with, but it’s the system itself that needs to have a re-calibration of thought and some good sound conservatives sitting on the board to keep the costs down. I’m offering to help and that help won’t stop once elected. I’ll help fight the union more than willingly and keep them at bay so good management of our tax payer resources can be applied. But we need smart people to sit in those seats. I’ll ensure that you are not alone and exposed—but we need formal positions filled to manage the budget properly. If we don’t then Lakota will be asking for a levy again soon because they don’t have control of their costs. The costs control them—and we just can’t have that.
It was very interesting this week to see a press release from the German archaeologist Julia Gresky regarding an obvious skull cult at Göbekli Tepe dating back to around 11,500 years ago at the great stone temples discovered under a large mound in southern Turkey at the head waters of the Tigris Euphrates rivers. Göbekli Tepe has been a mystery since it was first discovered in the mid 1990s as the 40 ton stone pillars built there with intricate carvings defy logic as measured against what we typically think of regarding human evolution from hunters and gathers, farmers, then city-state administrators. Rather, the temple is evidence that extremely advanced engineering, and astronomical understandings were present at the end of the last Ice Age and this is something that just wasn’t part of our understanding of human development up to this point. And now, with the announcement of this skull cult we have evidence of an elaborate understanding of a long gone religion that started in the cradle of civilization well before the Sumerians would rise to power further downstream many thousands of years later. Göbekli Tepe is mysterious for a lot of reasons but one thing is absolutely known because of it—that we are just dipping our feet into the depths of history. There is much more to discover and we must be open to those discoveries so that we can learn from that history and not follow the Vico cycle into what has obviously happened to mankind in the past—and keep making the same mistakes over and over each time the human mind makes some major advancement then collapse on itself out of sheer stupidity.
Göbekli Tepe is a fine example of how the Vico cycle has transpired over many thousands of years to see a declining culture transpire over time instead of an ever-present increase in thought which most of our sciences assume. The mistake is in taking for granted that once a scientific discovery is made—such as fire—that forever it will remain in the catalogue of human behavior. Once we learn it—we keep it so to say. But this isn’t the case. Just as in our present age where our political aspects lean toward regression we find that current generations of people are actually less equipped to care for intellectual knowledge than previous ones and thus the Vico cycle moves through its various phases, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and then ultimately anarchy only to begin again to start completely over. In some cases the process takes thousands of years. In others it only takes a few hundred—but the human mind seems to be a prisoner to this trend by their own inclination. At Göbekli Tepe the once advanced founders had their work buried and less equipped monuments were built upon the originals and this went on for a long time until the site was just buried under a massive mound that many thought was just a giant hillside. We are learning only now that we must never take for granted any hillside that we see anywhere in the world because under some of them are the origins to many of our myths and legends which are awaiting discovery. There is so much that we don’t understand.
My personal feelings about these discovers are perhaps more objective than even those of the scientists who discover these great finds because I am able to have my feet in many different worlds and have a perspective driven by freedom that they don’t enjoy—such as the archaeologist Julia Gresky. I live in a very affluent area of the world where all the gifts of culture are presented from fine food to literature and advanced tools easily accessible through my local hardware stores. I have access on a daily basis the greatest tools created by the human mind and I live in an economy that allows me to participate in those creations freely. But as I’ve traveled to different places around the world it is very obvious that not everyone is so gifted and many cultures are essentially still hunters and gatherers. Human advancement does not occur and give rise to all people everywhere. Many are limited by religious beliefs which prevent them from properly interacting with advanced cultures—or they for one reason or another are not economically able to engage in trade with a more advanced society. For instance in present day America it is unlikely that a typical Santa Monica resident from California will interact with a village in Ghana, Africa. The only way they might meet each other is if the Ghana resident shows up one day in Southern California looking for a job and is willing to leave behind their homeland for opportunities. Because the Santa Monica resident just won’t be giving up everything in their life to live in a hut in Ghana—they’d have to give up most everything they know about the world to even participate in such a thing. So the exchange of knowledge won’t happen—and that is in our present day of global communication and easy travel from one place to another. I am often surprised how primitive people become right out of big cities in Europe, Asia and even around the Americas. It’s not hard for me to see how Neolithic people may have developed separately around the world such as at Göbekli Tepe while hunters and gatherers in England were freely walking across the English Channel into France hunting animals as nomads. They may have run into and even traded with people from Göbekli Tepe and other advanced cultures who had developed engineering abilities but it may have taken many thousands of years for that intellectual information to find its way into the static cultures of their less advanced societies. That is easy for me to see where scientists like Julia Gresky spend much of their time season after season begging for funding then digging and digging on a very focused site like Göbekli Tepe to bring about more information like this recent skull cult evidence—which was assumed very early on but only recently was confirmed with all her hard work. Our evidence collection is slow at best but the assumptions of cause and effect can easily be made by global comparisons for those fortunate enough to have that exposure.
I continue to think that we are just scratching the surface in regards to our history. I think we’ll find even more advanced temples and cities the deeper we dig that are even older than Göbekli Tepe. I would offer that many of them are under water since ocean levels were vastly different during this post Ice Age period and over time we’ll discover them so long as we can avoid the effects of the Vico cycle. I would offer that the many wars in the region of Göbekli Tepe are created to avoid the discovers which await us in the many mounds of the region showing us that societies like the Sumerians were just distant descendents to cultures who founded Göbekli Tepe. We won’t know until we do proper archaeological investigation and you can’t do that so long as there are wars over regional interpretations of religion between Christianity and Islam texts identifying boundaries established by kings of recent memory. Obviously the history extends well beyond those recent developments and the Vico cycle insists on destroying the past so that the current can survive and that is the element which drives the cycle of madness—and so long as that continues—we’ll never get anywhere. Bu the evidence does keep coming in for those willing to look at it and the discovery of the skull cult at Göbekli Tepe is quite compelling. We need to let the evidence take us where it will—because we still have a lot to learn and by learning it—we may save mankind once and for all which I think is a noble pursuit.
At this point it’s obvious, the Democrats are like the Looney Toons characters of Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote compared to Donald Trump who is to them a combination of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner all rolled up into one terrifyingly president of the United States. Nobody out-thinks the “Trump” I suppose is the way the situation should be phrased. Trump is playing chess while everyone else is playing some child’s game in the media and within the Beltway. Trump has totally turned upside down even the most terrifying Deep State insurgents and made them look stupid just five months into his presidency—and I’m so glad to see it. I hoped this would happen, but Trump is even more successful than even my wildest imagination could articulate and I’m loving it. Yet when Trump made a small remark about the kind of people he had in his administration who were handling the economy—for which the political left has been critical because Trump’s people are very wealthy—Trump said to an Iowa rally audience that he wanted rich people instead of poor people managing economic affairs and this was somehow controversial. When I heard it I didn’t think anything about it until I saw the reaction of the media the next day, and I have to say I was shocked that they were so shocked.
In covering this episode of leftist babble Sean Hannity made a good point, he said on his Fox News show that out of all the jobs he had ever done in his life from busboy to radio station on air talent—he never worked for a poor person. As I thought about that it was obviously a correct statement. I reflected on my own colorful past of work experience and it was true, I never did work for a poor person. I can think of one guy who did struggle to pay for his monthly bills but that wasn’t because he didn’t have access to financial resources—it was because he was reckless with his money. After all he had just spent $23,0000 dollars on a stripper in Newport, Kentucky—so that did soak up some of his expendable cash during that time period. But nobody was ever poor who signed a pay check to me—and there’s a reason for that. Job creators are those who have financial resources beyond what they can handle themselves to manage—they have access to productivity which places them in a category of understanding that is beyond the concepts of a poor person.
As the poor are described Biblically, as people with limited resources who were not part of the political structure of their times, I can understand the nobility of being free and clear spiritually to live life simply and close to God. But the term is no longer relevant today with the invention of the United States of America. In America, you can be religious and wealthy and there is nothing wrong with it. It’s not like you have to live in sin to appease the Roman Empire or the Pharisees to hold wealth. America made it so that any person who wanted to work hard regardless of their social stature could become wealthy and that is essentially what is wrong with liberals today—they don’t understand that. They still want to apply merit to the poor because like most churches, it holds people’s minds to socialism and communism. Poor people to the socialist is a badge of honor. To an American conservative who loves their guns and their Bible—they are just lazy pot smoking losers.
There is no reason to be poor in America. There is always a job that needs to be done in a productive society and if you want to hold three or four jobs to climb out of a financial hole, you can do that. I know I have. I also know that Sean Hannity has. The main reason I enjoy listening to Sean Hannity is because he has a similar background experience as I do. I have nothing in common with news commentators who get up and go to work around 9 am and are pretty much done for the day by 3 pm. I get up at 5 am every day and I go to bet around 11:30 pm and I work pretty much all day on and off. Even in my leisure I’m still working on something—and that’s how it’s been for me for four decades now. Sean Hannity always worked hard, and so does Donald Trump—even now. The primary reason he’s running circles around everyone is that he’s used to this pace, and the swamp in Washington isn’t—and they look like fools trying to compete with him—because they aren’t prepared. People who are poor in America are that way because they made a choice to limit their income to only 40 hours a week—or less. There are 168 hours in a week and people who are poor likely are only being productive a quarter of that time. For those under that ratio—they are even worse off—and that is by their own inclination.
To dig out of a financial hole I once worked 96 hours a week at a regular job then on weekends I had a paper route and I worked for a tree trimming business. Essentially, I worked seven days a week on a primary job, then in weekend slots I trimmed trees all over Cincinnati and my wife and I shared several paper routes and that was the time we spent together. I was in my late 20s and 30s when I was doing all this. And I still found time to spend with my kids. We still went to see movies together. We still went out to eat and took nice vacations. We had Kings Island season passes and went often—we made it work. I never felt like I wasn’t getting enough sleep. I read at least a book a week still and I felt I lived a very good and productive life—and we weren’t poor—that’s for sure. We didn’t have unlimited money to throw at things and had to manage it, but we had to do that with every hour of our work day. When my kids need braces or musical instruments we bought them. Whatever they needed, we took care of it and we never used any form of welfare or government assistance to get through life—even though we could have. If we needed more money—I just took on another job.
In that context, I have no sympathy for the poor or those who complain about not having enough money. Being poor in America is a choice and there isn’t merit to it when you drag all your loved ones through a depressed lifestyle just because you are too lazy to work. The Bible for such people is often used as a mask—they might say something stupid like, “well you can’t take ‘it’ with you,” meaning material possessions and other justifications to explain away their inherit lazy nature—but it’s only an excuse for laziness. I don’t admire the mountain man or the monk who decides to quit life and retreat to their thoughts on top of a mountain and devote themselves to poverty and lack of possession. But I do admire the person who works 18 hours per day and employees over a 100 people—because they are the keys to being a productive society. Those are the type of people who should be in charge of the economy. Not some driveling idiot who hates money, wealth, and production. And in that context, we should all thank God that Donald Trump is finally in charge so we can talk about these things properly instead of with a bunch of emotional flap designed to hide a lack of personal ambition.
It’s not against the law to be lazy, or poor. If that is what people want to do, then let them have it. But, they don’t have a right to skunk up the works of a perfectly successful, and wonderful capitalist economy where the natural spillover of productivity makes even the poorest people in America far better off than some of the richest in the godforsaken third world countries of the world—where political connections and aristocracy still rule the who has from the wish they dids. In America, it’s a choice and that is what makes America such a beautiful and moral country. The best of the best are the job creators—because they bring opportunity to those who enjoy working hard. By their very nature, they are not poor. Rich people give jobs because they have produced an excess in their lives—poor people do not. So to Trump’s point it’s quite clear he understands the difference—and for that we should celebrate with the flare of a Bugs Bunny as the stupidity of Yosemite Sam blows up his carefully laid plans in his face yet again as America cruises one more day toward a prosperity that was attempted to be robbed from future generations—but in a nick of time—wasn’t.
Visiting Stonehenge for me recently was one of the most important things I’ve ever done. It wasn’t just a bucket list item that I wanted to see at least once in my life—it was crucial. I have read so many books starting at a very young age where Stonehenge was contemplated that I needed to see the place in person. But to get to it you have to make a trip to England—and to do that you have to see a lot of other things and London usually has some part to play in such an expedition—so enough time in a schedule is necessary to accommodate such a task. However, this year I was able to get there and it was everything I expected and more. More than anything I was extremely impressed by the position the Neolithic complex held on the high plains of western England and the relation that all the mounds in the surrounding countryside had with the ancient stone ritual center. I think Stonehenge is remarkable in many different ways and its history is quite vast—much deeper than what the type of people who showed up at the summer solstice events which happen every year where druid loving people watch the sun rise on the longest day of the year.
I watched the events that these types of people participate in and it actually makes me pretty mad. The druids were not in any way involved with building Stonehenge. Their Celtic heritage is just another rendition of the modern nature worshipping hippie—the earth first losers who plague our modern politics with wishy-washy sentiment rooted in a new religion—making Mother Earth the new Yahweh or Shiva. For them and their followers of the modern age—Stonehenge is an earth worshipping symbol that a bunch of second handers from the region of Germany adopted to have sex parties and conduct themselves foolishly while under the ground dating back over 10,000 years were the relics of civilizations’ origins waiting still to be discovered. The reasons for Stonehenge’s alignments to the sun and other celestial bodies go far beyond the natural worshipping druids.
Yet like the American Indian the true meaning of the people who built Stonehenge goes undetected because intellectual curiosity cannot get past the necessity for spiritual redemption. Even the people studying Stonehenge cannot help but be pulled into the earth worship distortion that people like these druid lovers bring to the site during real archaeological study. When I was there the obvious layers of observation was distinctly obvious. On the surface, you have all these conclusions that are wrapped up in the methods of druid mythology which has always been associated with the site—unjustifiably. The druids came along many centuries after the final stages of construction at Stonehenge in 2500 BC. But to look properly at Stonehenge you have to be willing to look at Old Sarum to the south and Avebury to the north—as well as many hundreds of earthworks over the 50 miles of regional coverage. There was a lot going on in that region of England dating from the end of the last Ice Age to the relative present of 4000 years ago. For many millenniums—much longer than our present age—the Stonehenge region was very important and it goes well beyond the need to worship the earth.
Dating back 10,000 years—at least, are the skeletons of many sacrificed animals. What we know of Stonehenge and its modern rocks were built on the sacrificial site of these animal bones. Even in recent years—the last stages of Stonehenge after final construction, human sacrifices where happening with frequency—many of them quite brutal. I’m inclined to think that the stone alignments with the various solstices had less to do with celestial worship and more to do with keeping track of their progress throughout the year—likely to mark the points in time where interactions with important events occurred—such as when it became known how to calculate complicated mathematical concepts among a bunch of supposed nomads hunting and gathering for their entire lives and doing nothing else. Somewhere along the line of this 10,000-year span something happened that made people do remarkable things in that rather unremarkable landscape.
Then there is the problem of understanding that the builders of Stonehenge were not a regional phenomenon, but a global one. I am quite convinced after visiting Stonehenge and seeing things with my own eyes that the same people who built that place were also in North America building the many similar structures still seen all over the Americas. We are likely looking at a society that was much more advanced than we give it credit for, and was likely part of the culture that existed all over the world prior to the time the Book of Genesis was written. Many calculate that the Great Deluge took place around 2348 BCE which is just a few hundred years after the final touches of Stonehenge so we are dealing with more than just mythology and Earth worshiping killers. We’re dealing with a particularly potent hidden history that is right in front of our faces—yet we hide the truth behind our recent religious inventions—and that is compelling.
Evidence of life—even giant stones like what we see at Stonehenge do not last very long. Once you apply 20 or 30,000 years of wear to anything it often becomes unrecognizable and that to me is the most compelling aspect of the Neolithic monuments surrounding the Stonehenge area. Without question to me the same culture that built Stonehenge ended up in some way in North America and likely China. Without question, there were global sea trade routes moving all around the world at a time when we think of the people of Stonehenge as being separate and rising independently. The evidence simply doesn’t support that if you look at everything instead of just the Stonehenge complex. And then there is the case of the American Indian—they are obviously from the China region and settled in North America as a separate transaction of migration and they were interacting with these Stonehenge people—whoever they were—well before the druids walked out of Germany. All this is very revolutionary and certainly changes what we know about our own history. That’s why I so badly wanted to visit the site in person as opposed to reading about it as I have so much. It is clear that even lifelong researchers into Stonehenge are trying to fit it into what we know about science, instead of letting history properly tell its story with us being a willing audience. We’ve tried too hard to shape the narrative to fit our comfort level.
The biggest question about Stonehenge is—why there, and likely that answer is due to events that occurred before the Ice Age even happened. The uneventful plain of land in western England did not suddenly just pop up all these really remarkable monuments—something inspired people to do these things at a great cost to themselves—and that is where we need answers—and we’re not going to get it by watching a bunch of hippies worship the sun. I think the reason the sun was so important to all these ancient people clearly marks their need to demonstrate to the political masses a way to tell time. The sacrificial elements that often come out of collapsing societies tend to be what we study but the initial cause is where the focus should be. Why, and why there?
The mathematics involved alone extend well beyond the achievements of Greek study—it is time to accept that Greek and Roman empires were only ages and that all this had come before in times long forgotten. I think Stonehenge says to us that society wasn’t so primitive—at least aspects of it. People may have come from the surrounding countryside to become part of something bigger, and wiser at Stonehenge, and Avebury, but the people who built all these things were far less nomadic than we want to admit. They were rather advanced and that is something we need to deal with. They were a global society, not a regional one. It may take us 100 to 200 more years to find enough evidence to support some of the things I’ve said here, but the evidence is stacking up, and much of this is obvious. We just need more evidence before re-writing history books. But mark what I’m saying here, these druid rituals are just a bunch of left leaning hippies who are trying to use history to justify their religion of Mother Earth worship. They are as loony as the fools who sacrificed other human beings at Stonehenge trying to make it rain. They are not the builders of Stonehenge, or the causes for why it’s there to begin with. They are just more of a second-hand civilization riding the coattails of greatness and hoping that they can loot the credit for it over the lens of history. So far it has worked for them, but the evidence emerging is telling us the truth, and they are certainly blind to it.
Rich Hoffman
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I was stunned by the movie reviews for The Book of Henry—they were illustriously bad. In fact, they were so bad that there was often hatred in the utterances of the reviews. Some people just hated this movie. Yet, I have been very excited about it and did go and see it on the opening weekend—and I thought it was an absolutely brilliant film. It wasn’t just a little good—it was great and in any other time, it would win many awards. So how could all the critics be so wrong—well, to get to that let’s study the reaction to just the trailer that Grace Randolph from Beyond the Trailer provided when she reviewed the preview back in March. I’m not picking on Grace, I usually lover her opinions even when I don’t agree—but this reaction is one of those raw–primal hatreds that certainly influenced all the negative reviews and that is why this is such a brilliant film. Watch closely.
I think it said a lot about Colin Trevorrow that he wanted to even make this movie between the blockbusters of Jurassic World and the ninth Star Wars film upcoming. He could have made any movie he wanted yet he picked The Book of Henry, which features a boy genius, 11 years of age who knows that there is great evil in the world and he spends much of his time contemplating how to stop it. Trevorrow brought in some great talent, wonderful editing, great composer, great actors, great cinematography—great film business people from top to bottom and gave a project like The Book of Henry a top notch indie film treatment. It’s a movie with a lot of heart but it has a judgment and that is what has people so outrageously upset with the movie and seek to punish it with their own needs to deflect their own guilt for the theme for which the movie is about.
The little girl next door to where Henry lives with his single mom and his little brother is being sexually abused by her step father who happens to be the police commissioner. So let’s answer Grace’s question from above, because her reaction was pretty innocent but some of the people in the film review business, from Variety to Rolling Stone are no doubt like the Sarah Silverman character—whom I don’t like as a political activist. But she played a wonderful normal person in this movie—a person that likely 90 percent of our population could identify with. She’s a loser, a hard-core drinker who misses work too much and has an ugly tattoo on her breast which she shows off most of the movie—she is the best friend of Naomi Watts who plays Henry’s mom. And what a poor creature she is—she represents another large segment of the population who have lost her way in life. She’s not a bad person, but she’s afraid to make her mark on the world and she drinks and plays too many video games to hide from that inclination—and she is totally dependent on her oldest son Henry who is an impeccable genius.
Most of the reviewers have commented that Henry seems otherworldly and un-relatable. After all, there just aren’t 11-year-olds out there who are as mature and wise as Henry. But movies are supposed to take us to places we can’t go in normal life and meet people worth the hard work that usually goes into making movies. And lucky for me, I completely understand Henry. I knew people like him and there are parts of him that I can directly understand. There is a scene in the movie that I thought was particularly powerful, it’s where Henry, his brother and his mom are at the grocery and they see a guy beating his girlfriend as they are having an argument. Nobody does anything to help the woman, but Henry is inclined to get involved and his mom stops him telling him its none of their business. “Don’t get involved.” Later that night Henry and his mom are in bed talking (innocently because the mother still reads books to her boys even though they are probably too old) and Henry tries to explain how disappointed he was in his mother for not wanting to get involved in the argument between the couple at the grocery store. Of course his mother uses the excuse that she didn’t want to become embroiled in a violent episode. Then Henry explains to her that violence isn’t always the worst thing. Curious, his mother asked the young man what is the worst thing in the world. Henry pauses for a second and answers, “apathy.”
When Grace Randolph was so outraged that The Book of Henry relied so heavily on a child genius to tell a rather ordinary story about revenge, redemption and family assimilation she made the mistake to assume that these things are normally very obvious to people—and they are in the third person. After all, we are used to watching other people in the god-like position of viewer, with television and movies where we often have more information about what’s going on than the characters on the screen do and the drama we experience is in hoping that people we care about learn what we do in time to save themselves. But in real life where stories are not broken down into typical three act plays, introduction, articulation of the conflict, then wrapped up nicely and on que to climax—events do not hold to that structure and because we have trained our minds in such a fashion—we often do not see evil sitting right in front of us. Evil comes at us in subtle ways through loved ones, our jobs, our politics—even the kid who wants to mow our grass, install our cable, or check out our food at Wal-Mart. We as human beings trust our structures and our institutions. But most of the things that happen in the world happens outside of those organized elements and in the case of The Book of Henry, we see a society stuck in its structures and trust in institutional figures—such as the police chief next door who complains that the leaves of his single parent mother neighbor keep blowing into his yard giving him psychological leverage over her to hide his real crime—that he is sexually molesting his step daughter and using the institutions of government to keep inquiries away from him. It takes someone free of those institutions—someone bigger than what human kind has to offer at that moment to see the evil—and that is why it was necessary to have Henry in this film be a brilliant kid. Without that genius, nobody would have the courage to step beyond the veil of adulthood with all its trickery and diversion tactics meant to deceive themselves into believing they were living good lives—to see the truth. That the police commissioner was destroying this poor little girl for extremely selfish reasons he deserved a style of justice that has nearly been outlawed in America. The Book of Henry nails all this and more making it a remarkable work of art. That it has pissed off so many reviewers say more about them than the movie—for they are like the institutionalists in the film who failed the little girl while only Henry thought to act and took action to start the process. There are a lot of little girls—and little boys in the world who need someone to see how much trouble they are in but unfortunately their plight is invisible to most of our adult population.
The Book of Henry is a rare film that like all great art shows us what is difficult to see and in this case the plot device is genius to show it to an audience stuck in life much like the Naomi Watts character—not a bad person, but a person stuck in hundreds of bad decisions holding her down in life. Her son Henry is pure and free of such things and it is through him that she comes to see the world for what it really is—and is compelled to act accordingly. Even with some of the truly tragic story lines in this film it is an uplifting tale of optimism and genuine love of life. It is a truly remarkable work and something everyone should see at least once. The reviews don’t like the film because it’s a bad movie—but because it makes them look at things they are partially guilty of creating—so that should not be a reason to avoid the picture. Rather, The Book of Henry should be watched with open hearts and open minds and an honest assessment to what role the viewer might play on the side of villainy so that they can correct the situation for the good of everyone. The Book of Henry nails it and is certainly one of the great films of history and should still be remembered many years from now.
On the day of the shooting in Alexandria, Virginia by a radical left-winged terrorist by the name of James Hodgkinson, the special counsel investigation into the made up Trump/Russia collusion story announced that it was widening its investigation against Trump for obstruction of justice over the firing of James Comey. If that is the case and the old FBI agent Mueller thinks that such an investigation is even appropriate—and that is the standard–then Loretta Lynch and Hillary Clinton need to be prosecuted immediately, because the evidence has already been produced against them. The hatred that caused the simpleton fool Hodgkinson to do what he did in attempting to assassinate congressional Republicans begins and ends at the feet of the extreme leftists who are currently being protected by people like Mueller, Comey and the other members of the Deep State. Then there is the media which has empowered the furtherance of real crimes, such as Comey’s illegal leaking of classified information as the Director of the FBI, which caused this special counsel investigation to begin with—they collectively created the vile creature that was James Hodgkinson. The following video and information reported after the shooter was identified came right off his Facebook page and clearly tell the story. I don’t know about you dear reader, but I’m not going to put up with it. These are villains and they are attacking everything that America stands for—and they won’t stop with some liberal loser like James Hodgkinson. They are desperate and they are killers. They seek to use idiots prone to quick tempers and intellectual stupidity to do their bidding, but make no mistake about it—behind James Hodgkinson are the puppet masters of the political left—and their desire to commit violence to stay in power—at whatever cost–drives their every breath. Before Trump endures anything close to an investigation into “obstruction of justice” Lorretta Lynch needs to be convicted for her proven actions in that category.
James Hodgkinson was a 66-year-old from Belleville, Illinois. On June 14th, he opened fire at several Republican lawmakers practicing for the Congressional Baseball game.
Political Views
James’ Facebook profile shows support for Bernie Sanders, FDR, and progressive causes while containing several posts that were hateful toward President Trump and his administration.[11][3]
His favorite television programs include Last Week Tonight, Democracy Now, The Rachel Maddow Show, Real Time with Bill Maher and The Daily Show.[3] James was a part of a number of left-leaning Facebook groups such as The Road To Hell Is Paved With Republicans, Join The Resistance Worldwide!!, Rachel Maddow For President 2020, The Democrats, etc.[3]
James volunteered for Bernie Sanders’ Presidential Campaign. He viewed Hillary Clinton as Republican Lite and wanted Bernie to be the Green Party candidate when he lost.
On the morning of June 14th, Republican Congressmen and their staff were practicing for the Congressional softball game in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia. Around 7 am, Hodgkinson opened fire on the baseball field. Five people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and two Capitol Hill Police Officers, were injured. Scalise was shot in the hip. Hodgkinson was also shot and died from his injuries. The weapon he used was an M4 assault rifle and witnesses report hearing 50 gunshots. The duration of the incident was between 5-10 minutes.
Look, this is a real war, these people are playing for keeps–and you better not turn the other cheek on them. Its time to fight back, shoot back, and legislate back. Hit them harder than they are hitting us–because its the right thing to do. Failure to do so will only breed more James Hodgkinsons.
It was strange recently getting yet another notification from the Ohio courts of Butler County that I’ve been selected for jury duty because my name ends up in the hat so often due to my voting patterns. I noticed while filling out the form which included my wife and kids that none of them have what you might call—“traditional” jobs. My wife is a happy housewife, my oldest daughter a professional photographer who is very highly sought after and my youngest is an illustrator. As I write this she, (my youngest) is doing a commission piece on the Batman villain The Joker shown below. But none of the ladies in my family have a “traditional” job where they go to work, punch in and sell away their day for cash. I know that’s the typical way that we measure economic success, but I’ve always been a big supporter of that type of freedom—especially for women because they tend to invest more into children, households and the emotional nurturing of a family as a whole. When people are free of that primary concern of having to sell away their time for money, it allows them to invest in less tangible aspects of family building, so it makes me proud to see that among the women closest to me, they are all on that type of path. They don’t have a “boss” out there they must yield to, and that is something I think is very important to family development, because it makes them the authority figures of their own lives which is why that question is asked on a jury selection form. Attorneys obviously want to know that the people in their pool are “normal” people miserable like everyone else—so the way I answered that question likely will knock me out of the selection process.
My photographer daughter has really impressed me; she is taking her business to a new level as seen in these included videos. She’s doing something called the 52 Weeks Project where each week she is picking a subject to photograph then she shows how she comes up with the shots and how the editing process goes on arriving at the final product. She’s a full-time mom, but on both of these efforts she was up at dawn before her little boy woke up wanting breakfast and conducted these pictures for her project squeezing in a lot of creativity into an already packed day. She’s been busy with booked appearances for several weeks now and coming up shortly after this publication she has a photo shoot in Chicago. So what you see here is a very developed photographer who is expecting herself to be one of the great ones. What she does is out of pure passion which I liken back to having the ability to be free of having a “boss” in her life who governs her away from home while on a time clock. That freedom has allowed her to expand her personal life in ways that I think are quite extraordinary—and necessary to achieve the level of art that she is shooting for.
Even her subjects are unique in the scheme of the photographic community. Her first entry into the 52 weeks project was “A Call to Adventure” which I thought she managed to squeeze a lot out of while working in a very limited area within Cincinnati. For those who don’t understand why a “Call to Adventure” is important it’s a classic motif most appropriately defined by Joseph Campbell in the telling of mythologies. Usually after the first act of a movie or the introductory phase of a novel the main character is faced with a jumping off point from the static patterns of their normal life and into the promise of adventure provoked by some dynamic force. For some people the “Call to Adventure” might be as simple as a stranger approaching you from the back of a cab at a stop light while you’re walking to work in New York and asks you to help them get to the airport. You must then decide to help or not because if you do, the static patterns of your day will be disrupted and that could have unpleasant consequences. Then for others it might be an opportunity to fly to Cambodia to do sex traffic rescue work in some steamy jungle nightmare, but while there you make a new archaeological discovery that changes the world perspective on our knowledge of history. The “Call to Adventure” is often how you can dramatically enrich your life for the better with vast experience, but to do so you must step away from your static patterns and allow dynamic forces into your life.
For instance, a friend of mine who worked on the Trump campaign in 2016 called me on a very busy day last week and asked me if I could appear on CNN the next day. I had scheduled a lot of events and I really didn’t have the time. After all I had an oversea meeting planned at the very same moment I was supposed to be on with Anderson Cooper. So did I answer the call and go on CNN which was likely just going to do a hit piece. As it turned out the CNN people were very gracious and were not the kind of gotcha people who Rush Limbaugh surmised when he talked about the event on his show. I did the CNN segment along with some other peers and it got people talking and was fun to do. I still managed to get all my work done—although it was different from my usual day and I could point to many times in my life where answering the “Call to Adventure” directly led to some very unusual experiences which ultimately enhanced my life.
I have learned over time to never get too rigid about things. The “Call of Adventure” is something I consider so important that I often go out of my way to find it with a very laissez-faire approach to living and personal management. I may start the day with all kinds of planned activities but by the end of it, I end up doing things I never thought I would at the start and that comes from saying yes to the “Call of Adventure.” So it made me particularly proud to see my photographer daughter out there capturing not only dramatic photos but articulating that difficult concept artistically. She, standing at the entrance of a forest goes back to some of the great Arthurian legends of the Middle Ages where the knights would all enter the forest of their various adventures at different points basically to establish that no two paths of adventure were the same for other people. People must pick their own paths in life to be living truly authentic lives so here was my kid showing this rather difficult concept to explain with a simple photograph. But as you can see from the editing process, it’s not so simple.
This brings me back to the importance of my girls not being encumbered with a traditional job—especially while raising their children. If they put their children in daycare, there would be many fewer opportunities for the kids to experience the wonder of a life lived authentically, because the static schedules of daily living prohibit it—and true intellectual learning is often crippled in children as a result. But for a mother who is there ready to answer that “Call to Adventure” at the slightest provocation a simple trip to the grocery store on a sunny summer in July might lead to a lifetime of discoveries that stay with young people forever because if the schedule of acquiring food is relaxed there may be opportunities for adventure that come up along the way—someone might need help changing a flat tire or a snake may be caught under a car in the grocery store parking lot and need help getting over to the cool grass before somebody runs it over. You just never know—but there is tremendous value in following the “Call to Adventure” and it makes me feel very good to see that my daughter has matured to a point where she can understand it well enough to photograph. That takes talent!
There was something that really bothered me about the way James Comey prepared his statements before the testimony, and the way he referred to tangible observations in such a lurid way. As I said to CNN, Comey’s written testimony along with the delivery of additional information to the senate reminded me of the early James Bond novels from Ian Flemming–of a much more disgraceful and reckless British agent than we saw in the films with Sean Connery and Roger Moore. The flair of Comey’s writing style reminded me not of a long time FBI agent—but actually that of a pent-up author wanting desperately to mater in the world just a few years before turning 60 years of age. My comments below come from the experience of being an employer myself and working with people the same age as James Comey—and in reading voluminous amounts of books over the years—particularly the work of Ian Fleming. I know all too well that when you hire fire and discipline around a thousand employees over a period of time some of them by nature will not agree with you. Sometimes they will work against you, and at some point in time will think you are the most evil person in the world because they can’t get you to see things their way—and they find themselves on the outside looking in—which often hurts their feelings. There are people out there who think I’m the most mean and evil person in the world. Does that make them correct? Of course not, but from their perspective their opinion is all they care about. And this is what we are talking about with Comey—an ex-employee who gambled and lost his job and is now on the outside and it hurts him. His testimony says all the things we need to know. If you know what to look for Comey spelled it all out before the hearing even took place by what he had written down, then illustrated gloriously during his sworn statements.
Again, this is experience on my part that I offer this breakdown, but Comey opened the door to it by his own testimony. Because he did that we have to account for the way he thinks and what his motives were based on the instinct of experience. For instance, below are a few of the Comey written comments that I found particularly damning for him so let me talk about them one at a time which will then be summarized to properly articulate my conclusion of why Comey should go to jail. Here is the first:
The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.
That’s not what the IC was doing on their January 6th meeting with Trump where Comey cleared the room to report the unverified salacious and unverified material to Trump. They were showing the new president what they had on him and were warning him of information they “could” possess if needed for their own preservation. They were guilty of trying to create the kind of leverage that Comey complained about later which indicates that they were prone to thinking this way themselves—as a point of reference. The IC (intelligence community) was trying to throw Trump a bone so that they could win him over for their further employment. When Trump failed to feel threatened by this attempt, the members of the IC were deeply concerned as they left Trump Tower that day and it was at this point that the leaks from the IC began to flow freely to the press.
I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past. I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) – once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016. In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions. I can recall nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in four months – three in person and six on the phone.
By his own admission Comey never did this with any other president prior, but the meeting rattled Comey to such an extent that he felt he better start now because it was always his intention after January 6th to rid the Beltway of this Trump threat. That was the same type of behavior that an employee who knows they are about to be fired does in an attempt to save their job, they begin gathering written recollections to use in human resources later. Comey lacking personal courage reverted to a passive aggressive approach, which was writing everything down. Comey understood early that Trump had doubts about him and his leadership in the FBI so he began to keep notes that he could use later to extort his futher employment.
My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch. A few moments later, the President said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.
Here Comey is hoping to use his experience as an FBI agent and director to overcome any doubt about what he’s saying about Trump. This detail about his personal dinner with Trump in the Green Room of the White House is particularly revealing. First Comey wants to show that he has a story to tell and is trying to attract agents for a big book deal, or even a Hollywood movie based on his experiences. The liberals of the Beltway who know film producers likely put the bug in his ear which he was receptive to after that January 8th meeting where Comey started writing things down. The salacious details here say a lot about Comey’s motives because he goes into almost screenplay detail—which has nothing to do with facts the way you’d expect an FBI director to illicit. Instead he relied on his feelings which are more aligned with the way a novelist would write. People forget that Ian Flemming, the great British writer and creator of James Bond was a British Naval Intelligence Division agent before he was a writer and if you go back and read his first book, Casino Royal, it actually sounds a lot like the way Comey writes in his interactions with Trump. Since Comey himself offered that “instinct” is admissible as evidence for the deduction of reason in this case, then I feel quite comfortable in concluding that Comey decided he was going to be a writer after his FBI career and Trump was going to be his villain that he’d write about. He’d be the toast of the swamp as his friends around the Beltway would honor him for all time as the Boy Scout who saved them from the lunatic businessman from New York during a short-lived presidency. The more he thought about it, the more alluring the thought became until it became so obvious that Trump could see it on his face. Prior to that January 27th dinner meeting, Comey had hidden his fantasy—but Trump could detect it and it changed the way that Trump thought about Comey as director of the FBI.
On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of the President. He sat behind the desk and a group of us sat in a semi-circle of about six chairs facing him on the other side of the desk. The Vice President, Deputy Director of the CIA, Director of the National CounterTerrorism Center, Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, and I were in the semi-circle of chairs. I was directly facing the President, sitting between the Deputy CIA Director and the Director of NCTC. There were quite a few others in the room, sitting behind us on couches and chairs. The President signaled the end of the briefing by thanking the group and telling them all that he wanted to speak to me alone. I stayed in my chair. As the participants started to leave the Oval Office, the Attorney General lingered by my chair, but the President thanked him and said he wanted to speak only with me. The last person to leave was Jared Kushner, who also stood by my chair and exchanged pleasantries with me. The President then excused him, saying he wanted to speak with me. When the door by the grandfather clock closed, and we were alone, the President began by saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” Flynn had resigned 5 the previous day. The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President. He added thathe had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify. The President then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information – a concern I shared and still share. After he had spoken for a few minutes about leaks, Reince Priebus leaned in through the door by the grandfather clock and I could see a group of people waiting behind him. The President waved at him to close the door, saying he would be done shortly. The door closed. The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied only that “he is a good guy.” (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at FBI.) I did not say I would “let this go.” The President returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Mr. Priebus and the Vice President. I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership. I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December. I did not understand the President to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. I could be wrong, but I took him to be focusing on what had just happened with Flynn’s departure and the controversy around his account of his phone calls. Regardless, it was very concerning, given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency.
Even going to the trouble to mention the grandfather clock in this segment of Comey’s testimony is more of an attempt to paint a picture of the moment more than just reporting the facts. This only reiterates what I said about Comey wanting to be a novelist because the clock has nothing to do with the facts of the matter. The point of this entire segment is to paint Comey as the sole survivor of a treacherous cloud of villainy. Comey knew that his Beltway friends would soak all this up so he added extra detail for the sake of drama. In the contents of the discussion its obvious Trump wanted to protect his friend Michael Flynn from further embarrassment as the guy had just resigned a few days prior. There was no conspiracy or ill intent on the part of the president—since “instinct” is now admissible as evidence. What is particularly revealing here is the part where Comey tries to portray himself completely in control by saying “I did not say I would ‘let this go.” The president returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock”—and so on and so on. Listening to Comey speak in writing he was very much in control and was the protagonist of his own adventure, but from what he stated in his testimony he added that he was terrified of this one on one with Trump and he felt compelled that the weight of the office was upon him to stop the Russian investigation.
Essentially Comey decided some time before the election of 2016 that regardless of what happened he was going to seek money and fame in the private sector which likely shaped the way he handled the Hillary Clinton case. If he had prosecuted her—like he should have, the agents and movie makers would have held it against him. So days before the election when things were tight between Trump and Clinton he tried to take the light off her and help her out a few percentage points—because he wanted his book deal. It would have paid a lot more than he made as an FBI director and he’d gain fame for he and his family—along with his professor friends who leak stories to The New York Times. From Comey’s perspective of trying to make a little money for his family he’s a hero—he’s the protagonist standing up to the president in the Oval Office like a Boy Scout honest, clean and full of pride in Amerca. But in reality he was just another swamp monster working against the American people, actively subverting justice to keep a political party in power and when none of that worked he became one of the big leakers to the media in an attempt to bring down a properly elected American president violating his employment agreement with the FBI and the natural trust his position carried with it as head of the intelligence community.
Comey lied because he took it upon himself to become an activist, he wrote down information on government computers to be used as a weapon—no wonder he let Hillary Clinton go—but he did not state these intentions which were clearly present. Instead he painted himself as a bastion of the law who would uphold truth, justice and the American way. In reality he was just another cowering bureaucrat trying to hide in the swamp and ride out his years as he propped himself up as a future writer in the private sector. He lied because he did not state his intentions correctly for why he actually became a leaker. He said it was to preserve justice—but in reality it was to take down a president he didn’t like from the beginning and he wanted to be a hero to the left. He also lied in saying that he wasn’t political. His actions were very political and more than justified his termination without any further drama. But we all know how that turned out. Comey placed himself on a pedestal hoping to play at being the sacrificial lamb for the good of the ”Beltway.” But what he revealed of himself was that he was an activist for the preservation of the status quo and a leaker of information gathered in the Oval Office to be spread upon a salacious press in the way a plot from House of Cards might have a hard time believing. Yet that is precisely what happened. That is why Comey should go to jail. He abused the trust of his office. He sought to bring down an American president’s administration, and he misrepresented himself under sworn testimony. And he wrote down the evidence forcing us all to act on it.
