Tag: corporations

The Evils of Corporate Culture: Why we love and hate them

One of the things that is most ill-defined in our country, and certainly in the world, is the understanding of why we tend to hate corporate culture.  Yet almost in the same sentence, we desire to be a part of them.  It’s actually pretty straightforward and obvious, which goes back to the foundations of capitalism and the work of Adam Smith in 1776, as well as the intrusive and corrosive nature of Karl Marx’s communism, which ultimately have led to many of the problems we see today.  We hate communism with the same ambiguity, and the reason in all cases is that corporations exist to allow the mediocre to feel validated in mass society, and that it shields them from the insults of competition.  Corporate cultures are often characterized by collectivism and are seldom driven by unique individuals with great vision.  By the time a company goes “corporate,” it loses that unique leadership that likely built the company into something publicly traded and valuable.  So when we say that something is “corporate,” we are saying that it is of less quality than something that isn’t.  Corporations allow mass collectivism to appear valuable by leveraging the efforts that built a company.   I’ve been thinking about this recently because I have had a front-row seat to a corporate takeover, and it has been astonishing to watch.  The people involved are really dumb.  And I don’t say that as an insult, but as an observation where individual intelligence is completely vacant from the minds of those involved, which is typically associated with stupidity or dumbness if taken in isolation.  But if many such people assert something, then there is a belief that a majority then gives validation, even to stupidity.  It’s one thing to read about these things happening in the world and to know the type of people involved.  But I usually have some insulation from this kind of thing by living my life, until those types of people stepped into my interaction by their own choice.  And I have had to establish their base reality, the only way that it can be defined, that they are dumb people looking for easy money in the world, and they accomplish this through mass collectivism, the same way that labor unions are a problem.  Wherever people hide value in groups, we see a loss in the quality of the visionary experience.  You don’t think of a boardroom as a group of people who solve big problems.  Typically, we think of a group of individuals who appease each other in a setting, at the expense of innovation.

I tend to support large organizations because their creation generates the flow of money, and I like money as a measure of a healthy society.  The more money a society has, the more corporations that create it, the more opportunities that society has to improve the lives of its people.  However, that is a very high-level assumption because, unfortunately, most people do not have positive corporate experiences, as many of the ideas we have about things are flawed from the start.  Even all the years of economic evolution that brought about the excellent book, The Wealth of Nations, there is always uncertainty in individuals about their ability to function in the world productively, so they seek joint relationships to hide in, and that is how the corporation came about as these ideas of capitalism and Marxism emerged as the world became smaller and easier to travel in.  Even if there were more opportunities for boldness and adventure, it was still the same kind of people who took them, leaving most of the rest of the world looking for a way to participate without the risk of actually doing so.  We prefer corporate jobs for the high pay we can earn within their structure.  But the pay usually comes at the cost of individual integrity.  You have to give up one thing to get the security of another.  And as human beings, we look down our noses at such a concession because we deem it inherently evil.  Evil because it destroys individuals, rather than enhancing them.

It’s not unusual for a family to applaud that a youthful personality has just joined a respected corporation at Thanksgiving Dinner.  The applause comes because we care about the young person and want them to have financial security.  But also in the back of our minds, we know that something is dying in that person, the ability to become all the dreams of youth as a unique individual.  Corporate environments are about giving voice to mediocrity for the benefits of mass collectivism. So that unique person we knew growing up will likely give up some of their dreams in the process of conformity.  They might gain an extensive paycheck, but in the process, they’ll lose their soul.  And we now understand this process well, having undergone many years of separating business from being run by kingdoms.  However, by default, the corporation evolved to give the mediocre a kind of unionized collective bargaining against the tendency toward cowardice, the act of waking up in the morning and having the courage to be an individual.  I know about such people, but I usually avoid them like a sickness until I had to speak to them often, when they came to my doorstep.  And it’s remarkable how typical dumbness is.  And when we say “dumbness,” we are referring to a lack of individual thought, where a person thinks something and acts on it without careful consideration. Instead, they feel a sense of unity for the preservation of the group, and their ambitions are collectively shaped through the force of numbers, rather than individual vision.  So, obviously, a corporation run by a board, even if there is a strong CEO, ultimately exists to sell mass collectivism to a consuming public, and we only notice when it impacts us, because there aren’t many pure examples of capitalism to measure real value against. 

We might like money, but there haven’t been enough examples of corporations that have survived due to corporate social responsibility efforts to give better examples of how things should be, or how humans should even make a living.  I’m talking about Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality again, the difference between back-of-the-train people and those who dare to live in the front.  The corporate environment was not intended to put the best in charge.  But to make mediocrity rule the masses through collective ambition.  The loss of individuality to the concept of just being another number.  And in the process, everything is less effective.  And so, there is this cheerleading effort by corporations to acquire privately owned companies, as the corporation and its inhabitants want to believe, through the force of confiscated resources, that they can be as good as the visionary owner.  But they never are, and that little secret rots them into their graves.  They may be able to buy a second home in Florida and have the nicest cars to drive.  They may make enough money to turn their kids into younger versions of themselves by sending them to a communist camp we call “college,” by saying we want to give those kids the best chance at life, when we secretly fear that they will grow up to be better than us.  There is a lot wrong with corporate thought and the people who have defined it over the years. Based on what I’ve seen of it, an entirely new definition for money-making needs to be introduced.  The faceless monster of corporate ownership is just an extension of Marxism that emerged in the void of any other definition at that time of its growth into everyday language.  And many of us really want to be associated with the corporate culture for the security of income.  However, it comes at the expense of individual integrity, and for that reason, we secretly view corporations as inherently evil.  However, since most of us lack the security of personal wealth and thought, we want to be associated with something so that, by default, other people won’t see what we really are.  And that we won’t be found out as phonies, even if that’s what we think each day when we get out of bed. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Individuals Beat Corporations Every Time: Why success happens

This could apply to anything, but studying why some movies released at the theater are better than others is critical because of how the movie business works.  People get together and tell a story, and the value of that story is released to the public for them to vote on.  People tend to think of Hollywood as very glamorous, but in truth, very few people who work in the industry ever get to be a part of an extraordinary success, a ratio even less than in other fields of endeavor.  So it is always interesting to understand why some people put together a string of hits, such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, along with producer Howard Kazanjian.  An even more important example is the role that George Lucas’ first wife, Marcia Lucas, played in some of the most memorable and good movies of all time.  Also, why did a small, family-owned company like Lucasfilm lose its magic once it became a corporate conglomerate under Disney?  All this was in a fabulous book called ‘A Producer’s Life,’ which was about the life and times of Howard Kasanjian, who produced several of the Star Wars movies and the start of the Indiana Jones franchise, among other classic films like Cool Hand Luke, The Wild Bunch, and working with Alfred Hitchcock.  This book caused much stir when it first came out because Marcia Lucas was just as upset about Disney killing off Han Solo as I was for many political reasons.  That was just another example of how corporations that use processes to isolate individual contributions produce products in the world that are not as desired by the market.  In the case of the new Star Wars movies, the belief was that the film itself held all the magic and that a girl could replace a character like Han Solo to accommodate all kinds of woke rules wrapped around the axil of globalism. However, the Disney people never understood Star Wars, and this book had the opinions of someone who was very close to Star Wars, who was the key to their success initially. 

The book came out in 2021, right in the middle of the Covid monstrosity, and Biden had just been inserted into the White House, so I wasn’t in the mood to think about movies.  But I promised myself that if Trump returned to the White House, I’d get the book, take a bit of a vacation, and allow myself to think about some fun things.  For me, these are some of the most fun things, and they show how entertainment impacts culture as a whole.  And when it comes to those movies, Indiana Jones and Star Wars, few people have put together the kind of hits as filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.  The corporate belief is that just anybody can make a good movie or a good anything if only enough money is spent on the project, and in film, typically, the industry attracts all the same kind of sharks looking for an easy dollar as Wall Street does.  But few of them, if anybody, understands what makes hits and misses in the marketplace.  I have always wondered why George Lucas was so good from 1975 to 1982.  After that period, George Lucas wasn’t very good at all.  He may have been interesting, but he had lost his touch, and I always thought it probably had something to do with his wife, Marcia. 

There were two good Star Wars movies, and then everything fell off the rails with Return of the Jedi.  The movies were self-funded and only distributed through 20th Century Fox.  George Lucas hated corporate filmmaking; he wanted to make independent films from a family-driven company.  This allowed someone like the film editor, his wife, Marcia Lucas, to put her personal touches all over those early movies, which were key to their successes.  Something Disney and all its resources today don’t have is that personal touch.  During Return of the Jedi, Marcia and George divorced, and she ran off with the stained glass window guy working on their Skywalker Ranch.  That sounds kind of cheap and stupid, but George Lucas was working hard at the time to maintain his independence from the studio system, so he was putting all the pressure on himself.  This is another reason why those family-made movies were so good.  It wasn’t the board of directors or BlackRock assets making the decisions; it was George Lucas.  But it drove a wedge between him and his wife, and he never recovered.  Neither did she.  They should have stuck it out, but that’s history now, and the results tell quite a story.  Because she worked with her husband, Marcia knew how to get the best out of the coverage shots he provided as a director and could make a story pop on the screen that resonated with audiences.  You have to be an excellent person to produce good work, which gets lost in all corporations: those individual contributions.  For instance, if SpaceX lost Elon Musk, the company would fail quickly.  We always see it in sports: a star player carries a franchise.  As the saying goes, there is no “I” in team, but there is in win.  Teams are not values, they are places where people can hide so they don’t have to deal with the pressure of taking on too much responsibility.

One time, when the character of Indiana Jones was being created, Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas designed the character before principal photography, and they were all talking about giving Indiana Jones some flaws that the audience could relate to, such as making him smoke and drink too much.  But as she often did with many of those early Lucasfilm movies, Marcia stepped in and gave her opinion that was critical to the effort’s success.  Keep in mind that these three moviemakers were some of the best of the best in the business. But it took George Lucas’ wife to point out the obvious.  She told them this was a kid’s movie and they couldn’t have Indiana Jones drinking and smoking.  He’ll lose all his charm, which they didn’t understand then.  But George listened to his wife, as usual, and the character became one of the most beloved in all movie history.  They are still trying to make money off Indiana Jones, with Disney running the studio.  But they don’t understand the character because they don’t have someone like Marcia Lucas in the editing room polishing everything up.  They have access to tens of thousands of talented filmmaking types, but very few understand the subtlety of success and failure.  Without question, Marcia Lucas, as a high-quality individual, made those early movies better.  She also made Lucas, Spielberg, and Harrison Ford better.  Better than any of them would ever be again once she was no longer a part of their lives.  After the divorce, it went all downhill from there.  They still made good movies, but they had all lost their touch, never to duplicate it again.  And no matter what business we’re talking about, that same kind of ratio applies.  Corporations often don’t get it; they mimic what made them great and hope nobody notices.  But to become great in the first place, there is always some charismatic individual, or a collection of them, who come together and make magic happen.  And without those individuals, no process in the world can promise success, purposefully or by accident.  Family-owned businesses are some of the best ways to achieve that success, and Lucasfilm was a family-owned business in those early days.  Once they became a corporate conglomerate, they could no longer make magic, and the brands they were associated with died in the court of public opinion. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Corporation of the United States against The United States of America: We are well into this new Civil War, which is behind the actions of Letitia James

I hate to say it, but there is a reason a lot of this diabolical behavior has been allowed to gestate in our American culture, where radical Marxists like Fani Willis and that goofball loser from New York, Letitia James, are permitted to cover for a maniacal menace to our Constitutional Republic.  We don’t discuss it much, but it’s a genuine problem.  I of course have talked about it for years, but to this detail we haven’t spent much time, because it’s a depressing concept.  And that is the idea that the truth of our nation and the nature of globalism is that corporations run it rather than the people.  And that our governments are set up to give the illusion that people are in charge, just like in the marketplace, but that behind-the-scenes decisions are made for the preservation of the corporation at the expense of everything else.  Of course, there are all kinds of things wrong with this idea, and I refuse the premise.  Not that it exists, but that it is the foundation for our rule of law.  Yet, when it is analyzed why so many people in government hate the idea of President Trump, and that they will do anything to stop him from even running for office, let alone being in charge of the Executive Branch, then we have to talk about this essential problem that we do not have a United States of America ran as republic, but a Corporation of the United States ran by corporate communists.  This traces back to the battlelines that the World Economic Forum has established, and we saw their footprints all over COVID-19 and the Great Reset economy they attempted.  However, the roots of this corporation idea started a long time ago, most notably in the 1950s during Eisenhower’s term in office.  He didn’t want to sell us out to the global corporations, but they pinned him down which led to his famous speech upon exiting office, warning us of this menace.

Not only do I know a lot of lawyers, but I also know many people with very high IQs.  And I know and have known quite a few people with IQs in the 200 range, which is supposed to be impossible.  I can say that I have known more than one to keep some form of anonymity for their own good.  Because they are not necessarily flag-waving patriots the way I am, or you might be, dear reader.  These are people who have been trying to recruit me for the last thirty years into the Sovereign Citizens Movement, and they have been in and out of jail and have all kinds of problems.  Not because they are dumb, of course, but they are too smart to play the game, which the rest of us do.  And that game is that America is a free nation run by free people.  They would argue that it’s a corporation, that our Social Security numbers are our only real names, and that we are all products of the state as the state decides.  And that government is run by corporations, which I think is beyond a doubt.  What we’ve seen over these last few years when we talk about the Deep State is these kinds of characters scrambling around in a panic.  Like the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, Toto pulled back the curtain to the Wizard’s little booth, where he made all the illusions the world saw.  Trump’s was in that effect, Toto pulling back the curtain to the Deep State, and suddenly everything real started to emerge, shattering the illusion of a free republic.

I have told these people over the years that I do not acknowledge a Corporation of America.  I only recognize the American Constitution, and anybody who does not adhere to the Constitution of the United States of America will have a lot of trouble with me.  And that has certainly been the case over a long period, and there’s not much anybody can do about it in protest.  The courts must support an assumption that they follow the Constitution to maintain the illusion of a republic.  But due to their impatience, they have been pushing to subvert the Constitution for years and replace it with a kind of corporation human resource handbook intending to enable outright communism, which most corporations are attracted to for obvious reasons of centralized planning.  But strategically, I have expressed to all these citizen protestors, again, not stupid people, that I would always stand with the Constitution, and anybody who wanted to fight about it would have to deal with it.  Because I wasn’t giving up on it, and I certainly had no plans to be a fugitive rebel living in the mountains, hoping the FBI, CIA, and IRS never find me.  I’m a kick-the-front-door kind of guy, not a sneak-around subversive type.  So, that has been an impasse I have lived with for a long time, and my position on it is essential because of what we are witnessing now.  There are no longer a few random people talking about these things, but essentially everyone.

The reason of importance now to discuss it, in the wake of all that’s happened to President Trump, and the more success he has, the more panic that there is from these Corporation of America types, which we loosely call RINOs, Deep Staters, Administrators of the Administrative State, people like Mitch McConnell and other members of the House and Senate who have become very rich off politics.  People like Biden and his puppet master Barack Obama.  Who do you think put the terrorists from the Weather Underground in power who then put Obama in the White House?  It was not a random act, and it turned out to be the same people who used the power of government to steal the 2020 election.  It’s the members of the hostile Corporation of America, and they wish to keep their gig going without revolution.  But we are in another Civil War as we speak, and yes, people are being killed.  The battlefield is in our living rooms, school boards, and Chambers of Commerce.  And it’s not so easy to see who the good guys are.  But for me, the good guys stand for the Constitution.  Those against it are the enemy.  We are fighting for a free United States of America from the forces of the Corporation of the United States, which is just one door in the centralized planning scheme of the World Economic Forum.  Unfortunately, these guys have been in power operating outside Constitutional law for a long time.  And now we are ripping away their assumptions about existence, and it will be messy.  And the days of battle that I have told my friends over the years that I would stand on are here.  I stand for the Constitution, and anybody who says otherwise is an enemy of the United States, and that’s how it will be.  And they will suffer accordingly.  This isn’t a new problem.  For most of us, it has been in the background our entire lives.  But it’s not how it’s supposed to be, and they won’t give up their scam easily.  Which ultimately, is on them when they suffer for it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Law of Fallow Ground in America: Corporations and Communist Governments are not in charge and never will be

One of the reasons I enjoy my time around Fast Draw Shooters, as a sport, is that most of them have reverence for old westerns and the values of the gunfighter instilling justice against bad guys as typically defined by a social dedication to the Ten Commandments.  I was at an event in Cleveland this past weekend, and we had a friendly little discussion going on about the moral erosion that is obvious to everyone.  Now these events are fun because everyone is armed with guns, and we wear our gun belts all day, and nobody thinks anything of it. It is productive because it puts me in the right frame of mind to discuss these things.  And I reminded people that the world isn’t as different as it always has been.  I reminded them of my report from traveling around the world that most countries, including England and Japan, love American Westerns, especially old ones.  If you turn on the tv in those places, you will constantly find a lot of old American Westerns playing.  Hollywood changed along the lines of the BlackRock view of radicalism that has caused much of the modern trouble.  But people are still people, and they always will be.  And I told these old gunfighters what I’m about to say to you, dear reader.  Never forget the Law of Fallow Ground, which, if you are a farmer or know farmers, is the deliberate rotation or avoidance of planting crops into the soil to allow it to replenish its nourishment.  If you keep growing the same crops in the same parcel of land over and over again, the product that comes out of the ground becomes compromised and much less efficient. 

I told those old gunfighters that America was going through just such a period.  For many years we planted good things in the ground of capitalism, and the return to society was fantastic, and the world clamored to be a part of it.  Our old westerns were reflective of that culture.  People always did love them, and they always will.  The decision not to make those Westerns by a radicalized leftist culture of communist sympathizers run by financial tyrants is a kind of Law of Fallow Ground in the greater scheme of things.  This is a period in America where we are letting the soil rest.  For too long, Americans got used to everything coming out of America being good.  It will be again, of course, the yearnings of the Trump administration and his supporters represent that hunger.  But the world needed a break from what America produced because they didn’t appreciate it when they had it.  People are seeing how good those crops were and having conversations like the one I was having with those gunfighters, talking about how messed up the world is now, they are getting hungry for the good stuff.  They should have appreciated America when America was producing good crops.  They are not happy with this Fallow Ground period.  And when America is great again, maybe they won’t take things for granted as they have been.

I was getting a hamburger just north of Columbus, Ohio, at a Hardees, and I caught a conversation with a woman with the cashier complaining about how high the prices were for fast food these days, and she was shocked.  On the store sound system was a station playing 80s greatest hits because music isn’t very relatable these days, just like the westerns that used to be expected on television.  Occasionally something good comes out in entertainment, but most of it is garbage compared to how it used to be.  The people at that Hardees were far from political people, but they missed the excellent ol’ days when fast food was cheap, great music came out every week, and people had a generally optimistic view of things socially.  Human potential was celebrated, and American culture cultivated it in everything from hamburgers to pop music.  This was never more obvious than our plans for a Disney trip with the grandkids we had been planning for a while.  I have personally been very hard on Disney.  When I think of Disney programming, I think of Davy Crocket and the Zorro television show.  As a little secret that I don’t usually talk about, I was deeply inspired as a kid by the Zorro television show, and it’s no accident that my life as an adult reflects those values.  So despite all the woke garbage that Disney puts out now, I want them to see the amusement parks while they are still there.  Yes, I predict they will be gone in the not-so-distant future.  They will not survive this Fallow Ground period because they took people for granted.  People are moving on since Disney no longer represents those classic American values.  I have been shocked by how badly Disney has fallen on vacation planning.  Their brand damage is substantial and unrecoverable.   They haven’t planted anything new for a long time, and their crops are stunted, wilted, and not consumable.  So, they are dying.  Ten years ago, planning a Disney vacation was a much different experience.  They are almost begging people to visit now, which they never used to.  But in many ways, what is happening to Disney will happen to every American corporation.  This plot to collapse capitalism into a communist centrally planned society was destined to fail from the outset. 

Just because people see a barren landscape and that the Law of Fallow Ground was imposed on a culture by a hostile society, such as the levels of Marxism we now see injected into the American economy by radical leftists; the unfortunate answer is that we needed to let this happen so that we could restore greatness to the soil of our economy.  Giving the soil time to rest by allowing other things to grow, mostly garbage has been good because people will appreciate the good stuff when it returns.  And it will return.  Companies like Disney will likely be gone forever, as will many companies that have tried to take advantage of this Fallow Ground period and grow weeds in our gardens.  But once pulled and cleared, many companies won’t be there any longer.  But the values of our culture, shown in all those American Westerns which people worldwide appreciate so much, will return in whatever form they grow into.  And as I told those gunslingers, the values are still desired.  Because communist corporations have tried to plant weeds in our culture, people will tire quickly of their offerings and want a restoration of the good stuff.  So I don’t see all this depletion as permanent.  It’s a trait of the Law of Fallow Ground.  It’s a necessary period that people need to gain an appreciation for what America has produced in the past.  Once our culture makes those things again, people will appreciate it more because now they will have seen the option.  When Zorro was on television for the first time, produced by Disney, people expected a good society that understood why that show was essential and enjoyed.  Now they see the benefits and want more of it in the future.  The lesson is that corporations and communist governments are not in charge.  The market economy is the desires of people and values that most represent them.  And what we see today is just the Law of Fallow Ground, and the good crops from that ground will return. 

Rich Hoffman

A Guide Across the Change State Economy: Through the traditions of the gunfighter, America can be saved from global communism

It’s not that I’m trying to sell you another book. But I didn’t write The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to sell the book as an author. I saw what was happening in the world ahead of some of the terrifying stuff we are seeing now while Trump was still in office. We were seeing market trends that would reflect the world as a whole, and I wanted to provide people with a book on strategy that would help people deal with those changing circumstances. And now, a few years into it, I’m getting a lot of positive feedback on it, and I’m reminding people of it because there are many scared people out there. I’m not afraid, not at all. I worked out a lot of the strategies outlined in the book while competing in Cowboy Fast Draw competitions, and I was just at one in what they call the Shootout in the Black Swamp. It features a lot of chiseled veterans from the fast draw world who have been around the block a time or two, and there were some conversations they had with me that were different this year as opposed to years past, in what they see happening with the Biden administration, global politics in general, and the presence of an absolute evil in the world that has shown an unholy alliance between the world of finance, corporations, and the kind of evil worship that destroyed the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Sumer, and the entire Middle East. It’s with us now; people are scared and want to know what to do. And it is for them that I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which offers a way to live a healthy and productive life in the face of grave danger presented by the essential failures of the Administrative State driven by the needs of the liberal world order under the maniacal direction of the Deep State which resides behind everything and has its roots into evil occults. 

Shootout in the Blackswamp June 2023

It’s not that going to college is a bad thing; most people I know and communicate with daily are people with at least one advanced degree, and in many cases, several. But it’s becoming increasingly evident, which I pointed out in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, that much of our education systems were built not to instruct people but to make them submissive to the ultimate goals of the Deep State. They were designed that way from the beginning, especially the notion that the college system of buying your way into various financial levels of society through the degree program would never be successful. People have been wondering about it for years, but now they are finally starting to admit to themselves what the college experience has really been about, and it hasn’t made our society a better one. As featured in Charlie Kirk’s book, The College Scam, which is fantastic and honest, it’s not just American society that is starting to view college as just an early attempt to subjugate all people to an aristocracy of thought that was a creation of the Liberal World Order. That kind of society was not a meritocracy driven by Adam Smith’s capitalism but a tyranny by a global crime syndicate residing behind the hidden menace of communism, as China had been built around. And the only way to face down that kind of evil was in the classic way of the gunfighter, out in the street against a black-hatted villain to bring justice to a town overrun by crime.

I’m not part of the professional network of LinkedIn. Before I wrote my book, I was, but as it was being released, I did an excellent interview with a guy influential in the media culture of Los Angeles who ran a PAC in Washington D.C. that was professing that America decouple from China. It was a very compelling interview, and the moment it went up, LinkedIn locked up my account and essentially sent me a note that I still have, which says I must submit to the LinkedIn China policies before I can have my account back. I don’t need their account or their network. As we are learning, as is the case with a lot of social media, LinkedIn is already a Chinese asset, which is the case with most of our media and political figures. China pours a lot of money into these various organizations. Many corrupt people are willing to build their entire lives around easy money, and you quickly end up with a very corrupt corporate structure. We are seeing that Chinese style of communism shows itself in corporate brands like Bud Light, Disney, and even Chick-fil-A. It started with the idea that you couldn’t have a good job without an advanced college degree from a liberal thought processing factory. If you don’t respect “trans” rights, you will be removed from all respectable society. But that only works if everyone submits to that communist authority, and many people don’t want to, which has led us to this current impasse. In that LinkedIn interview, I laid out the case that if business owners wanted to save themselves from this communist tyranny, if corporations  wanted to free themselves from the perils of globalism, then I had the strategy that could do it. My book worked on many levels for the personal benefit of the reader or the resurrection of entire nations. The concepts were the same no matter on what scale they were applied. And that if people followed them, China could easily be defeated. 

I advise a sizeable number of people directly on the methods discussed in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which were formed under tremendous pressure. I provide the video here of a sample gunfight in the sport of Fast Draw from that Shootout in the Black Swamp: speed, efficiency, management under the pressure of danger, and duress. As I say to everyone, be the one in the room with the biggest metaphorical gun, and know how to use it. And most of the time, victory follows. Even when it comes to one nation against another, it’s always the same kind of thing in a competitive world that is best represented in the classic gunfights that resulted in American culture. The assumption by the Liberal World Order was that the world would follow them to the ends of the earth and eventually submit to communist rule controlled by global forces. And that if only that Liberal World Order and its minions in the Administrative State, who take their orders from the occults of the Deep State, could control all of global finance, all the world’s big corporations, and rule over people through an education system that dumbed people down instead of teaching them to think, that they’d get away with it. But people are waking up to it, and I’m happy to see it. I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business not just for the success of individual lives but for the eventual destruction of the Liberal World Order, to teach people how to beat it. And now that people see what’s been going on, they want answers, so I have put them in that book to make it easy for people. I’m very happy to see it is starting to do its work right on schedule.

Rich Hoffman

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The Communists Attack: What the actions of Alvin Bragg show about the menace that has been hiding in the background all along

I’ve explained it many times since the news of the Trump indictment was made known at the end of March 2023 that I think it’s probably the best thing that could have happened. It’s wonderful news, certainly not detrimental. I’ve been warning about this kind of thing for a long time, and people would say, “oh, that’s just too inconvenient to know about; I have to take my kid to soccer practice.” Throughout the last decade, many of those articles can be found by going through the search history on this site along the sidebar; I have talked about the communist infiltration of America so people could do something about it. At first, it came from the Soviets, from the deliberate KGB infiltration of our institutions during the late 50s and 60s. But we think incorrectly that communism went away with the Reagan presidency and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But no, it just went underground, and with the attempts of globalism, communism is their pick for the government of that one world order because it’s much easier for them to manage from the United Nations. And China, the propped-up country of globalism from the World Economic Forum, where the country went from a third-world country in the 1960s to the new superpower in the 2020s, it is that form of communism that the globalists and their controlled corporations have picked to rule. And that communism has infiltrated our American society in most of our institutions, as I have explained in detail by going on radio stations and writing many articles about it, most exhibited in the great Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist. In it, the former FBI agent, back when the FBI was filled with good guys and not a bunch of communist sympathizers, Skousen provides the 45 Goals of Communism, which I read to everyone when I first started my Rumble channel. And now, finally, people can see with this Trump indictment that all that was true and then some. Communists are making their move, and their desperation is showing. 

When it was obvious that the 2020 election was rigged, that is why the first bit of information I offered to explain it to people was from that Skousen classic. It has been inconvenient for people to name the word communist into anything that was American because people just couldn’t bring themselves to admit to what degree it was a problem. Even President Trump has been reluctant to go there in his speeches. We have talked about socialism in an open context, especially regarding the Obama presidency, but as I and many others have done, we have shown that many of these insurgency figures, such as Obama was, had many communists in their background. And that would hold true for modern members of minority neighborhood anti-Capitalist groups such as where this New York DA comes from, Alvin Bragg. This communist movement has been with us, working in the background for longer than most people have been alive. Communism didn’t die with the Soviet Union; it just shifted to the emerging China. There are many more communists and socialists in the world than there are capitalists, who are at war with all competition. The globalists have been using the greed and manipulation of China to spread their European export, the communism of Karl Marx to the world for world domination, and we can see their effect most in our institutional controls, such as education, our judicial system, our entertainment, just as Skousen warned about in 1958. Most of the trouble we are seeing in the world now is coming from the global moves that the communists are making, and to not name them is to declare that nobody actually wants to solve the problem essentially. 

I remember specifically a radio interview I did on The Naked Communist while I was on a professional engagement in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was in a fancy hotel restaurant having a very nice dinner with some power players saving the world on the economic end. We were all having a very nice time along a river that was pouring into Lake Michigan, from where all the fine wines were being poured into specific glasses designed to let the well-vintaged stuff breathe. I told everyone to excuse me momentarily while I went to the bathroom. I went back to my hotel room and did a 45-minute radio interview with a talk show on Cleon Skousen’s Naked Communist, which blew the doors off the audience. Then I returned to my table almost an hour later. People had been drinking, so they didn’t notice much that I had been gone, and we resumed our business talk very successfully. But when dealing with international commerce, as that talk was all about, the discussion about communism was not something even people drinking a lot of wine had the stomach for. It was OK to talk about kids, the sports they were in, and basic entertainment observations, such as what was happening with the Kardashians lately. But any discussion about communism in these governments we were dealing with was simply off the table. But the radio audience was captivated as if it was the first time they had ever heard such a thing. That just shows how sneaky the communists are, they penetrated our culture in such a way that nobody wanted even to discuss their very existence, and because of that, communism has grown into the monster that it is today. It was strange for me to have that Milwaukee experience because within the span of a few hours, I went from advanced talks about international commerce that were worth millions and millions of dollars to discussing communism, which to me was like having one large conversation about global concerns. But for the various members of the audience, the topics had to be separated to accommodate their sensitive understanding of history and the real threat that was actually in their own backyards.

I see the shock of many over this Trump indictment as a great thing. It forces people to look at this communist problem for what it is, finally. The blind trust that people have in our institutions has been dangerous. But yes, communism is a major problem in America, and it’s a global movement with literally billions of members. And they see America as the last bastion of freedom that stands against their political movement, and they are in full attack mode, just as I warned about now for decades. But people didn’t believe me. They were curious, but it was much easier to just laugh it off as a conspiracy theory. Yet I have gone way out of my way to educate people about these dangers, and now Alvin Bragg has made my job so much easier. People can see it for themselves, and it’s scary. But the monster in the closet was always there, even if people hid under their sheets. What we are seeing coming out of the New York DA office, and not just with Trump, but others, such as Steve Bannon from the Warroom podcast, it has been infiltrated by communists who realizes that the MAGA movement is the best form of populism that could kill their aims at global domination. And to meet that threat to their political order, they are crossing the lines and stepping out of the shadows for all to see. I think this is great because it forces people to wake up to a threat that has always existed. The communists are attacking because they are desperate. Over 100 years of plotting and scheming are being threatened by America’s self-defense, Bill of Rights, and Constitution as applied through MAGA Republicans. And they are being forced from the shadows to fight, and in doing so, are showing themselves for the first time in many cases, which is something I have wanted to see happen my entire adult life. So I’m quite happy about it. Indicting Trump was the best thing that could have happened.

Rich Hoffman

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The WHO is only a Front for Big Pharma: When government serves only corporate interests and ignores the will of voters

In many ways, I’m grateful for the incompetence that the Biden administration has displayed because it has revealed aspects of government that I have been pointing out for a long time but were hidden behind the protocols of polite society. It’s the cost of incompetence that is often at the heart of every debate about further taxes and burdens on innovation that are held back by a government that is so large and incompetent, and slow, yet insists on controlling society to satisfy their egos of domination over others, that they deserve the ridicule they get. And I knew what would happen as I watched President Trump and his wife, Melania, walk from the Capitol Building to the White House as many worldwide protested. The bar would be raised for governments everywhere in the world, and they would be angry about it. Those people would get out their unread copies of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals dedicated to Lucifer, and they would be upset and want to protest. And we ended up with many people showing their below-the-line thinking, the negativity screaming at the top of their lungs for the right-to-be losers. Then with Trump removed because of FBI activism, Big Tech manipulation, voting machines built to sustain the power of the Liberal World Order, election laws written on the back of a napkin because of a virus created in a Chinese lab meant to destroy the American economy, purposely released to destroy the Trump administration, and anybody in the way including elderly people in nursing homes. A media culture corrupt beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, then we had the Biden administration, the party of the Deep State. He was a loser forced down our throats without a chaser, and people could see just how bad the government of these losers really was without good Republicans to hide behind to validate their existence. For the first time, these globalists, these Lucifer worshipers of the God Baal from the Bible, were exposed for what they always were, and people now have seen them naked. And they don’t like it. That has been a good thing. If applied to biblical sentiment, the feelings would be like Yahweh in the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah. That’s where people are now regarding their governments.

We have ended up with a government run by lobbyists that no longer represent voters. They represent those who can write the biggest bribe checks. The evidence is everywhere, from Mitch McConnell to Joe Biden, and his five houses that were bought off a senator’s salary. Give me a break. And the media lets them get away with it because there is a lot of money in playing along. Big Pharma, the same people who are behind the lobbying efforts of politicians, is throwing a lot of money at media companies. Big Pharma buys a lot of advertising, and media companies have their hand out, and like a common street whore, they will do anything for the right price. And when someone like Tucker Carlson comes along, or a James O’Keefe, or Julian Assange insists on doing some honest reporting, of course, the system of corruption wants to get rid of them because it’s not about good government. It’s about building a corrupt government that acts as the face of corporate power. And now that the evidence is flowing freely now in the wake of Covid-19, we can see just how much power Phizer for instance, always had over our lives because they essentially controlled not just the United States Government but the mechanisms of the United Nations as well.   And when I speak about Julian Assange, I am pleased to say I went to see him at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. After going there, my family and I had a very nice shopping experience at Harrod’s, just a few feet from where Assange was trapped because of his Wikileaks news, which threatened the world with the truth they desperately wanted to keep contained. That was just a few weeks after Trump moved into the White House, and there were protests all over London. It was quite an experience to see all this up close. Yes, I knew this day was coming, even back then, in the winter of 2017. 

It would always be a collision course with reality, the fight to keep an open and free media from reporting the truth about the world governments who had sold their integrity away for the fastest buck. And essentially, that’s what the World Health Organization has become, a street whore from Amsterdam, the window eye candy for the reality of what was being advertised. The WHO is run by the socialist Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is the current director general, or the United Nations Secretary-General, the socialist Antonio Guterres, which gives them the proper front to be the face of corporate power that has adopted into their cultures communism and socialism that buys governments to wear like earrings so to distract the voting public from the fact that they are not in charge and can’t see what’s going on in truth because of all the glitter. The World Health Organization is nothing but a front for Big Pharma so that the drug companies can sell their products behind the force of government, which has been the government’s plan for most of the last century. They never intended to work for their constituents. It has always been for them about manipulating the public, using them to stay in power with illusions created by media, but their paychecks come from borderless corporations with no loyalty to God or country. And that is the harsh truth of our times.

In this unconstitutional treaty that the Biden administration wants to sign giving health authority to the WHO during the next pandemic, this is what is really going on. Big Pharma wants the power of the government to sell its drugs to an unsuspecting public by force. Pharma doesn’t want to earn a customer’s business; they simply want government, through mandates to force drugs on the world’s populations, all in the name of “safety,” the kind of “safety” that the mainstreamers in media sell advertising to establish. If you go back in time, this is what happened with the insurance industry; once the government started mandating insurance for the drivers of cars, insurance companies knew all they had to fight for was a piece of the state’s population because they were guaranteed some portion of it by legal enforcement, rather than insurance companies being the best option for drivers. Once insurance companies no longer had to work to earn a customer, their prices went up, and their customer service fell off a cliff because they no longer cared about the relationship with their customers; they could afford to abuse them by government mandate. That is the same practice we watched with Covid, and the government essentially became a drug dealer for Big Pharma. And that is all the World Health Organization is, a drug dealer for Big Pharma. A government seeking control of all nations so that their corporate backers can rule from the shadows unchecked, and with endless revenue streams coming to them without having to do the work of actually earning a customer. No wonder corporations have lost so much customer trust. But those corporate influences don’t need that trust if they have a government that can kick down your door and forces you to take their drugs and live by rules that only serve corporate interests rather than the voters who are supposed to be in charge. At least now, it’s no longer a conspiracy theory. People have seen all this for themselves and are acting in their best interest for the first time, which will make for some interesting elections over the next several years.

Rich Hoffman

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Why I Am Proud of Vivek Ramaswamy: The New Declaration of Independence

When I saw Vivek Ramaswamy at the Lincoln Day Dinner 2022 in Butler County, Ohio, I brought my copy of his book Woke, Inc for him to sign. I had a VIP pass, so I figured at some point I’d get a chance to see him behind the scenes, and I had to take that opportunity to get him to sign what I think will be a book that will define our age, this weird kind of financial war America is in with the rest of the world. Getting books signed isn’t a usual thing for me; I have to be very impressed with the author even to seek a signature, and my reason for doing this one with Vivek was I knew my great-grandchildren would be going through my books a century or two from now wanting to understand me and all the things I was involved in during my life. I wanted them to see Vivek’s signature to understand the magnitude of what was coming next. These many steps would occur over the next decade to save America for the world to enjoy, and knowing that the book Woke, Inc played a significant part in that effort, I put more emphasis on it than I otherwise would. I’ve read Woke, Inc at least nine times that I can remember, and many more times I’ve read sections of it because it has turned out to be a skeleton key to hundreds of other books that I have read, which sort of circled the drain, but never quite got to where they needed to go, including Klaus Schwab’s The Great Reset, and most recently, The Great Narrative. I would also put The Lords of Easy Money into that book category brought together by Vivek’s masterpiece, Woke, Inc. It had been a journey since I last spoke to Vivek Ramaswamy at the Middletown Republican Headquarters for a special event where he talked about his upcoming book, and during that, he gave me a little promo card that I had kept on my desk since then. At the time, our meeting was unremarkable, but I felt that he was performing a kind of Paul Revere task in a new type of revolution, so I made a point to read his book the day it came out. I was very glad I did.

Since August of 2021, Vivek has been talking about his new book all over the media, and I was proud of him. He came from my area; he actually went to Lakota schools for a short time in his youth before moving to Evendale, where his father worked at GE. Vivek grew up and made well for himself, working on Wall Street and becoming a CEO of a few companies in biotech. We ran into each other a few times before the Covid pandemic, and during that time, he came up with this idea to tackle woke culture in our corporations just as the world was going into lockdowns over the pandemic. When I ran into Vivek again at the Middletown event, he was on to something that was just then becoming a recognizable problem, the takeover of American corporations by liberal politics that were backdooring our Constitution and imposing themselves beyond our politics for the destruction of our society. I thought his speech was compelling, so when he did his book tour on Fox News and many other places, I tried to catch every interview with him that I could, and I continued to be increasingly impressed, especially as we saw what The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab had been building up to in a post-Covid economy. Vivek had been more correct about things than anybody could have imagined. He took his insider knowledge of how Wall Street worked, and with Woke, Inc, he got in front of a significant attack on our way of life in America, and he really earned my respect. This respect culminated after rereading Woke, Inc after watching Vivek at the 2022 CPAC in Florida. That’s when it was clear that America was under attack not with tanks and troops but through finance and international progressivism. Before anybody knew what was coming, Vivek had his finger on it. 

But what made me want to get his signature wasn’t any of those things. By all measures of success, Vivek had hit the jackpot with Woke, Inc. But so do many other writers. It was a successful book that had been on the bestseller’s list for many months.   But that wasn’t why Vivek was doing what he was doing. The book was just the first step in the ultimate solution. When I found out about that, I grew very excited and determined that I would get him to sign my book the next time I saw him. Many people don’t understand the world of money management, which most of us have to interact with, and unfortunately, they have all turned radically to the political left. While we are arguing about politics and election results, these radical left-wingers have taken over all of finance. It doesn’t matter if its Larry Fink’s BlackRock, but State Street, Vanguard, and dozens of others at the top which all our 401K plans flow through are forcing us to hold our nose and put up with it because literally all our life’s work is often entangled in these liberal companies. They have shown that they are attacking our culture where it hurts most, through our economy. That is why Disney is bent over backward presently because their executives have all been put in place to satisfy ESG scores. Power plants are closing in Ohio because BlackRock owns a majority share of stock and can now command how the company has been run. In Larry Fink’s case, he has had a very incestuous relationship with the Federal Reserve, with Ben Bernake, Janet Yellon, and now Jerome Powell. They have printed money for Wall Street to build up a massive artificial asset bubble that has allowed these money management firms to buy up all these key stocks to liberalize the companies. So this isn’t small stuff, it’s all big, and there hasn’t been a solution until Vivek Ramaswamy brought his tireless energy and talent to the problem and is essentially changing the world for the better.

At this point, I’m not going to get into the details until Vivek is ready. But what makes me so proud of him is that he is working very hard to give people a choice, which is the key to American society. When it comes to money managers, they are all currently liberalized. To deal with them, we are forced to deal with progressive politics, ESG scores, and the nightmare of international controls that even makes Klaus Schwab blush. The point of Woke, Inc for Vivek Ramaswamy has been to create an option to that problem, to give people an off-ramp for their investments that do not involve woke politics, and to allow investments to flourish in measures of actual value instead of climate change initiatives and global power politics set by radicals like Al Gore. And that option is being created as we speak, and I think it will save our country from the financial side of things. That is why I couldn’t wait to have Vivek sign my book, why I am proud to have it, and why I think my great-grandchildren will find that information valuable. They’ll understand how things occurred when they want to know why I spent the kind of time I do on these things as history reflects on it and see Vivek’s signature in that book on my vast bookshelf. We can win elections. We can fight for liberty around the world. But if we let the monsters of finance run our lives through our money, we will be held hostage to value for which the bad guys determine it. And that isn’t freedom; it’s slavery.   If we want to remain free, we must defend our financial system, our corporations, and our national economy, where we control the standard. Not Klaus Schwab, not Larry Fink, and certainly not the maniacal lunatics from Chatham House in London, where they plot to rule the world through interconnected banking and ESG manipulations. Vivek Ramaswamy is working to give us a choice, and for that, the key to saving America resides. And I am very proud of him for what he has done.

Rich Hoffman

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Corporate Selfishness: They don’t respect our time, or money

They Don’t Respect our Time

It’s not enough to talk about the Constitution as it applies to the government and the people who elect it. One of my concerns about the purpose of my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is to more appropriately define the relationship that corporations have with society and government in general. This has essentially been a problem since the Jackson administration, where Cornelius Vanderbilt first exposed the cracks of corporate power in the years that followed. Now, of course, I’m not a believer in heavy regulation, and I do not think the government can manage power well at all. So they are certainly not capable of controlling corporate governance and shouldn’t even try. By nature, they always need money, and corporations all too easily buy them off with donations, which is why most of the corruption we see these days is happening. Corporations do not care about the Constitution. I have never been in a business exchange in all my years where business people suddenly said, “oh, that might be unconstitutional.” They simply will say, “well, if people want to get paid, they’ll put up with it.” That is why Biden attacked the vaccine mandates the way he did. The American Republic is most vulnerable through its corporations rather than through Constitutional mandates, so this is a long-time problem that needs a very modern solution. I have started to tackle this need in my book, and I’m sure many discussions will spawn from the continued necessity. 

So it is in that context, I say, especially among the new tech companies, that corporate America does not respect the people they do business with, and that needs to change dramatically.   It is a good thing that all companies should cherish to have a customer. But, corporations, whether it’s McDonald’s, Disney, network television, Wal-Mart, etc., have evolved over the years under government protections to disregard the customer experience. With more and more technology emerging, they have really come to abuse their relationship with consumers. And consumers have accepted this abuse by default because it’s coming from every direction so fast and furious that we haven’t really taken the time to understand what is happening to us. This is most obvious in the complete disregard of our personal time and freedoms concerning our corporations. Corporations, by their nature, are like only children; they assume they have exclusive access to the attention they want without considering all the other elements that are competing for the same time and money. For instance, McDonald’s isn’t thinking about the time and money that P&G is committing to new shampoo when it comes out with a new fish sandwich for the season of Lent. But the consumer only has so many hours in the day and so much expendable income. So when all these various elements seek selfishly to consume every waking hour of a customer’s life, there are lots of adverse effects that cascade off the experience that has a negative impact on the nature of our government in general.

For instance, I’m a Call of Duty player. I’d play it a lot more if I could, but I sleep about 7 hours a day these days. The rest of my 24 hour day is carefully planned in 15-minute increments. I do not have “free time.” I have lots of managed time, but I do not have empty time that is filled by random behavior. So I maybe get a half-hour a day to play Call of Duty which I consider a luxury. Now when you are in the Call of Duty world, or the platform of PlayStation in general, they make it so that you could easily spend 24 hours a day playing their game and their game only. It is quite a culture of game players, and I can see why many people who want to be good at it would easily stay home and play that game all day, all night, for seven days a week. There is enough content to really just live in the Call of Duty world. No wonder our employment numbers are so low now that the government has taught people that they are willing to pay people to stay home. I look at the number of people playing Call of Duty with me whenever I am playing and think a lot about all the lost productive time spent on that game. Sometimes, if I worry about something and can’t sleep very well, I get up at 2 AM and play a few rounds, and there are always thousands and thousands of players in the queue ready to play any game I pick within the Call of Duty environment.   But it gets even more complicated than that. Call of Duty is just one game out there; many other games are just as popular, such as the Madden games, Fortnite, and many others, all that have their game bases filled with people willing to spend their time and money on those products. But, time in a day is not infinite, so there is a management problem that we have to deal with as a modern consideration. And the corporate influence is committing the same problem they always do. They assume that the consuming public will put 100% of their time into their product in the same way that an only child expects their parents always to be available to them. 

But, while we are trying to find all our passwords to all our media accounts, and playing all these games, and are under pressure constantly to update our media accounts and to read all the legal agreements with each one, people have no room to figure out the origin of Covid, or the FBI tampering in Michigan with the Whitmer case, or the paradox of Ray Epps and the FBI attempting a false flag on January 6th, as they usually do when the government needs to make a political case beneficial to them, there is no time for people to give to these subjects because they are too worried about what their password is to their Diseny+ account. Or their bank is changing their account number because they are doing a system update. And at work, people might have an account for Microsoft Teams, their inventory systems, their clocking systems. Everywhere people turn these days, there is some technological incursion for their time that is not being managed, hurting the American family and their productive output. I would say that the solution is not more regulation, but is more like I say in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. The way to punch back at corporate selfishness is to hit them where they genuinely care to protect, in their self-preservation. Right now, they assume that consumers will always be there for them whenever they decide they want them. But by applying constitutional concepts to even corporate culture, as it should have always have been from the start going all the way back to the Jackson administration, many of these modern problems could have been alleviated. Consumers could still be consumers, but they would be more than that to the world of corporate America. And that’s what’s missing now, is that people are people who should be respected first and foremost, starting with their time and money. Because just as every only child must learn at some point, they are not the only things in the world that matter. And to truly be balanced in the world and good, they must learn to deal with the rest of the world respectfully and with excellent quality.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Woke, Inc. and The Gunfighter’s Guide: Meeting Vivek Ramaswamy and entangled fate

Woke, Inc. and The Gunfighter’s Guide

I was introduced to Vivek Ramaswamy by the great Butler County, Ohio treasurer Nancy Nix.  You might ask what makes her great; well, she has the books balanced in Butler County, where we all live, Vivek, Nancy, and about 400,000 other residents, and we are operating financially at a surplus.  Not a small town, but she and others like her serve Butler County as a fine example of good government, proving that it is possible.  She knew some of the things I have been doing, and she certainly knew Vivek as he was a very wealthy ex-CEO of biotech firms who wrote a book called Woke, Inc.  He was the featured speaker that night at the Middletown GOP office, which I had attended to hear what he had to say.  Nancy thought Vivek and I might have an interesting conversation. That’s when I learned that Vivek had been in attendance at a big campaign rally that I had organized a year and a half earlier where he had an epiphany to change his life, quit his job, and write this book.  Because at that rally which was saturated with political correctness, he saw a very good friend of mine, a CEO who at significant risk, came out publically in favor of Trump, and Vivek thought that was pretty cool.  It inspired him, so he sat down and wrote Woke, Inc for the next year and a half.  I accepted a warm handshake from Vivek and got along well with him for the rest of that evening, enjoying the early preview of his book that wasn’t due to come out for a few more months.  I made no mention of my own book, but the more he spoke that night, the more I realized that something weird was going on in Butler County.  After all, J.D. Vance was from Middletown who wrote the Hillbilly Elegy who practically lived in my backyard.  Now Vivek was a multimillionaire investor and biotech wiz who had decided to turn against woke culture and spill the secrets of that inner sanctum, and of course, my various projects. That’s a lot of exciting debate for a relatively small part of the world in southern Ohio. 

Vivek’s book came out on August 17th, and I immediately read it a few times.  I love the book, there are many things I could debate, but in essence, it’s a great book with a mass-market appeal that I want to cheerlead on as much as possible.  The more people who read it, the more people will understand what kind of fight we are in to balance out the needs of government with the needs of capitalism and the corporate alliance that has drifted away from America and merged with the Davos crowd of international conspirators.  I will likely read Woke, Inc. several more times because it is written at a high level and is filled with great information.  But the more I read it, the more I felt that my book, ironically comes out on August 28th, just a few days after Vivek’s contains the answers to many of the questions posed in Woke, Inc.  I found it incredibly ironic that two people from roughly the same area with different backgrounds would independently identify essentially the same problem and attack it almost like a question then answer.  For instance, a couple of the chapters from Vivek’s book, most notably “The Rise of the Managerial Class,” were the very aspects I was targeting in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as a way to contend with.  Ultimately, what was driving woke culture was fear, and I intended to teach people not to be afraid.  Once fear was conquered, many of the mechanisms mentioned in Vivek’s book would be eliminated.  But here were two people who independently arrived at a driving need and only shared a few chance meetings in getting there.  How inspired Vivek was from the event I hosted, I don’t think, will ever be measured.  But the irony was not lost on me. 

Where my mind has gone, however, is based on my background, not so much as a business manager and poker player with investor house money, but from my own experience at managing fear by taking away the option of people being able to scare you.  So I took my experiences as a gunfighter, for sport, as a foundation for approaching woke culture, just the latest rendition of socialism and Marxism.  Where I planned to give a review of Woke, Inc., which I’m sure I will at some point, I couldn’t stop thinking about how his book almost ended with a segway into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.   Yet mine is targeted to influence leaders, not necessarily a mass public.  That would be the case for most of my stuff.  But in all these explorations into an epistemological philosophy, you have to start with identifying the problem, which Vivek did.  While I could tell that Vivek was working out some things in his approach, he comes from a background in India where ideas of capitalism were romanticized as a way to opportunity.  In Vivek’s world, arranged marriages were very much a real thing.  My approach was to strip away the façade of the progressive era and set my book in the Old West, a period of American history that most people can agree on and have some relationship from which to build.   We live, after all, in a time when wokeness is seeking to erase our history, so we forget who we are.  Where toxic masculinity is illustrated so that Western civilization’s fall can be ignited without challengers, the danger is very much real.  So I set my scope there and then used that platform to teach people how to be all those great things again to attack this new “Managerial Class” that Vivek spent much of his book talking about.

I did enjoy Vivek’s book a lot.  If I didn’t have the experiences, I mentioned I would still feel that way.  One thing I talk a lot about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the value in “ghosting it,” and if something I did a year and a half ago inspired such a brilliant mind like Vivek’s, that makes me happy to hear.  I would suspect that Vivek, a big-time insider, had been thinking about these topics for a long time before he took his plunge into independence.  Reading his book, it sounds like he is making a platform for a political campaign for the future, where he wants to fix these kinds of woke problems as a legislator. That’s all great; it takes all sorts of people independently to make things happen, which is evident in some of the writing coming out of Butler County, Ohio.  Nobody was talking to each other, yet here come all these exciting ideas to contribute to a social need that has been brewing for a long time.  I tend not to spend much time thinking about that kind of thing.  Whatever divine intervention is doing its magic, I welcome.  My goal is to do what I can every day to make the world a better place in whatever way possible.  And in that regard, I am proud of Vivek.  He could have chosen a cushy life and easily become a billionaire by just riding the coaster into the station, especially for a guy like him, charismatic and full of energy.  But if I had any part in inspiring him to write Woke, Inc. with a political rally, well, I can say that his book inspired me of just how vital the themes in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business are for a hungry public looking for answers.  In that way, the world may just be finding a way to step out of the smoke and into a prosperous new tomorrow. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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