Tag: corruption

The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs: A review and an observation on the nature of existance

I have always loved westerns, they are uniquely American inventions born of our culture and the world watches them with great curiosity. If you are in a hotel in London or even Paris and Madrid, and flipping through the channels in the middle of the night, you will see lots of old westerns playing because to them there is great optimism in old American westerns. Westerns specifically show values easily in a stripped away fashion of what American values truly are, what a capitalist society truly thinks about itself and others. Hollywood essentially built itself on the strength of the western but leftist radicals’ intent on destroying America have launched a not so secret crusade against all westerns essentially, most obvious in big Disney productions like The Lone Ranger and the Star Wars film Solo: A Star Wars Story. Even in the disguise of science fiction such as Solo was, modern critics and the entertainment press in general want nothing to do with them, and they make it known as they try to torpedo those films at the box office leaving a clear message to filmmakers to stay away from the genre or else. Those who do so dare usually end up turning the American western into a Shakespearian tragedy which is certainly the case of the new one from the Coen Brothers called The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs, just released to Netflix and the video game by Rockstar Games called Red Dead Redemption 2. However, in the case of both references, Red Dead and Buster Sgruggs the old traditions of the American western are there and represented strongly and in the age of the Trump presidency, are quite necessary.

It wasn’t planned this way because Rockstar Games has been making Red Dead Redemption 2 for the last eight years, and the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan have been writing The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs for the last 15 years so neither could have known what would happened in 2016 when Donald Trump would be elected president and the world would be shifting toward nationalism as opposed to a one world government. But with those events westerns such as these suddenly have much more appeal to the longing individualists struggling to make sense of our modern times. And let me tell you something dear reader, it is a real treat to get something as good as The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs delivered to the comfort of your own living room through Netflix as opposed to having to go to the theater to watch it. The film was released to limited theatrical presentations, but on a project like this very inventive western, it is a must watch for those with Netflix accounts.

However, I would not call The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs a traditional western such as Bonanza or Gunsmoke where the protagonists defeat the antagonists with great moral clarity by the end of the story set to uplifting music. Buster Sgruggs is a tragedy, but in all other aspects, it is a very epic achievement of art set against the canvas of America and is very much worth watching. The movie is divided up into six primary stories and is presented in a format much like the great film by Akira Kurosawa called Dreams. The six stories are very compelling but one in particular I felt a great affinity with, it was the story of an old gold digger panning for gold in some unlisted wilderness environment. I think that story said so much about the pros and cons of capitalism in a very simple setting that it was brilliant in its execution. That portion of the story was well worth watching all by itself.

I have a real love of old western towns and Buster Sgruggs had plenty of well-designed sets that were wonderfully built of old frontier towns. The reason I love those towns so much is that they say a lot about us as human beings, suddenly free from the aristocrats of politics and provided with great resources, what is it that humans desire to build. Modern cities have lots of added levels to them and the benefit of modern construction methods, but when you look at an old frontier town and consider the amount of human capital it took to build them, everything from downing the trees, to plaining the wood for construction to building every last thing by hand, to see a town build in a remote corner of the world for the purpose of a new economy freshly discovered in just a few years is quite a remarkable undertaking. And in a lot of ways The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs captured that dim hope that the human race placed in such projects without being overly preachy about it. Everything was wonderfully shot and was generally ambitious in the way that those old towns were constructed. The filmmakers seemed to have understood that yearning and applied the same effort to their craft to obvious effect.

Another particularly sad but very effective story was the segment involving Liam Neeson as he traveled the country with a quadriplegic orator. Not to give anything away, but it was quite a commentary on the human condition and why people do things that they do. The results were ultimately very depressing, but all too honest and I thought it was a wonderful display of high art. Way too sad, but honest and it really is a good format to tell a story like that in the context of a western where people for the first time in their lives were free to roam about on their own, without the protections of group affiliations or government reach.

Another such tragedy that I didn’t see the end coming was the segment about the Oregon Trail, wonderfully photographed in Nebraska with a real caravan of covered wagons. You can’t help but love the characters, they are very likable and you want to cheer them on to success. The love story that evolves is one that anybody would want to see flourish, but how it all ends was just sobering. Often human beings cut the rug out from under themselves all with good intentions, but we often write our own tragic ends in life before the story ever starts. And that was the case of that story, sad, tragic but worth living. It was a mesmerizing tail not so much of good and evil, but in stupidity and hope, blind faith, and the harsh realities of existence.

If you get a chance, I’d highly recommend The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs and to watch it with an open mind, without the pretense of previous westerns. I would not so much call this a tragedy set in the west because there are moments of great optimism in it. I for one had several favorite characters, my favorite probably being Buster Sgruggs himself and the banker who is tasked with fending off a bank robbery. I can really relate to that guy. But ultimately, I think my favorite character was the old man panning for gold. His shock and awe intertwined with endless hope and persistence is something that anybody could admire. And his story alone makes The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs worth watching. But lucky for us there is so much more to enjoy and it is a real achievement in these changing days of entertainment where something of that quality can be streamed at home rather than a theatrical experience which is yet another benchmark in our march into the future.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump’s Interview with Chris Wallace in 2018: One trying to preserve the politcal order from thousands of years, the other a CEO born out of capitalism

A few interesting observations about the Chris Wallace interview with President Trump on Fox News, now two years in office, it is quite clear that even the most politically astute, and experienced, still don’t understand why the Trump White House is so magical. For so many centuries, really for several thousand years all aspects of the human race have been built around ideas of democracy and society as established by the Greek and Romans. But those are limiting factors, under the banners of capitalism new kinds of leaders have advanced and they are now in direct competition with the assumptions of the old, and that is what is going on with this very interesting interview. Chris Wallace is trying to hold Trump to an ancient standard of political leadership whereas the president is behaving as any culture building leader would, and the clash is rather obvious.

What is missing from the politics of old is that charismatic salesman who looks at everything as half full and leads their team of industrialists through every kind of terror with a smile on their face. It’s not that we haven’t seen characters like Donald Trump before in history, but never have they been at the top of government running countries until this specific moment in time. Not a single Roman emperor, or Greek philosopher was ever in a position across the world as President Trump is presently. Not a single king or queen of England, France or Spain had such a glass half full personality driving their population. So when Chris Wallace asked President Trump questions about his administration, his relationship with the press, controversies from political insurgents and the like, Trump’s answers are literally new to the world.

Yet in just about every business across the nation Trump’s leadership style is somewhat recognizable. Under the most powerful economy of the world a certain kind of personality must emerge and logically speaking it was only a matter of time before one of them ended up in the White House. What has the globalist seekers trying to unite the world under one flag for which they control so terrified, which was only exacerbated by the Fox News Wallace interview was that after everything that has been thrown at Trump, he is still an optimistic salesman selling nationalism across the world. Nationalism is spreading all over Europe, and even into the Middle East and Asia. Trump as a natural Chief Executive Officer knows how to set up a sale and through the mechanisms of political order has established a norm that globalists just cannot compete with, and everyone knows it. Trump unphased and loose on his feet with probably the best news man in America that is left in Chris Wallace had delivered the world into a completely new age of thinking.

Determinations of leadership used to be considered not on merit, but by birthright or conquest. Never has such leaders of economic dominance been in a position to lead nations, they have always had to grovel for appeasement to leaders who were unworthy of real leadership. That checks, and balance system has dominated since the dawn of mankind, so this Trump phenomenon is a very new thing. Chris Wallace was asking his questions based on the way things were as Trump was answering them based on how things would be from now on. After only two years in office he has turned the entire system on its head. After another six, the world will be changed forever. That is what was obvious from that Fox News interview.

What was even more interesting was the grand picture of the situation which I thought of specifically as I watched the interview. Chris Wallace is a Democrat, but he’s a good reporter who is about as fair and balanced as they get. Many people consider Fox News to be a conservative bastion of reporting, but that clearly isn’t the case. Since the days of Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes and the waning influence of Rupert Murdoch the news station is becoming more and more liberal moving dramatically to the center. I would never have considered Bill O’Reilly a bastion of conservative thought either, he was a centrist in my book to a large degree, so it’s not like Fox News represents the standard of conservatism. They are just more so than other stations which is why conservatives watch them more than other outlets. But that could change quickly and likely will over the coming years. Fox News for me is nearly unwatchable during the day and on weekends. I would not say that Fox News is friendly to the President. They certainly weren’t on the Chris Wallace interview, yet Trump continues to give Fox News exclusive access to him which has helped them dominate in the ratings war over the ever-changing media landscape. But one thing that has become quite clear, news like most other things is becoming more and more decentralized. Social media is now taking over where Fox News and others have dominated and by the time that Trump does leave office, it will be a completely different story.

One thing that continues to come up regarding the president which was talked about in great detail during the Wallace interview was the Russian conspiracy and whether the new AG should recuse himself. Any CEO of a company could easily root this problem out and see it for what it is, a kind of employee uprising meant to wrestle control of the company away from its leadership, an insurrection. Most politicians would have no idea how to handle the optics of that problem but for Trump, it’s no big deal. He’s not going to allow the Mueller investigation to run the culture of the country and give Democrats the power they hope it will. Now that the election is over and they have seats in the House, enough to make fools of themselves with, Trump is going to let them hang. Any good CEO would see this as a clear strategic option. Emperors and kings from the past would look to appease the mob, but leaders created under the banner of capitalism are functioning from extra values that most people around the world don’t yet understand, so the results and methods of getting those results are yet uncharted in political life. But Trump knows what to do and just how to do it.

For centuries we have allowed liberal artists to write anti-capitalist books and movies portraying the American industrialist as a villain. But in reality, most of them are brilliant tactical thinkers. I would say that even the manager of a typical American fast food restaurant has more leadership skill than the typical dictator or emperor of a destitute third world country and that is the miracle of American capitalism, the ability to produce such minds and put them to work in the world. And the current hatred of President Trump is to maintain that illusion. But time is running out and reality is telling a different story and as Chris Wallace tried to hold the White House to the standards of old, Trump is just too optimistic for that world. He easily skipped across Wallace’s tough questions and left the interview as still a glass half full guy, which is what makes this presidency so much different from those of the past. And very exciting to be a part of.

Rich Hoffman

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How the Kardasian’s Saved Their $20 Million Mansion from the Wildfires: Decentralization of all services is the trend of the future

I don’t know much about Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Celebrity gossip and trivial nonsense is a massive waste of time and I contribute nothing to that enterprise. I did recently learn that I liked Kanye West because he has emerged over the last few years as a Trump supporter. Other than that, I know they are celebrities and they make their mark in the world on social media. They are of course rich because they serve a role in society of making regular people occupied with foolish behavior so they won’t truly look at the world as Democrats attempt to steal even more counties in California for the House of Representatives, flipping those previously conservative seats. While crimes occurred people marvel at the Kardashian sisters and their beauty and controversy and forget about the low bar nature of their personal lives, which seems to be the only goal of magazines like “People” and other tabloid acts. But I did hear something interesting involving Kim Kardashian and her husband, that they avoided having their $20 million dollar mansion destroyed by the California wildfires in Hidden Valley by employing and maintaining their own fire department. Honestly, I had never heard of this but learned that out of all fire departments in existence a small single digit percentage of them are privately employed. But any would be something I’d consider an extraordinary revelation.

I have been a tremendous critic of public employee tax payer funded centralized organizations culminating with the Senate Bill 5 that Sharon Jones and John Kasich tried to get passed back in 2012. I went all in even though it was dangerous supposedly to piss off your local fire department, police and teachers who were all targeted in that bill to break up the collective bargaining agreements they have as public employees to suck off all our tax money in extraordinary ways without any real management to control the out of control costs. When their obvious banter came back to me that only they had the courage to run into a fire or toward danger while I slept well at night my response was to call bullshit. If I see danger I run to it every time. I love danger, actually I’m obsessed with danger—I go looking for it ever waking hour of my life, so what they were saying to me just didn’t stick. They were doing what they always do as public employees, they tried to use sentiment and a natural fear of danger to asset that we should pay them infinite amounts of money for their public service. Then we are supposed to worship them in every parade and memorial ceremony. And if you feel differently they really develop a bad relationship with you, almost like they’d love to teach you a lesson for daring to challenge their role in society.

I’ve had the same fallout with teachers. When I questioned their ridiculous budgets at my home district of Lakota I had some of those union activists approach me and declare that I couldn’t teach their classes because the effort was too hard. My response to them was that I’d be happy to take them up on that challenge. In fact, I took it even higher, I volunteered to teach four classes all by myself to prove my point, which nobody took me up on. I was quite serious about my proposal. I’m not one of those people who will say, teaching kids in a class is too hard, or that charging a gunman as a police officer is either. And in fighting fires, I think it would be fun to save people and put out fires. I wouldn’t think of it as work, more as a human obligation. So I’m not one who thinks there is great value in those occupations. I think there is value in the tasks, but as large labor unions attached to tax payer money, I think there are better ways to do it.

I’ve often said about teachers that the decentralization of information these days has made them pretty irrelevant. Once children learn to read, write and do math, the public education system pretty much just drags out their baby-sitting service for the next ten years mostly ruining the ambitions of young minds in the process. And police have their role, but more guns in the hands of responsible people is the real answer to crime and punishment. But I never really considered fire fighting as an option to decentralization. I can say that when I’ve been in situations to put out a fire, I’ve always done it myself. And some of them were quite big. I’m not a call the fire department and stand outside and wait kind of guy. I never have been and I never will be. But they do have good equipment and expertise in basic medical care that saves lives, so I have sympathy for their efforts as first responders. They fix a lot of cut up people and people who suffer heart attacks and that can be a tough job to show up at a site and have people always in a state between life and death. But do these people have to work for an international labor union and do they have to be centralized in a community?

So we’ve heard so much about the California wildfires, and how they are destroying so much property. We’ve heard they were caused by global warming and other gods of disaster by liberals who still think that rain dancing and wearing the severed head of an animal as a mask is a viable option to solving problems of drought. And we watch on the news as constrained resources fight these massive fires that just spawn out of control. But then we learn that the Kardasians had their own fire department who built a fire break around their property and kept the fires from destroying their home. Why does a constrained resource have to be so, why can’t such services be decentralized so that quick action can be taken when danger arises? If you can afford it, why limit yourself to a constrained, publicly funded service? Seems kind of dumb to me and obviously most of the wealthy people who lost their homes in places like Malibu could have done the same. Instead, like a bunch of idiots they evacuated and let the professionals do the work of letting everything burn down because they were trying to fight fires everywhere at once and doing very little to actually solve the problem.

This Kardashian example is just another glimpse into the correct future, where public utilities are decentralized, where every home generates its own power, where every home can get anywhere in the world from their driveway, where even food is brought to your door without the added complexity of having to waste time going out and getting it. Already information has been decentralized in our relatively new phones which are essentially not just communication devices with anybody in the world any time of day, but are vast libraries of information and surveillance right in the palm of your hand. I often think of my iPhone as being as powerful as a typical television station was as I grew up. That is also the trend for all these public services. If you have the money, why not have your own fire fighting department to protect your property? It makes sense to me.

But that of course isn’t the message liberals want people to hear. They want more centralized authority and they use these positions, police, fire departments and teachers to make their arguments for more government that they control. But if they were so effective, California wouldn’t burn to the ground the way it has. Most of that damage was quite avoidable and the Kardasians proved it. While the fires were hard to put out, their path can be diverted out and away from valuable property. But because their efforts were too centralized, places like Malibu just burnt to the ground leaving a bunch of celebrities to stand crying in the streets and reminding America why more centralized authority was needed in all fields of endeavor. That is until the Kardasians showed that the whole thing really has been a ruse to sell more socialism from the beginning and that is a very important observation to consider.

Rich Hoffman

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House Bill 228: No more singing in the rain for bad guys

I am extremely proud of the current congress in Ohio as the gavel dropped in the affirmative on House Bill 228. I wasn’t too excited at first as several people were quick to let me know that the vote had been taken and passed as it happened. My response to them all was that we still had a liberal governor in Kasich so he’d veto it. The bill would arrive dead essentially. But over the last couple of days many from Columbus told me much better news, that they fully expected Kasich to veto Ohio’s new Stand Your Ground law, but that they had the votes to override the veto. Now that became an entirely different matter all together and the fact that the Ohio congress acted so boldly at the end of the session spoke a lot about what’s to come for the positive. Stand Your Ground laws are needed everywhere and they reinforce the Second Amendment in ways the Bill of Rights was always philosophically designed. I consider The Anti Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers to be some of the most joyous reading I’ve ever done in my life and there can be no understanding of American Constitutional law without accepting that the paramount epoxy of a proper structured society is the decentralization of law enforcement using the gun as the symbol of order. And for Ohio to take that proper step in making Stand Your Ground legislation the law of the land the state takes that critical step forward in raising the bar for a state that was being tempted to go purple to turning a nice bright red.

With a vote of 64 to 26 House Bill 228 passed comfortably showing great conviction. I know the House has had to sit on their attempts for a long time knowing that Kasich would prevent its advancement. But what was a surprise was that the House proved they could get the three fifths of the total vote count needed to override a veto, which in this case is 60 votes out of 99. With the 64 House of Representatives members who voted in favor o House Bill 228 they are already there. Then of course it will take 20 of 33 Senators to get passage of the bill without the governor’s signature. “Isn’t this exciting!” I learned from a good source that the senate was on board as well which was a stunning revelation. Of course, this boldness comes after the election before the newly elected congress takes over but its more than symbolic in nature. Kasich has prevented many of these conservative advancements and because many members of the House and Senate were up for election, they couldn’t afford to have Kasich pulling resources away from their re-elections. But it is refreshing to see that the moment they could, this congress acted and they did so boldly on legislation that is far from the type of change agent progressivism that has taken over Columbus in recent years like a vast sickness.

Stand Your Ground in Ohio is a big deal. The “duty to retreat” laws that have been in place were always dangerous and a real impediment to continued growth in both a population sense and in relation to business. With a “duty to retreat” it has added an unnecessary layer of burden to gun users when faced with hostile adversity. If something is going on that is hostile in nature a person acting in good faith should never have to worry about hesitating when faced with eminent threats. I can say I’ve been in those situations more than once and have not elected to use a gun because I did not want to go through the legal mess that always comes after. I have the fortune to have other tools to stay out of trouble and I use them more than I’d care to admit. But I do worry often about those tools not working and having to resort to a gun, and with Stand Your Ground, one less layer of concern has now been removed. House Bill 228 doesn’t allow people to have shoot outs in a Wal-Mart parking lot over parking spaces. But it does give gun defenders the ability to use deadly force to resolve a situation at the point of a threat. Under the “duty to retreat” obligation not only was a gun owner under a burden to diffuse a threat before using deadly force, but they had the burden on them to prove it. When some criminal loser is acting aggressively they don’t care often what happens next. They only live in the moment whereas their targets are at a tactical disadvantage of having to be put in a circumstance to think of the future while facing the possibility of everything coming to an end right then and there. If you do survive those moments, you might lose everything you own in law suit after lawsuit and many years in jail. “Duty to Retreat” favored a progressive vision of society where dissemination of activity, high taxes and massive government welfare has spawned sharp increases in criminal activity putting good people at a burden to deal with the conduct.

The way things have been reminded me of the book and movie, A Clockwork Orange, where young criminal gangs terrorize innocent people because they know that people who have built value of themselves in society are always at a disadvantage. A person who has nothing to lose always has leverage against people who have everything to lose. And progressive legislation, (regressive in human nature) favors the down and out of society, the criminally inclined and inherently lazy. Their premise is that all people are equal, and that property should be redistributed to all, so the criminal element helps them achieve this goal through open crime and theft. Obviously, they don’t want people of value to be able to defend themselves from people of little value with a gun so that is why there has been legislation in Ohio that favored “duty to retreat.” If a criminal wants what you have, then you have a duty to retreat to save the lives of everyone involved. These are the same kind of people who wanted to lower the criminalization standards in Ohio with Issue 1 over the last election. Their goals are to grow criminal conduct that redistributes property to those who need it—the down and out, and the poor—essentially the Robin Hood effect. Clockwork Orange was an interesting observation of the trend of these redistributive thoughts and in how they unleashed the worst elements of society. For the anarchist the criminal is a saint, to the builder of a republic, the criminal is a detriment, a cancer that must be eliminated.  The singing in the rain scene from that film shown above is specifically what I’m thinking about.  While the scene is a dramatized version of rape violence the behavior of the criminal mind I think is captured all too well in that Stanley Kubrick classic.  So the essence behind all such legislation is what kind of society we really want to have, a republic or a anarchists paradise that puts power in the hands of the criminal and ties the hands of the law binding and hard-working behind their backs while their assets are stolen from them. Before Ohio voted for this Stand Your Ground law, that was the philosophic premise of the previous progressive legislation.

The trend of our society in every American state is moving in the direction of the gun owners. Gun ownership is part of American life—its at the core of our philosophy. While pockets of our society are still functioning from European progressivism and the noise they leave behind sounds bigger than it really is on the nightly news, the real trend is toward more individual liberty and the protection of that liberty with a gun. If you plot out legislation history not just in the Ohio statehouse but also in Washington D.C. the trajectory of what guns mean philosophically to our society is headed away from confiscation and more gun control and toward more freedom, and many more of them in the hands of hard-working people who have something to defend. And that is great news for the good, and terrible news for the bad. While progressives hate judgements of people into such categories the gun then becomes the judge. If a bad person seeks to inflict harm on a good person who is just minding their business, now the gun can rectify that conduct. The burden is not on the good to prove that they didn’t suddenly become bad the moment they pulled the trigger. And that is historic in how humans deal with each other. Because good people don’t go around creating gun violence, but bad people do. And now we have a situational judgment that can root out the unnatural paradox. Which is a wonderful thing to behold. Nice job in the Ohio House! That is truly something to be proud of.

Rich Hoffman

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Those Murdering Wagners from Pike County, Ohio: The reason guns make society safer

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As it turned out, I know people who know people who know people who knew the Wagner’s, the four family members who slaughtered the marijuana producing Rhoden family in Pike County, Ohio a few years ago. It didn’t surprise me to learn that the heavily tattooed George Wagner III and his wife Angela along with their two sons George the Vth and Edward were responsible for the execution style killings of eight people. Pike County is rural, everyone knows everyone, and almost every house has someone’s ex-wife in it and when it comes to child custody which is always a problem of high turnover divorce situations, or loose sexual ethics, tempers flare. It doesn’t matter what courts decide, particularly among people who have the IQ of a potato, when raw, primitive instincts are unleashed, things like this grisly murder happen.

When people were slow to back Mike DeWine for governor, now they get to see why many of us supported him. DeWine may not be flashy, but he certainly didn’t back down from this horrible case as Ohio’s Attorney General and thank goodness he didn’t. There was plenty of wrong to go around when the bodies of Christopher Rhoden Sr., 40; his ex-wife Dana Manley Rhoden, 37; their three children, Hanna May Rhoden, 19; Christopher Rhoden Jr., 16; and Clarence “Frankie” Rhoden, 20. Frankie Rhoden’s fiancée, Hannah “Hazel Gilley,” 20, were found badly beaten, butchered, and killed execution style, along with the brother and cousin of Christopher Rhoden Sr., Kenneth Rhoden, 44, and Gary Rhoden, 38. The nation has been shocked not just once due to the nature of the murders, but in seeing the pictures of the Wagner family. The shock that such normal people, “so to speak” could do such a thing has captured the terror that resides in most everyone, in wondering who among the people they know might be capable of something similar.

What always shocks me about cases like this is how the family could have lived since then. The Wagners obviously were a close family who talked to each other and had at least great passion for the kid that was at the center of the killings, but what did they think would happen after they killed the Rhoden family? Imagine the dinner conversations after they killed eight people in a Ohio county where if someone sneezes, every house knows about it. Feeling the pressure the Wagners moved to Alaska where they actually had conversations with their landlord about coming back to Ohio and clearing their name, so they were professing innocence. Imagine living with the knowledge that you had been involved in such a terrible crime then trying to tell people you knew about it and declaring innocence. You would either have to be terribly stupid or just manically evil. Regardless, it was great work by Mike DeWine’s office and law enforcement to put all the pieces together and make the arrests of the Wagner family this past week. And watching them appear in court I just have to shake my head in wonder what they were thinking and what life for them must have been like over the past two years. I mean did they sit down as a family and stream movies off Netflix and live like normal people? How didn’t the crushing weight of what they had done destroy their happiness in their every day life? Then looking at them and watching their courtroom conduct, I think they were just too stupid to know that what they did was wrong and they were likely too thoughtless to quell their emotions in the first place which is how these killings happened originally.

There will always be George Wagners in the world, dumb people acting on animal instincts who tattoo themselves up to look like a menace to society to earn respect that they can never get due to their limited intellectual abilities. And when their ruse doesn’t work, they will seek to enforce their emotions through physical dominance, these problems are as old as the human race itself. We can create laws to stop it, but marijuana is against the law yet the Rhoden family had a major growth operation, they weren’t completely innocent in all this. This is precisely what happens when we have a lawless society filled with people who have not pushed themselves intellectually interacting with each other. What you end up with is a society obsessed with sex and death and in that context, the Wagners were functioning at the level of the average animal, and nothing more.

We like to think that we have a civilization where public education and a structured society might avoid making people like the Wagners and the Rhodens. But I can tell you that through massive parts of rural America and well within the inner cities, a lot of people aren’t very far off from these primitive emotions. They are all one power outage away from becoming mass murderers themselves. All it would take is a lack of access to bread and water for a few days and they could easily become serial killers. There is only one thing that keeps these people in check, just like why animals don’t go near campfires or the sound of a gun shot can scare off predators, and that is their own fear of death. For the very stupid and unsophisticated, most people, even the Wagners as dumb as they appeared to be, have a basic instinct for self-preservation. That’s why after they committed the crimes, they fled to Alaska to hopefully outlast Mike DeWine’s investigation. Some states with less tenacious attorney generals might have given up after a few years of investigation, so the Wagners came back to Ohio expecting that to be the case, but obviously that wasn’t what happened.

This is why I say often, more and more these days, that gun ownership is an intellectual pursuit, because it provides protection from the lawless and stupid that structured society fails to provide. A structured, respectful society only exists when people like these Wagners are diffused from action out of their own preservation. But if they think the target of their anger or anxiety is unarmed, they will all too often function from raw emotion. They have no respect for the law as life in Pike County tends to be. There are a lot of marijuana growers there who live too far away from the city to have a steady job. Once the premise for law breaking is established then more advanced law breaking becomes more and more of an option. Murder is against the law but so is running through a stop sign, or speeding, or selling drugs. Once you rationalize one thing, the door to everything else is opened and chaos erupts. In such a world, which no law can prevent, the gun is the only thing that normal people can use to keep the villains of the world safely away.

This is why I propose that more guns not less are the essential element to a more civilized society. Gun possession and the will to use them against assailants triggers in people like the Wagners at least a measure of self-preservation that may well prevent senseless murders over raw passions such as in the Rhoden case. I’m sure the Rhoden’s had guns, but they likely weren’t readily available. I think guns should be worn or be near their owners most times of the day. At any point in my 24-hour day I am never very far from mine ever. It’s not that I plan to shoot anybody, but when your enemies know you have them, it causes them to take an extra measure of planning before they try to kill you. Often that is a variable that they are too lazy to sift through, and when those enemies are as dumb and unsophisticated as the Wagners, they are likely to turn on the television and forget about their flared tempers when given the option of a possible death among themselves. And that is the only real way to have a peaceful society.

When you carry a gun, even around your house you aren’t conducting your life-like some gun crazed lunatic, the way gun control advocates would like to portray such people. You are saving lives by detouring many attempts that would otherwise occur. That is exactly why gun free zones are so dangerous and why many of our gun free cities have the highest crime rates. Guns are the fabric of a structured society and they keep losers like the Wagner family from showing up on your doorstep wanting to kill you because you looked at their “ol’ lady,” or that you took their parking space at a Dollar Store. By having the gun with you at all times in your life, you keep those types of losers from becoming murderers and you keep crime from happening and that is the only method of real law enforcement that works.

Rich Hoffman

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The Tree of Global Warming: California’s schizophrenic relationship with exsistance

I have to give President Trump credit for doing the unpopular thing and that is criticizing forest management in California while the wild fires were still blazing and destroying massive amounts of property and killing people in live time. Many thought it was insensitive to the firefighters who were still battling the blazes and sentiments quickly retreated back into the patriotism and sacrifice of those fighting the fire, but to Trump’s point, there shouldn’t have been wildfires to begin with. Like most things that he is dealing with in his presidency, everything from empowering North Korea and Iran to be boogeymen in the world to be feared to insurmountable debt attached to socialist legacy costs, Trump with his business background looked at the wildfires and determined the cause, which most people aren’t used to hearing from the political arena.

The cause of the multiple wildfires in California isn’t just the dry conditions due to extended droughts toward the end of each calendar year, its in the regulations that California has put on itself to preserve the habitats of plants and animals but allowing way too much underbrush to exist in forest regions which then become kindling for any fire that might arise. The environments for the species the laws were meant to protect end up killed anyway, but with it millions of dollars of property and lives who have built homes in those tree hugging regions only to be removed from the connection to begin with. We live in the modern world, wildlife management, especially near populated areas should be removing all the underbrush under a forest canopy to remove the fuel for any potential wildfires. That they didn’t is the cause of these massive fires ultimately. And regarding the dryness of the plant life, there are underground aquifers that could be tapped in to in order to act as a natural sprinkler system should the need arise in population centers. Not taking those proactive measurements is precisely what President Trump was talking about.

Even though part of me felt sorry for them it was almost comical to listen to the governor of California insist that the cause of the problem was global warming as celebrities stood among the ruins of their homes in Malibu. I mean they are the ones who built their homes in an area known for wild fires, and they are the ones who have taken positions favoring the preservation of nature against the efforts of mankind. You can’t have it both ways. If you build homes in the paths of hurricanes, earth quakes and forest fires, eventually you are going to get bitten. Especially if no measures are taken to prevent the tragedies in the first place. It’s insane to have regulations against preventative action because California is trying to preserve wildlife when by the lack of prevention causes more death and destruction not just for the humans involved, but the wildlife they were trying to save. The situation is an insane approach built by a schizophrenic society.

Like most backward thinking people who ironically in this case call themselves “progressives” they have regulated logic back to the actions of mystics, the blame they contend is the mythic realm of the gods, in this case “global warming.” That is the only way that California can get away with trying to have their cake and eat it too, by building their homes and businesses in areas where they are always in danger of natural disasters. And I say natural even though accidents often start these fires because they do exist in nature. If it isn’t a careless campfire or power company that starts the fires its often lightning. In their most primal function, forest fires exist to destroy competing undergrowth in a forest. It’s an act of nature and sometimes nature can be cruel and lots of innocent plant life and animals get caught in god’s often tragic stage play. But to build in an area and put mankind’s stamp on the effort but refuse to manage the volatile elements is a recipe for disaster.

This whole issue is nearly as stupid as when the media tried to make an issue of the poor people in Hawaii who had their homes destroyed by lava flows when a volcano erupted on the big island and destroyed so much property. Hey, they built their homes on a volcano. What did they think was going to happen? This is what progressives do all the time, they test the temper of nature then when they feel the sting of the mistake blame it on a lack of appeasement to the gods. Mother nature in the world of liberal politics is just another god coming from mankind’s mystical past. Rather than accept that mankind was put on earth to tame nature, we are told that we are to live in harmony with the rules of nature. But those rules are brutal and unsentimental. Nature doesn’t care if Lady Gaga’s home burns to the ground in a forest fire, especially if the wildlife growth is allowed to grow out of control.

Trump gave credit to the firefighters and other supporter services that were fighting the fires, but to Trump’s point, the fires should have never started to begin with. They should have been managed so that if a fire started, it would never have spread so quickly and out of control. Part of what makes those fires so deadly is that they simply have too much fuel to drive them, and if forest management had done their jobs, that undergrowth would have been removed well before a danger ever occurred. As forest management employed by the government, they aren’t used to hearing criticism which is quite common in private industry, but they need to get used to it. What Trump is saying is that they didn’t do their jobs and that caused the loss of life and the destruction of a lot of property, not some god of global warming. Its one thing to believe in supernatural entities because humans want to neglect their responsibilities to existence, but it’s quite another to let those beliefs actually kill people, and that is what has been happening in California, not just this year, but every year over many decades now.

If humans are going to build a house in a region known for wild fires, then preventative action is part of the process. You can’t impose yourself on the land then back off and call yourself a preservationist. If you make the decision to do something, do it. Do it all the way, not half in and half out. A large part of the problem with everything in California is that they want to be everything, they want to be the occupants of one of the world’s largest economies, but they also want to be a leftist utopia, a literal Garden of Eden. But if you remember that story, Eve listened to the snake and that was what got her, and Adam cast from the garden. And in politics there are a lot of snakes always trying to get people to eat from the fruit of their trees. The Tree of Global Warming is one of them and California has eaten from it and thus have lost their ability to live in paradise because they refuse the responsibility of managing it. So thus, they have the problems that they do, and it certainly wasn’t President Trump’s fault for pointing it out.

Rich Hoffman

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Forget about Civility, We are Being Robbed: Massive evidence of voter fraud in Florida and other places mandate action

How do we know that Democrats are cheating and attempting to steal the election results in Arizona, Georgia and Florida, well, we have history of their behavior to compare it to from the 2016 election where Bernie Sanders was pushed out of the primary. We also have close coordination with the F.B.I. which has explosive evidence everywhere and still unresolved. Additionally, we know there is media coordination as well, specifically in the Sherrod Brown race against Jim Renacci where obvious double standards were applied to the sitting liberal senator over his past with domestic violence. If the defendant had been a Republican the story would have been plastered all over every newspaper in the country, but when it came to Sherrod Brown, Jim Renacci was supposed to apologize to the perpetrator. These things have always gone on mind you, but it wasn’t until Republicans started to push back and challenge the premise that the exposure was so obvious. It used to be said that politics was a dirty game, but what we are learning is that definition is largely attributed to one specific party and that the real fight of our modern time is to keep it that way. So civility is not an option, the nation and its people cannot all just get along so long as corruption and misdeeds define the process of a functioning political party. That is why I am so grateful for President Trump, because he is representing my interests well. When he fired Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, he was doing so to deal with what is coming, and Florida and this recent example of election scandal is just the latest incarnation of evil that must be crushed out of our society, because it can’t continue untended.

When people demand civility in our modern climate of interaction with fellow Americans what they are essentially saying is for us to turn away from evil. For instance, in Arizona, during the entire election night process McSally was in the lead with a margin that was consistent, yet in the days after the election as they are still counting votes, the liberal Sinema has taken the lead as the press cheers it on like a horse race that is still continuing after the finish line was already crossed. The election tampering is obvious and there won’t be any evidence of the matter because we’re dealing largely with provisional ballots that can be destroyed rather easily laving no paper trail. Of course no evidence will be uncovered because like the Hillary Clinton emails, or the coordination with the F.B.I to attempt to steal the 2016 election the evidence is destroyed so that there won’t be any. Liberals after the election day are enraged that Trump’s White House picked up a comfortable lead in the senate and did not lose seats. Since Democrats desire as the minority party to rule from the Judicial Branch they must control the appointment of judges and with Republicans having a comfortable majority this is why they are attacking those senate seats so aggressively, cheating if needed, because is they don’t cheat, they will cease to be a political party. That is all the proof we need in this case, the means to survival indicates the willingness to conspire as they have in the past.

Brenda Snipes, the Broward County elections supervisor looks to have mixed bad provisional ballots with good ones and she is at the center of the controversy in keeping Rick Scott from winning the election and becoming the next senator from Florida. It’s not like Scott has no idea how things work in Florida because his previous job was only as governor of that same state, so he’s aware of the potential of voter fraud in the past and where those attempts might come from. Given her past, Brenda Snipes is certainly a suspect, and given that all the other results are in and hers are not indicates meddling that any honest press would seek to explore. But this modern media is in partnership with the change agent efforts of Democrats so they refuse to cover this story properly even though the evidence is literally being destroyed right in front of our faces—the evidence that Rick Scott won a tight race in Florida against Bill Nelson, the incumbent. Again, there is another senate seat that Democrats just can’t allow strategically to contribute to Trump’s ability to appoint judges and defend previous legislation. After all, what good are any House seats that Democrats gained control of if they can’t do anything with them. So they are in a desperate state to steal those two senate seats, the one in Florida and the one in Arizona using any means possible. Cheating and election fraud are options for Democrats as we have seen before shown to us in the text messages of the F.B.I. agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. If not for those text messages we wouldn’t have known about previous attempts at tampering with elections between the F.B.I. and the Democrat Party because the evidence was either suppressed or destroyed, but thankfully we know enough about the previous election to recognize the patterns of activity that are going on today specifically In Broward County under the supervision of Brenda Snipes.

Of course, the way to commit all these crimes is to insist that everyone maintain a posture of civility. It’s the classic desire of a robber to demand that we put our hands up, lay down our weapons and give them all our money and nobody will be harmed that we are talking about here. We are literally being robbed and we are supposed to keep our hands up, our eyes down, and to put up with it and to shut up. And this has been going on for many, many, many years. It’s been going on for as long as I’ve been an adult. I can report from direct experience with many mayors, many city council members and many, many politicians that this has been the relationship that politicians have had with people for many years and the corruption has been obvious to anyone willing to look at it. But the election of Trump came with it the demand from people like me that we put a stop to it starting at the top and working our way down to little counties in Florida like Broward. It is not acceptable to just take crimes and to be robbed of representation due to voter fraud.

President Trump did what he should have when he fired Sessions as Attorney General. He offered Democrats an olive branch but he knows like the rest of us that they have no intention of taking it and working with his administration to do good things for the country. Democrats have only one plan and that is to conduct themselves as change agents against the American way of life. So they will continue to lie, cheat and steal their way into power, just as they are currently doing in Arizona and Florida and they are going to attempt to destroy Trump from the House of Representatives, which will leave him with no choice but to blast open all their previously uninvestigated corruption cases, so he needs an Attorney General who will do the work. There will be a lot more fighting on the horizon because there are things to fight. Civility will enter American life when respect is given to the republic for which we all stand. But not before. So long as specifically Democrats are willing to break the laws of the country for changes that go against life in our nation which affects us all, then anger and aggression on behalf of Republicans is perfectly justifiable, and expected.

Rich Hoffman

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The Shooting in Thousand Oaks, California: Why can’t we all just get along–because liberals don’t want to, they have declared war

In the wake of another mass shooting, this time in Thousand Oaks, California by what people are saying was a mentally deranged 26-year-old Afghanistan war vet leaving over a dozen dead, gun control and civility were cited as the things that people wanted, not just from the people present at the press conference, but across the nation. Why can’t we have gun control? Why can’t we all just come together and get along and heal this divided country? While they were saying it they might as well have asked why monkeys can’t fly like they do in The Wizard of Oz or why blue can’t be red, or green viewed as purple and why couldn’t Elvis still be alive making music—or Michael Jackson for that matter? Why can’t reality be suspended to fulfil our fantasies is essentially what came from the press conference in Thousand Oaks, in the aftermath of the tragedy was a desire to find civility and peace in all these mass shootings so that a solution could be brought forth that allowed people to just dance at a nightclub on a Wednesday night to some country music. Oddly enough, some of the people there were survivors of the country music concert in nearby Las Vegas where another gunman opened fire into a crowd there—of course the motive of the killer was never determined or released. On this shooting the motive was released much quicker, it was mental illness, PTSD and ABC News almost seemed to be reading off a script as they announced it. But not so fast.

As all this was happening Democrats were looking to literally steal the election in Florida from Rick Scott for the senate seat he won there with votes that are appearing out of nowhere. The lady in Georgia is trying to do the same—apparently Oprah wasn’t enough. Tucker Carlson from Fox News had his house attacked by ANTIFA and threats to his life were made. Of course, there have not yet been any arrests even though the protestors were going well beyond free speech. They were violent and implicating a promise of violence. Nancy Pelosi in the newly won Democrat majorities in the House are promising endless investigations of President Trump who has done nothing to be impeached but beat them in an election, which continues to happen. Democrats won the House for only one reason, because many never-Trumpers wanted out of their jobs because they didn’t like the way things were shaping up in the Republican Party, so they retired in most cases, around 38 Republicans and 17 Democrats leaving a lot of open seats coming up in this particular election giving Democrats a slight edge in filling those vacancies. It says more about the Republican Party coming together under Trump than anything the Democrats did. In Atlanta hoping to intimidate voters in voting for the eventual loser Stacy Abrams was members of the New Black Panther Party posing for pictures on social media dressed in military gear and holding guns as if to say, vote for our person or die. And when Donald Trump finally fired Jeff Sessions the day after the election there were protests and endless streams of anxiety from the political left over that, which is well within his right to do.

There is no prospect for peace in America. There are domestic enemies who wish to toss away the Constitution and to change the way that we conduct ourselves in American culture. They do not want to get along, they wish to be agents of change to alter the behavior of American life and so long as that is occurring there will be violence and conflict. The reason that so many people are willing to support Donald Trump in the presidency and why there were gains in the Senate, and very minimal losses in the House due to the Republican retirements specifically, is because people are aware of the new civil war that we are currently under. Big money from those domestic enemies have financed that war effort on a media front and so long as those agitators are functioning and challenging American society there will not be peace, so don’t even indulge in the illusion.

The cries for gun control after the Thousand Oaks shooting are just to disarm good Americans so that the bad ones can run free to do as ANTIFA did at Tucker Carlson’s house, threaten and dominate those standing in opposition to the point of death. It will be interesting to learn more about the shooter, the former Marine who did spend extended time in Afghanistan exposed to Islamic culture. PTSD sounds like an excuse to me, there are surely deeper issues not so neatly summed up. But the bottom line is that occupants of that night club should have been armed. The bouncers in the very least should have been carrying guns. So should the security outside the venue. If people inside had guns, they could have shot back instead of hiding under pool tables and having to jump out of windows just to survive. As it always is, more guns are the answer, not less. And eliminating gun free zones is the way to stop these mass shootings. The shooter was a frequent customer to that establishment and he knew where the guns wouldn’t be, making the entire area a soft target.

Gun control and civility are not even on the radar so long as insurgents are trying to change American culture through dirty tricks and outright threats of violence. When the question is asked, when can we return to more bi-partisanship, when can we all just get along, well the answer is in those who are imposing themselves upon the rest of us with threats of violence, impeachment and law breaking. The threats to peace come from these insurgent Democrats who want single payer health care, illegal aliens, and gun control to change America from a prosperous first world country into some armpit of Europe. It is not an act of violence to stand up for yourself, it’s a right. If there had been people at that nightclub armed in a way to stand up for themselves and not having to wait the short, but deadly time that it took for police to arrive, then the situation would be different.

The change agents looking to turn America from one thing to another have already had quite an impact and most of that started before I was even born fifty years ago. While guns where shown in westerns on television and movies during the golden age of cinema all through the 30s, 40s, and 50s Americans didn’t run around killing each other because we all at least had some shared values about what American society was, and gun ownership protected those values-more as a symbol than a tool. But now carrying a gun and the gun itself has been made out to be a monster by the same radical leftists that want to impeach Donald Trump for nothing more than winning an election. They expect us, “gun supporters” to sit down and shut up while they steal the elections in Florida and Georgia with made up votes pulled out of a few counties known for cheating. And we’re supposed to just shut up and like it. That is the source of the problem, and until that is gone, there will be no peace in America. Because we are at a time of war and it wasn’t Republicans that started it.

Rich Hoffman

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Finally, Ohio can Pass Stand Your Ground Legilstation: Guns and GDP have a direct relationship

As we are getting the details on yet another mass shooting, this time in a California bar we need to talk about the importance of George Lang being elected to the 52nd House District in Ohio and Mike DeWine winning as Governor. DeWine winning that governor seat I thought was one of the biggest election surprises of 2018, yet the media didn’t really see the magic. Being a resident of Ohio its quite clear to me. I am very encouraged that we can finally get a Stand Your Ground law passed with someone who will finally sign the legislation. If there was anything great that came out of the 2018 election it was that pro Second Amendment representatives are fully in power and can act with authority. Stand Your Ground is a very high priority for George Lang and as I’ve written in great detail on several occasions personal ownership of firearms is directly connected to economic expansion and the positive mechanisms of capitalism. Like Florida which has good Stand Your Ground legislation economic development has come directly from it, Ohio has a wonderful opportunity to advance itself from a state being tempted to turn purple to a solid red state for the foreseeable future. And the time to act is quickly before Democrats can reset their footing and start posturing for 2020 elections.

Issue 2 failing in Butler County where George Lang’s district has the most residents was a tremendous opportunity also to deal with the root of school violence in our society, and the expansion of the Second Amendment to solve those problems. To avoid more school shootings in the future teachers must be armed, it’s that simple. There is no gray area on the matter, if we want to protect children from the criminally insane and the destitute, we must use guns for what they were invented for, personal protection at the point of a threat. There is no way to uninvent guns unless society decides to go the way of Ayn Rand’s great novel, Anthem and essentially go back to hunters and gathers living around a campfire, forgetting about the microwaves, the cars and planes, as well as the televisions of our modern society. To take guns out of society is to take away the tool that was invented by necessity by human minds to defend themselves from tyranny. That is precisely why an anti-gun stance in gun free zones is so ridiculous.

There have been times in Florida where Stand Your Ground laws were abused, and trigger-happy maniacs overstepped their rights with guns, but generally the legislation there has kept crime down and allowed for business owners to invest in the state knowing that a criminal element has a minimal influence over the population centers. Guns make people behave correctly, when people know there is a potential for gun carrying people roaming about and death is a possibility they often seek to take their temptations of crimes into other endeavors that are not so deadly. Guns and businesses are directly connected, the more guns in a society, the better their GDP. So the benefits far outweigh the losses.

Public schools are going to have to arm teachers, it’s the only way to promise parents that their kids will come home each day, is when competent teachers are carrying guns in the classroom. And competent parents as well, the more people carrying firearms, the safer a society is. And the reason that Stand Your Ground laws are so necessary is because it keeps gun users safe from unnecessary prosecution if they must use a firearm to defend situational problems. For instance, if a vile maniac stepped into a school right now and tried to shoot up a bunch of students, even if a teacher who was a gun owner confronted that assailant, the teacher under Ohio law has an obligation to retreat. That is the same situation on the street of any Ohio city, all gun owners have an obligation to avoid a confrontation. If police had the same restriction, they’d be toothless in a society to deal with people intent to commit harm.

I’ve been to Paris fairly recently and they have a very anti-gun policy even among their own police and the effects are obvious. The city is dirty, and the people are eccentrically committed to left of center criminal conduct. The major tourist areas do have a heavily armed presence to keep the criminal element away from those attractions, to keep visitors coming to the historic city, but that heavy-handed approach has the opposite effect, it is too much and can be intimidating. Paris is the perfect example of how to lose control of a population center toward the criminal element. As a result, industry has pulled away leaving only tourism to sustain their reputation, and that isn’t infinite under the current policies. Criminals can’t be allowed to rule as they do in Paris, any city, state or country that wants to prosper must empower its individual citizens to enforce the rule of law at the individual level of personal interaction. Law and order must happen everywhere, not just where the police are. That is the only way to have a prosperous society. Guns are directly related to morality and justice.

Stand Your Ground laws are needed to protect teachers from lawsuits and prosecution if they defend students from a potential terrorist. They should not hesitate and act with worry when trouble starts, they need to be free to engage a problem without fear of prosecution which could financially ruin them for the rest of their lives. That is not the way of a civilized country or state. And the answer is not in more government employees to be everywhere all the time as Issue 2 was trying to establish. People, every day people, need to be empowered to protect justice from hostilities born of insanity, greed, and malice. In doing that all public places become that much safer and businesses can invest without worrying about criminal conduct functioning beyond the reach of the police which are often overstretched by resource management.

There have been attempts to advance Stand Your Ground laws in Ohio and John Kasich, the newly born-again Democrat refused to sign anything close. Kasich in his final years as governor simply lost his mind and turned away from conservative ideas of self-reliance among people. Guns are obviously one of the biggest symbols of self-reliance in a culture and Kasich in the end was against gun rights as well. When people start legislating that they can expand Medicaid because God told them to, then all rationality was thrown out of the window and Stand Your Ground laws were off the table. We had to wait for a real Republican governor—so DeWine winning was a really big deal in Ohio. There were a lot of important races that were won on election day 2018 but DeWine winning in Ohio was one of the biggest because there has been a lot of positive legislation that has been held up due to Kasich’s sudden liberalism from 2014 on.

To make Ohio safe and prosperous not only from potential terrorists attacking our schools to protecting that manufacturing plant out in the middle of Ohio farm country from thieves looking to stock a black market, Stand Your Ground laws are a first priority to making Ohio the most business friendly state in the nation. The lack of a clear Stand Your Ground law has actually held Ohio back, along with a lack of Right to Work legislation that Kasich also held up. But now it looks like Ohio can advance in a conservative way and that is the most positive aspect of Mike DeWine and Jon Husted being elected as governor of Ohio. And it opens the potential for Ohio to become very great and a firm state in the corner of President Trump. Part of making and keeping America great again is in making Ohio great again, and with Stand Your Ground laws, that journey can finally take place.

Rich Hoffman

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After the Smoke Cleared: Trump Republicans are much better off

I would have liked to have seen the House of Representatives stay Republican, but with so many RINOs in it, the passions of the upcoming generation of socialists couldn’t hold enough seats to give it a proper majority. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one of the new victors entering that branch of government, so as the smoke clears it may well be a blessing in disguise. The best way to quell the socialist movement coming from that progressive corner of government is to expose it in the light of day. By holding the Senate with good gains, the Trump agenda remains intact along with his ability to confirm judges so the direction of the country will not spin off the rails. All in all it says a lot that Trump was able to stave off a socialist revolt and what happens next will likely scare off any sentimental support that people might have for socialists like Ocasio-Cortez. We may not like the socialist tendencies that have been implanted in our culture, but we’re going to have to sift it out in conflict so that people learn their lesson. And House Republicans need to construct a strategy to retake their majorities in 2020.

However, generally I was happy with the results, locally George Lang won a hard-fought challenge to win his first full term in the 52nd District. That was number one on my list of needs for the election. The second was to maintain a Republican governor in Ohio, this time getting one that is more than in name only. There is a real good shot now of Ohio passing a Stand Your Ground law. A real good chance. The other big thing that needed to happen was that Issue 2 went down in flames, that was the school levy for the five Butler County schools that wanted to extract a lot of money from the public to avoid arming teachers in schools to deal with the potential of insurgent attacks. Those issues were particularly important to me on the local level and the inside baseball aspects of politics. So I am very glad to see things working out well, as they should have.

I was very sorry to see Jim Renacci not to come out on top of the very liberal Sherrod Brown for the Senate. The media gave Brown a free pass, just as they did for many of the House Democrats, which will be exposed rather spectacularly in the coming months, but with the liberalized media that we have, a lot of people like Brown who have no place in government were propped up, and that was certainly the case for Renacci. I personally think Renacci would have done better against Brown by getting more down and dirty, but that wasn’t his style. So the liberal held his long-standing seat with the wind of the media fully at his back, much like the young kid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I think of these candidates as media props who can’t stand without help from their media outlets and it says a lot that so few of them managed to get elected with everything that was thrown at the Trump administration. Renacci’s seat was always a deep pass with a low percentage of completion for net Senate seat gains, and Trump got those anyway, so strategically in the big picture it’s not a big deal. But Jim was certainly the better man by a long shot.

With Ron DeSantis winning the governor seat and Rick Scott winning in the senate for Florida a major bullet was dodged that will establish a turning point that the state needed to experience. The progressive caucus could have done a lot of damage to that great state for economic activity and with a friendly House on Capitol Hill could have made a real mess of things. But not getting a progressive stronghold in Florida it leaves House Democrats isolated and in a position we all need them to be in, with a circular firing squad aimed straight for their positions, instead of trying to aim in various pockets all over the country. Florida couldn’t afford to go blue, and thankfully it didn’t. And its important for Republicans to keep it that way. Poor people who don’t have much interest or knowledge about politics find these progressive candidates attractive, because they don’t know any better. In a few years when the next round of elections comes up during a presidential year the Trump economy will have taken off to even higher levels and impact even more people in a positive way, so states like Florida will be much less vulnerable. This particular year Florida was as exposed to change as it will likely be ever again, so the results there were particularly important.

With all the effort that Democrats put into trying to destroy the Trump administration it is pretty embarrassing for them to see a gain in Senate seats. No longer are there RINOs like John McCain or Jeff Flake there to tip the scales toward Democrats, of a particular note Marth McSalley beat Chrysten Sinema for the open Flake seat which is like trading in a Ford Fiesta for a Corvette as far as standing for Republican ideas. The Senate is much stronger after this election than it was before so that is a big positive. If Republicans could have held the House, the Democratic Party would be a smoking heap now, but let’s face it, the media owns the Democrats and the results they did get were obtained with a huge amount of effort and many millions of dollars wasted. The modest gains they did get were won at a great expense and knowing the way President Trump works, Democrats will have to look in the mirror and wonder if what they wished for will really be worth it. Its much easier to defeat an enemy out in the open than one that has been hiding in the shadows and now the shadows are gone. The map across the country is overwhelmingly conservative except for a few pockets of liberalism here and there represented by the House seats. And that means that promises and hopes become reality and responsibility which the Democrats will choke on both right out of the gate.

Like all battles there are always casualties but what matters is that you win, and the big seats Republicans won both locally and nationally which is of vital strategic importance. On the pro-gun side, which is as I’ve said many times, the essence of American capitalism, Ohio has a very strong state representative in George Lang who will advance pro-business measures and advance Stand Your Ground laws, and he has a governor who will sign those bills. It was never a concern about building up the votes in the House, George can certainly do that, it was that the liberal John Kasich, a Republican in name only, would not sign those bills. DeWine has indicated that he will. That will make Ohio even more of a red state and Florida to the south will join in those efforts. Progressives have targeted Ohio and Florida as insurgent zones of their leftist ideology and both states have pushed away the efforts which is far more powerful than holding a House with a bunch of radicals screaming for power. Now the liberals are isolated into one branch of government and exposed, and that is a good place to have them as the rest of the nation marches toward a new kind of Republican Party, one that is successful, and truly conservative, and for a change, winning.

Rich Hoffman

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