Tag: corruption

The Real Way to Get Peace in the Middle East: Going door to door where evil lives and thrives

I think it’s nice that Trump did a deal to get the hostages back in Israel.  But the cause of the trouble between the Palestinian’s and Israel was not present at that peace negotiation.  The politicians are not the cause of the conflict, and if we really want to solve the problem and bring peace to the Middle East, then the source of that trouble will have to be eliminated.  I recommend performing that task without any state involvement.  The United States doesn’t need to commit ground troops toward lasting peace.  All it needs to do is step aside and give contractors a “get out of jail free card.”  To allow contractors to go into the Gaza Strip and go door to door, eliminating the perpetrators of violence.  When you travel through the area, you can learn a lot about a culture, and one of the most dominant influences in their bookstores is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  The people who order those books to be sold, and the publishers who knowingly try to keep that kind of anger alive by blowing on the embers of evil, are the cause of the trouble, and they’ll have to be eliminated.  And until we are willing to play that game, there will be no peace, anywhere, not in the Middle East, nor on American college campuses.  The enemy lives in the minds of the vacant, empty souls of evil who want people to fight in a bloody conflict for all kinds of terrible reasons.  Everyone may clap that some tortured souls who managed to live through that captivity were returned to their families.  But the problem is far from solved.  Nobody could blame Trump for trying.  Yet the solution is still lingering in the tunnels and back rooms of the Gaza Strip, and many other places around Israel, and they are planting the demise of the Jewish country as we speak. 

Hamas had its money dry up after the bombing of Iran, and Trump has put everyone on their heels, including Qatar, who are the primary sponsors of terror in the region, and they want Israel wiped from the face of the earth.  I have a unique understanding of this problem from the science side, and the battle over the Temple Mount is the key to it.  The Arabs are never going to get over what the British did to them over Sykes-Picot after World War I, and how they felt double-crossed at the end of World War II, when the United Nations decided to give the Jewish people their own country, and Israel was created in what the Palestinians considered their land.  But this fight, as Trump said, goes back many thousands of years to when Yahweh encouraged the Hebrew people, the Jews, to raid the land of Canaan and resettle the land righteously for them.  And all that went well beyond 4000 years ago, even further to the land dispute that God was clearly very aggressive about.  And since that time —the First Temple period, especially with Solomon and King David’s threshing floor —the dispute has continued, with no end in sight.  The Jewish people were constantly attacked and removed from the land and dispersed as exiles all over the world.  Until the United Nations came along and imposed a Jewish state, and everyone had to get along with the idea, which has caused all the wars there for all these years.  Looming always in the background is the hostile views of the Muslim community toward all outsiders, which feeds the anger of pitting the Quran against the Holy Bible as a source document for understanding eternity. 

Knowing Trump had everyone pegged down for destruction, the Palestinian movement is going back underground while the politicians save themselves from financial destruction and give Trump what he wants.  Visible peace in the Middle East so that they aren’t crushed by the aggression of a much stronger enemy, the United States.  They only made a deal because Iran has fallen apart, the Marxism of the area behind the teachings of the Quran is being challenged by populism, so they are, for their own preservation, making a show of peace for the cameras.  The real solution will be to eliminate the leaders of discontent, as in the United States.  There are a lot of voices hiding behind what they think are Constitutional protections of free speech, who are outright anti-American terrorists, and they will stop at nothing to destroy those they don’t like.  Look at the youth movement behind the killing of Charlie Kirk.  Those kids didn’t come up with those thoughts on their own. Instead, they received their thinking from influences who are still very much at work and just holding their nose through Trump’s terms in office.  That same radicalism showed itself on ABC News when George Stephonopolis cut off Vice President J.D. Vance during a Sunday show recently.  They are all united behind a curtain of discontent and just waiting for Trump to be removed from the world stage.  And a future president was treated like a rag doll by those same elements, disrespectfully cutting him off to show him disrespect purposely.  That’s the kind of evil that puts those books in the book stores of the Middle East, from Egypt to Turkey, and everything to the East, all the way over to India. 

The best way to deal with these terrorists who hide behind polite society is to hire contractors to eliminate them, $100K per head.  Cut off the enemy’s head and put it in a bag for payment by an independent contributor.  Keep the states out of it and fight this battle away from the borders of nations, but door to door, where the bad guys really live, and create so much purposeful, strategic hate, to destabilize society to the liking of evil.  I would volunteer for that kind of thing, and many people could get very rich as privateers, much as it was in the golden age of piracy.  There are plenty of ways to do it, and all that would be needed from a country like America is to leave the process alone.  Let contractors go into Gaza and collect the heads of the terrorists.  Everyone knows where they live; go in and get them.  Take the terror to their doorsteps and save the ink on the peace deals.  Because as long as they are allowed to live, they will seek to bring evil into the world.  And that goes for areas outside of the Middle East as well.  Even in New York City or Chicago.  The Antifa terrorists of Portland.  They are being crushed now by a Trump administration willing to perform the task.  But the evil is still lingering, going underground.  And it’s there where evil must be hunted, door to door, and with soldiers of fortune carrying around pillow bags to carry the heads of their trophies.  Turn those kinds of people loose, pay them well under the table, and attack the rats where they live.  Don’t let them continue to publish books like Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Or even to burn down churches in Paris in the name of the Quran.  That hatred even found expression in the creation of the Quran in 610 AD by Muhammad, which sought to displace the emerging Christian movement that had united the Roman Empire in 313 AD.  These were not religious pursuits intended to gain entry into the gates of heaven, but rather to destabilize the governments of the world through military raids.  And that same youth is being corrupted everywhere in the world at the point of learning.  And it’s a real threat to any potential peace efforts.  That is, unless you physically remove the perpetrators with door-to-door contractors.  And speak the only language those kinds of enemies understand, ruthless violence, mercifully applied to the root cause of evil itself.  And nothing less.

Rich Hoffman

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

Under New Management: Why companies fail and how leadership works

All over my town of West Chester, Ohio, there are signs everywhere indicating that new management is running a business.  Most of them are restaurants and bars, but they have been unusually placed in front of all kinds of companies, even manufacturing facilities.  Which was another thing I said would happen as a result of the catastrophic stupidity of COVID, where a global Marxist strategy of micromanaging how people were going to do work was imposed on all of us through the ridiculous means of a doctor’s office.  White coat losers in the form of health professionals were trying to scare us into open socialism, and it was always going to be a disaster.  And now, five years later, the world has turned to populism, specifically to capitalism.  If you really want to get philosophical about the Trump administration at this particular time, it’s because the human race knows what’s good for it, and all forms of Marxism have not been it.  There was never a plan for Trump to be in any authority position.  The plan was to take over mass society and make people afraid of a virus that was made in a Chinese lab, by people who wanted to make a bioweapon to use against the world, to steal elections, and take over economies.  People saw this happening, and they put Trump in office as the rest of the world has been supporting their own version of pro-capitalist populism.  Its not because they were that great of a candidate, but because people didn’t like the direction the world was turning, which brought about out of desperation, the Covid year of 2020 and the complete collapse of the global economy that was so tragic that most people didn’t even want to discuss what happened because they wanted so badly to put it out of their minds. 

So the mindset of the economic shutdowns has taken a few years to recover from, and it has taken a while for people to get their feet under them again.  And what we’re talking about are all the DEI hires and the work-from-home mentality that has been socially disastrous—social policy cooked up in a lab, with everyone’s books open to Karl Marx’s literature.  Even Microsoft was in on the gag, trying to push everyone into Teams meetings from home in their pajamas.  Nobody was betting on a complete economic recovery in those dark months of 2021, as Biden took office, Trump was forced into exile, and Covid protocols were imposing themselves on every one of us.  People should have been more intelligent to see the obvious.  We were under attack by an extensively laid plan of a complete Marxist takeover of the world.  And I said it at the time, and said all this was going to happen.  Nobody listened until it was too late.  And I would go around town and talk about all the businesses that were working from home, and how they were going to fail, and all the fast food places that closed their dining rooms because they didn’t have enough staff to stay open.  I told everyone what was going to happen, and now it is.  And I saw it clearly because of the way I live my life, in front of the train. At the same time, most of the world lives in the back, where it’s safe.  We’re talking about Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality as he talked about it in the great book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  It’s a very popular book, though largely misunderstood.  Its sequel, Lila, has not been read by millions, but by a very select few in the world who are audacious rarities. 

The metaphysics of quality, as I explained in my video with a train roaring by, is essentially a perspective on leadership and decision-making. Outstanding leadership is done at the front of a metaphorical train, where you can see what’s coming as it approaches.  You can turn the train, slow it down, tell people what you see coming.  But most people don’t dare to lead from the front.  So they have built an administrative bureaucracy in the back of the train to provide analysis, which is useful.  But it’s not leadership because by the time the moving train reaches the point of decision, the caboose has passed it entirely too late.  Decisions have to be made at the front to ensure the quality people expect.  That is why great generals who lead from the front are great.   Great business leaders are so rare.  And why political efforts succeed or fail.  If leadership is at the back of the train, a management effort will likely fail every time.  If, under scarce circumstances, an organizational leader is at the front of the train —where few people dare to be —then great success is possible.  Success that is often beyond people’s wildest dreams.  So when a business is failing and wants the public to know they are making changes, they put up signs saying they are under new management, hoping people will give them a second chance in the economy, implying that their leadership change will be different.  After COVID, a lot of companies got suckered and put their leaders all in the back of the train, where it was safe, and it was a disaster for the world’s economy under a hostile takeover. 

Karl Marx was always an idiot and a coward.  He died broke because he was a back-of-the-train theorist.  The world is full of them.  But because there were a lot of cowards in the world who ended up in government, health care, and were second-generation titans of industry who didn’t have the same guts their previous generation had, they adopted Marxism to hide what losers they were.  But in a marketplace where free will is expected, that kind of back-of-the-train micromanagement was never going to work.  And I said so all along.  And now that the money is flowing again and Trump is back in the White House, leading from the front, it has exposed this plan for the fraud it was.  And now everyone is scrambling to find people at the front of the train, and their “under new management” signs are hopes that people will assume that there is leadership at the front of the train instead of everyone functioning from the back, where all the wimps hang out.  And that’s why there are suddenly so many signs.  At least the owners of these businesses are trying.  But it shows clearly the danger that arises when we micromanage society, with back-of-the-train personalities who are not equipped to lead.  Even in a bar or nightclub, where leadership isn’t even considered.  People expect the lights to work and the beer to be cold.  And when everyone is hiding in the back of the train, they often order those things too late to arrive for a Friday night gathering that nobody thought would happen because of COVID social distancing rules.  Only people in the front of the train were ready, because they saw well in advance what a dumb idea everything was.  And most businesses that lacked those unique personalities failed, are now trying to recover, and want the world to know they are looking for front-of-the-train management.  And even if they haven’t yet found them, they are at least looking.

Rich Hoffman

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

Big Tish James Needs to Do Big Time in the Big House: Destroying the communists in our courts

Don’t forget how Big Tish James, the New York Attorney General, looked at President Trump every day in court when she was purposely trying to bankrupt him over some evaluation prosecution in his company, the Trump Organization.  Big Tish went for blood—and then some—eventually fining over $ 515 million in penalties against Trump, which, through the appeals process, was just relieved this past month as excessive.  But for a grueling several years, the case dragged on, and if Trump had not been a billionaire, too big to drain financially like she was trying to do, he would not have survived the process.  Lucky for him, during this year of 2024 Truth Social went public and Trump essentially made back all the money he had lost in these court cases, in fees and legal costs, and it essentially put the case James was trying to form out of reach and it was a miserable loss for her and the corrupt New York judge Arthur Engoron, on all fronts.  But don’t forget what she tried to do, because this happens way too often.  The communists of our culture feel they have control of the courts, and essentially, they do.  We have trusted the courts too much without oversight, and the situation has gotten out of control.  We had been wondering about it, but this case against Trump by Tish James made it clear to everyone, and she really thought she was going to get away with it.  So it was more than a little satisfying that with all the charges she was trying to impose against Trump, like most Democrats who conduct social policy where they try to deflect from things they are actually guilty of, we learned that the Attorney General was guilty of far worse.  And now that we know, there can’t be any mercy for her.  She has to be made an example of.

So in that context, I think we can all root for the worst possible to happen to that corrupt communist, Big Tish James, and that she will do big time in the big house for her audacious crimes.  Audacious because she had tried to blame Trump for manipulating the values of his properties for better bank interest rates, which she indicated was a form of fraud.  She set the bar where it is now, and from which she is now judged.  Because now she is being prosecuted for much more obvious fraud, which she undoubtedly knew.  It’s so audacious that mistakes are impossible; she knew what she was doing, and that was to deceive the public and lenders to get benefits on real estate she owned.  As the Attorney General of New York, she can’t say she was ignorant of the law.  She had just tried to prosecute the President of the United States using the same logic.  She clearly knew where to look because she was guilty of the same thing, so this is an easy case being led by prosecutor Lindsey Halligan, one of Trump’s personal lawyers, formally.  Big Tish is being prosecuted for bank fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1344: knowingly misrepresenting the property’s use to obtain a favorable loan and making false statements to a financial institution.  Specifically, James signed a “second home rider” on a Fannie Mae-backed mortgage, certifying that a three-bedroom house would serve as her second residence and qualifying her for a lower fixed interest rate of 3%.  The loan terms, which she openly violated, prohibited renting it out as an investment.  And according to the court documents, Big Tish was clearly trying to save $18,933 over the life of the loan. 

These people were always communists, these kinds of Democrats, so it’s appropriate to indicate who they really are and what the movement intends.  Just as is reflected in this mayor race in New York, all this communist sentiment has snuck up on many people, biting them now that it’s too late.  Big Tish was elected by people who called themselves Democrats in an America that doesn’t like communists.  So they just changed their name so that people would vote for them.   But ideologically, they are all capitalist-hating communists, and they meant to gain control over our institutions, which has obviously happened in our court system, at all levels.  Most lawyers, even though they might not identify as communists by name, have beliefs about the world that are very much from the pages of Karl Marx.  And with the strength of that assumption, Leticia James thought she would get away with destroying the financial life of one of New York City’s most famous people and richest, and make an example of him with a different kind of execution.  It might have left him alive, but the case intended to destroy the Trump Organization so that the President wouldn’t have any wealth to defend himself.  She meant to personally bankrupt a former and future president of the United States, and enough people in New York who identify as communists supported her in that effort of destruction.  So let’s not kid ourselves here.  The communists who linger in this country in the background are looking for blood and to advance their party more deeply into power with fear.  Big Tish was showing the world that she controlled the courts and could destroy anyone in the legal process.  And she put everything she had into the effort regarding state power.  Trump was not supposed to survive. 

So when we talk about the grace of God in this case, I say let him do what he wants with her eternal soul.   I would recommend her destruction and to make it as public as possible.  Show absolutely no compassion for her in any way.  I would like to see her publicly humiliated to the utmost extent that the law will allow, and to see her permanently ruined for her efforts.  Because this is more than just a war of ideas, this is a communist invasion that has resided behind a kind of curtain that the Democrat Party put up to let these people gain hold of important public offices.  And their purpose was the destruction of the American way of life.  And they meant to control all of us by scaring people with what they did to popular people with a lot of money, like Trump.  The case with Trump, as I said in the very early days, was never going to stick.  Big Tish thought the courts were corrupt enough to make anything stick.  But legally, they had all kinds of problems.  But when that same prosecution by the New York Attorney General gets caught actually committing the crimes she was trying to paint on Trump, well, you have to throw the book at her.  And the kitchen sink as well.  She deserves destruction and no mercy.  For what she and her supporters tried to do to Trump and this country, we have to view it as treasonous, and nothing less.  This was no accident or a meaningless banking transaction.  No, this is the intent to gain control of a legal system to destroy political opponents personally.  And now the shoe is on the other foot, and Trump has a chance to take action that will be meaningful for centuries.  And I’m thrilled to see him do it.  There are many people who need to be punished for what they did.  And Big Tish James is just the start of it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Meet the Candidates for Butler County Commissioner: Why Michael Ryan is the best

So, why Michael Ryan over the other two people running for the same Butler County Commissioner seat?  Well, a nice walk down High Street in Hamilton, Ohio, makes it all very clear.  Cindy Carpenter is the incumbent in this race, and she has held that seat for about 15 years.  The other is Roger Reynolds, who used to be the auditor of Butler County.  Before getting into any of the negative stuff, let’s just say that Michael Ryan is a good fresh start for the Butler County Republican Party, and he is coming into the race highly endorsed by a lot of very important people.  And he has great donors who are supporting him early in this process, which was quite evident at his October fundraiser.  Michael Ryan doesn’t have any baggage; he and his wife are a really good couple, and what he has done as vice-mayor of Hamilton has been very enterprising.  The good job that he and the city council have done for Hamilton is obvious just by walking down the streets of the West Side.  I was born in Hamilton.  I’ve lived in and around it most of my life.  And I have traveled all over the world and have an excellent idea of what good is, and the Hamilton of today is fantastic.  And Michael Ryan has a lot to do with its recovery from a not-so-good place.  Ryan has been optimistic and shown a remarkable ability to work with others to make things that seem impossible happen.  And there really aren’t many people anywhere better for the Butler County Commissioner job than Michael Ryan.  Butler County is lucky to have him, and I think he could do great things for the County over the next decade. I’m very excited to vote for him. 

But why not Cindy Carpenter?  Well, Cindy has always been thought of as a RINO.  Most of the time, she has run unopposed.  She has been a yes vote on police budgets.  But she has essentially been a Democrat socially, and recently proved it by campaigning for the Democrat mayor of Middletown, Ohio, Elizabeth Slamka.  Cindy was caught at a voting location openly pushing for the Democrat, and it was all caught on camera, which was very embarrassing for her.  Of course, when Cindy was caught, there wasn’t much she could say; she was the Republican endorsed candidate openly pushing for a Democrat mayor in a town that needs a lot of help, Middletown.  Simply put, after all these years, that’s the best Cindy can do, and she will never be a spectacular success.  She has had her chance; we know what she is, and we know she supports Democrats and doesn’t respect the endorsement process.  It’s not like the Elizabeth Slamka issue was in the past; it was very recent, and I think it ruined her forever.  She’ll never be able to live it down.  We’re in a period of party politics that wants more MAGA representatives, and Cindy isn’t one of them.  She’s too much of the kind of politics that people want to run away from.  Not to sign up for another term, especially when they openly support Democrats who have proven to be really detrimental to cities and counties where they gain a majority.  Hamilton didn’t improve because of people like Cindy Carpenter.  It improved despite her.  Michael Ryan gets much of the credit, and we want a lot more of his kind of presence.  I’m sure Ryan will support police budgets, even as tax cuts become a higher priority for him.  In a one-for-one comparison, all the positives go to Michael Ryan, and there are none for Cindy Carpenter.  She did her thing, it wasn’t perfect, and she is a closet Democrat.  So let’s dump her and move on to someone better.

The other candidate is someone I’ve supported in the past.  I would have preferred that he not run until he got his life back together after a rough trial he just went through, which cost him well over a million dollars.  I was very supportive of him during all that, so people are wondering why I’m not supporting him for commissioner.  Well, through the trial, I got to know him better.  I’ve known him for a long time, and I like him.  But he tends to get combative with people, and you learn a lot about them by how they handle pressure.  And under pressure, Roger Reynolds showed he’s someone people want to fight.  And that’s how he ended up in court to begin with.  As a commissioner, you need to be able to work with people and build relationships.  And Roger has a hard time with relationships.  So I might like the guy.  But he’s not ready for a public office.  He has had relationship problems with his wives, and in my book, if you can’t handle a marriage, you are going to struggle with a lot of other things in your life.  And after listening to the testimony of the former Lakota treasurer, Jenni Logan, there was a lot of poor judgment that gave early indications of spousal commitments.  Most of those are private problems, but he’s the one who decided to run for office, even though there are a lot of red flags about him personally that have only muddied this race for what I think are really selfish reasons. 

I would have said the same thing about President Trump’s marriages, and it took me a while to start taking him seriously.  I’ve met Trump several times, especially during the early Tea Party and Reform Party years.  And I’ve met Melania Trump, too, and I’ll say she’s been good for Trump and has made him better for the public office he’s now doing so well in.  Maybe Roger will find someone who will help him improve as a person, like Trump did.  But right now, he has a lot of digging to do to get out of a hole he put himself in.  And, unfortunately, he is seeking redemption through public office, even though a much better person is running for the job.  Roger is damaged goods, and he needs to present himself undamaged.  And it’s not just marriages that Roger has destroyed.  He has relationship problems, which raise major red flags for a job like this commissioner position.  Again, Roger has been around for a long time, and everyone knows what they are getting.  He’s not going to do anything significant.  But Michael Ryan has a chance to, so it’s really not a hard decision for voters.  Because of the way the world is changing toward better MAGA options at these positions, Michael Ryan is the only reasonable choice.  That’s why I am happy to support him over these other candidates.  If Roger wants to return to public office, he needs to fix some things about himself first.  Seeking redemption by voter validation isn’t healthy.  And Butler County needs to do good things for itself, not provide a platform for personal growth at the expense of progress.  And that is what anybody but Michael Ryan would be for the Republican Party, Hamilton, Ohio, in general, and Butler County as a whole.  People deserve the best person for the office, and for me, nobody would be better than Michael Ryan.     

Rich Hoffman

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

Wells Fargo Analyst Matthew Akers Was Purposely Wrong: When bankers are more dangerous in the world than Hamas

There’s a very public case going on right now that I’m in the middle of, and all this is on public record so that people can judge for themselves the contents.  But when I have to explain it to people —many thousands of people —the only thing that comes to mind is pirates.  People who rob other ships at sea and kill the crew and steal all the wealth on the ship.  The case I’m referring to involves a huge bank, Wells Fargo.  But as I have learned, what they are doing in the finance world is very common, not unique to just them.  We have a lot of plundering pirates in the finance and legal world, who, to put it mildly, steal wealth for all kinds of radical reasons.   And they have grown so large over the years that they have turned to piracy as their mode of operation.  The system we have allowed to exsist has created pirates in the finance industry that are completely stealing the kind of wealth that Trump is trying to unleash and based on my experience, because none of these people will ever admit any of this in court, it all comes back to politics and radicalism of human beings who have been allowed by law to get too much power over industry standards.  In the case I am talking about, Wells Fargo published an analytical opinion in April of 2025 that indicated the aerospace industry was going to suffer through a tough year.  This opinion appeared in multiple trade publications aimed at investors, and, to make a long story short, the intent of the opinion and its publication across multiple fronts was to depress the aerospace industry as a whole.  The comment by Wells Fargo analyst Matthew Akers regarding the poor performance of the aerospace industry was way off the mark, and I knew it then.  But the reason for the comment is that the piracy begins there, and is no different than the robbery we know occurred on the high seas in 1690, or in the finance industry in 2025. 

Banks like Wells Fargo did not get to be so big by their own power, there is a whole corrupt story that involves BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, and the Federal Reserve pumping a lot of printed money in the system that essentially gives public companies like Wells Fargo a pirate ship to attack the finance industry, while appearing to a media they largely control through advertising, to dress them up as good vessels.  Pirate ships used to perform this trick all the time: they would pretend to be a normal merchant vessel, then, just before they pulled up alongside another boat, they would hoist the Jolly Roger flag to scare the inhabitants of the ship they were trying to attack into surrendering.  And from there, the boat would be plundered for all its worth.  I see that happening to a lot of companies these days, especially after Trump was put back into office, which, based on the case I’m involved in, appears to be the motivating factor behind Matthew Akers’s statement.  I could have easily told him all about the aerospace industry and that he was incredibly wrong about his forecast in April of 2025.  But he wasn’t looking for the truth.  He was putting up a friendly flag to look helpful to the industry, to pull up alongside unsuspecting vessels to rob them.  That was the apparent purpose of his statement to the investment media.  And they thought they’d get away with it cleanly because they have for years, and have acquired more power, they believe, than our court systems can process.

There are a couple of strategies for why Matthew Akers and the people at Wells Fargo would make this prediction, knowing it was not the case.  2025 was projected to be a big year for the aerospace industry.  Trump was back in office.  The economy was poised to be red-hot.  And when people are happy and spending money, they fly to places.  Knowing a lot of people in this finance industry who are Democrat rats in disguise of pirates wearing suits, I would bet a lot of money that the purpose of the Wells Fargo statement to the industry was to attack the aerospace industry as a whole because they wanted to depress the incoming Trump economy.  If the Autopen president were still in office, I think the Wells Fargo forecast would have been the opposite.  And this is one of the primary reasons so many businesspeople are wishy-washy about politics.  They don’t want to be targeted by pirates who try to take over their business and industry.  So by depressing the industry, a large bank like Wells Fargo thinks it can actually shape politics.  And we see the same behavior wherever significant money is controlled by political radicals, such as in the pharmaceutical industry.  Only in aerospace, if you want to attack the military that Trump was to have access to, and the free flow of money into commercial aerospace because you want to protect the earth from the carbon footprint of a lot of new airplanes being built, you would if you could seek to tank the stock and harm the supply chain so that the industry would meet the expectations of a forecast that was not measured in real market value, but the strategic intent of the pirates involved at the front of the lending practices. 

Even worse than the political motivations is the ability to actually steal value.  In the case of the Wells Fargo April analysis, the mention was on the impact on Boeing stock, which a large bank’s opinion could greatly influence.  Such negative news could easily spark a mass sell-off and lower the price.  Only to have BlackRock, which owns a lot of Wells Fargo, sweep in and buy up all that stock for a very low cost.  And that money came straight from the Federal Reserve.  So we have a terrible game going on here that is really restricting a positive American economy and a global aerospace industry critical to Trump’s goals in the world.  In the case I’m involved in, the pirate ship is being fought; it was recognized well before they raised their pirate flag.  And the intention is to sink that pirate ship and bring disaster to all who are on it.  Ruthlessness has to be the means of proper conduct when its necessity is discovered.  But this practice isn’t unique; it’s common, and it is shocking how many court cases are spawned from this very behavioral practice.  These big banks have way too much confiscated power.  And Matthew Akers at Wells Fargo obviously is abusing that power for all kinds of political and financial reasons.  And the biggest threat to the American economy isn’t coming from foreign attackers, but from the banking industry that is entirely way too politically radicalized.  They keep their pirate flags lowered until it’s too late.  They pretend to be friends and helpful merchants.  But they are ruthless pirates by their conduct, and they intend to do anything to destroy positive financial growth in opposition to the politics they disagree with.  And in the case I mentioned, they went too far.  I know a lot more about the business of aerospace than Matthew Akers does.  So being wrong revealed a deeper problem, and it was easy to see in this case.  But often, nobody figures it out until it’s too late.  And if we want to have a good economy, we can’t let our bankers be more dangerous than Hamas. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Democrats Will Die on the Government Shutdown Hill: Who needs Obamacare when people will live for hundreds of years in greatly improved health

Democrats were already on the outside looking in politically, and for a lot of bad reasons, they have decided to die on this government shutdown hill.  Now that we are well into October 2025, Democrats have insisted on a shutdown of the government, pushing for subsidies on Obamacare, which has always been about socialized healthcare, and control over a large segment of the economy.  And this is a particularly foolish thing to do for many reasons, not just politically.  Healthcare is changing, so the kind of political control over it that Democrats want is already a thing of the past; therefore, their position on it really spells doom for them as a party going forward.  Nobody is missing government services, except for an inconvenience.  We live in a world where many other things can be done, and people are willing to do them.  When they find out they can’t get something because of a government shutdown, it only reminds them that the government shouldn’t be involved in holding things up, but rather in providing the service they are seeking.  Shutting down the government only solidifies the bad feelings toward the government that people already have.  It doesn’t make people feel like they need to go out of their way to accommodate government workers, but rather to find a way to eliminate them so as not to inconvenience them.  So this position of a strike essentially to get what they want, “they” being democrats, is really out of step with reality.  They aren’t going to out-market Trump. Democrats are going to get the blame for the whole thing because Republicans have been trying to pass CRs to get the government going, so Democrats are going to eat the entire thing, which is fine with me.  I want to see the Democrats destroyed and obliterated from politics.  And I see more people will join me as a result of this shutdown.

However, being tone deaf to the world, the healthcare market has changed tremendously in just the last six months.  Not to mention, since Obamacare first came into effect in 2010.  Healthcare changed forever when the industry itself made a significant move with COVID-19 to take over the world, essentially.  Everything dangerous about Obamacare came to people’s minds just ten years later, internationally, with COVID-19, healthcare workers essentially trying to take over the management of everything.  At that point, people began to lose trust in doctors and the industry as a whole, and they started asking numerous questions.  And now, five years later, the whole healthcare assumption has come unraveled, and just as many medical breakthroughs are hitting the market as we speak, such as cures for cancer and repairing tissue that deteriorates typically as we age.  The way we treat illnesses is going to change dramatically by 2030, and many of the legacy costs of the healthcare industry are expected to decrease.  The cheapest form of healthcare is not needing it, as our bodies are capable of repairing themselves.  The best way to not get sick is to stay healthy, and that is the future of healthcare.  Not continued insurance costs to fund an industry that nobody wants anymore.  Democrats view labor in healthcare completely wrong and assume that doctors and nurses are going to be needed, and that isn’t the case.  AI is better than a doctor, heck, and Apple Watch replaces a lot of the need for a doctor’s visit.  And when something is found, it will be stem cells and nanobots that are used to repair the body to its infinite state of healthiness. 

Most of healthcare is a scam, where the industry itself is controlled by the influence of pharmaceutical companies.  Many people have always been suspicious of it, but many of our fears were grotesquely confirmed during the COVID pandemic, and as a result, healthcare as we know it will likely never return to the trust it had before 2019.  People who don’t know any better will use healthcare as it has been sold to the public; they’ll go to the doctor, go to the hospital, and take the drugs that they tell them to take.  However, the future of healthcare is likely to involve nanobots, AI, and stem cells derived from placentas—waste from newborn baby births.  I have a few friends who are fighting off stage 4 cancers right now, and just a year or two ago, these would have been death sentences with a short time to live.  But there are treatments, primarily out of the country right now, that are shrinking their tumors and giving them a path to full recovery, which is what healthcare should be.  In a few years, to kill cancer, you’ll take a simple pill or get a vaccine, and the cancer will be destroyed, and people will live.  People could, and should, live as many years as biblical characters did, for hundreds of years, if not longer.  These lifecycles that we have endured for the last several thousand years are ridiculously short, and that is a consideration that the Schumer Shutdown never understood.  They are trying to preserve a system that is dying year by year.  They are funding for an industry that people would love to move away from.  They are late to a party that ended yesterday, and they are too ignorant to realize it, so they have dug in, seeking more than a trillion dollars in funding that taxpayers simply aren’t going to pay.

This will only help Republicans in the midterms.  It certainly won’t hurt them.  And remember what I say all the time, Democrats don’t have the numbers.  Without illegal immigration, they do not have party support.  Their only hope is to convince illegals to come into America to vote for them because of free giveaways like Obamacare.  However, the industry itself is already too far advanced for an Obamacare-like medical approach.  My advice to everyone is to avoid major surgeries if you can.  Instead of letting people cut away things from your body, wait for the stem cell treatment that is becoming commonplace.   Much of the world is further along in developing new therapies that repair the body because pharmaceutical companies in America have gained too much control over our government, which has received constant funding to cover their operational inefficiencies.  The future of medicine is not in the legacy costs, the hospitals, the doctors’ offices, and all the employees who care for the sick.  They will have to find other jobs in the economy, because more than a fifth of it will change as people stay healthier longer and treatment involves self-healing.  Looking back on this government shutdown over Obamacare credits will be really stupid, but it’s obvious how the Democrat party essentially died as if it wasn’t viewed that way already.  This just put the nail in their coffin.  They have no negotiating room and, out of desperation, are shutting down the government as a last-ditch effort to exert political power.  And all that will ultimately happen is that more people will realize what Republicans have always said.  And support for the GOP will increase dramatically.  Who wants Obamacare and perpetual sickness when you can heal and live much longer?  Which we need because of declining birthrates.  People need to do more because we don’t have a next generation that can take over like we did in the past.  And that means even worse for Democrats, who count on an uninformed youth as another part of their base support; they are going to lose them in this process, too.  But we warned them, and they didn’t listen. 

Rich Hoffman

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

There Will Never Be Peace with Hamas: Releasing hostages that should have never been captured in the first place

After Trump posted support for Douglas Murray’s book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, I bought it quickly and read it because I wanted to know what Trump’s position on these hostage negotiations was with Hamas.  There are 48 total, with only 20 still alive, but none of them are in good shape.  Trump was wise to point to that particular book as an example of his policy on the issue, because it can be confusing.  But here’s the thing: it’s nice to do everything you can to save those poor people who have been hostages to Hamas.  And to return those bodies to their families.  But the solution is a deep one that I think will require much worse than Israel wants to do to all these Palestinian neighbors.  There is no way to achieve peace, and a two-state solution will never be realized.  One side will have to eliminate the other, and that will be the end of it.  That is the only way at this point.  The foundations of the religions at play are meant to provoke each other into conflict, and this is serving a greater evil that is far at work beyond normal sentiment.  There is a real lust for the death of the people involved that looms in the background.  And just for the record, when people ask me about AI and if I use it.  The answer is no, there is no AI program in the world, and I don’t think there ever will be, that can write the way I do.  It can attempt to copy my style, but it can’t think in the way I approach writing my articles.  AI could not write this article from scratch because it would require it to exceed human capacity to do so. To answer the question, no, I don’t use AI.  I do it the old-fashioned way because that’s the only way it works. 

I say all that because I think there is only one solution, especially after you read Murray’s book.  I’m not particularly impressed with Murray as a person; he is way too progressive for me and way too accepting of drug use.  There was a lot of drug use going on at that Nova dance party in southern Israel when Hamas ruthlessly attacked them over their Gaza Strip war.  Gaza is one of those positions where Israel tried to play nice and let the Palestinians live in some co-existence.  However, the terrorist mindset in the region simply cannot and won’t do it.  And they never will.  The minds at play are poisoned with hate, and we have to deal with that before we do anything, which is a radical leftist issue that is global.  It plays out beyond the façade of religion in the Middle East, as a validation between indigenous people and their territorial captors, as is the issue over the creation of Israel to begin with.  The primary assumption is that the Jewish people should not exist.  And the creation of Western Civilization behind biblical history should never have happened.  I know a lot more about this issue because I am very interested in the archaeology of the region and the politics on dig sites. At the most fundamental level, the situation is irreparable.  Islam is determined never to admit that there was ever a First Temple period, and they work really hard to make sure that science can never find anything from that period, which predates Islam by almost 2000 years.  There is a significant amount of historical revisionism occurring to validate their current political stance, which is unacceptable. 

Israel itself is way too progressive; the drug use at that festival was not appropriate for the young people who were slaughtered for no reason.  And the way Bibi Netanyahu has been untrustworthy as a leader of Israeli politics, claiming power, reveals how fractured the government really is at the highest levels.  The solution to it all is a much more conservative government and people far less inclined to liberal ideas.  The raids into border towns like Nir Oz, which had Hamas raiders going door to door and ripping out people from their homes and killing them ruthlessly, would not have happened if Israel had more guns in the hands of private citizens.  To answer the question about why such a thing as this doesn’t happen in the United States, it is because of the mass gun ownership that we have.  The same terrorists, using different masks, attack, and they kill ruthlessly and often.  Consider the recent situation involving Charlie Kirk.  It’s the same kind of leftist evil that is corrupting so many young people; there isn’t much difference between Charlie Kirk’s killer and the young people of Hamas who ruthlessly killed so many at the music festival and raided the homes of innocent people at Nir Oz.  But the incident cannot be widespread in America because every home is so well armed with personal firearms.  Terrorist elements would love to go door to door, raping and killing people in the suburbs of America.  However, they can’t because people can retaliate if the government fails them.  And in Israel, the government failed the people.  They should have known an attack was coming.  It took them too long to respond.  And it all could have been solved with wider gun ownership.  So Israel and its way-too-democratic government are too liberal to start with, which has caused them many of the problems they do have.  Without the United States, Israel would not exist, and everyone knows it.

The solution to the problem is not at the level of government.  The United States can’t get drawn into fighting Israel’s battles for it.  If we are going to say Israel should exist because God wants it to and we want to serve God, then let’s get serious.  Send in private contractors to wipe out Hamas wherever they are, pay them $100k per head, and hunt them down like dogs.  The solution to the violence is a lot more violence by private citizens.  I would volunteer for that.  I’d be happy to go and be a private contractor by going door to door where Hamas lives in Gaza, and other places, and just getting rid of them.  Forget about the armies, those are too structured.  Just take the violence to the enemy with profit-minded contractors, and beat the political left with their own game of terror, and stop playing nice.  I think it’s commendable that Trump is trying to secure the release of those hostages.  It’s a reasonable effort to try to make peace.  But, to really solve the problem, Hamas has to be hunted down and destroyed where they sleep.  That is the only way.  All the Hezbollah activity in the region, and the funding support that comes from Qatar and Iran, are just too deep.  When books like Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are as popularly sold in book stores in that region as they are, there is a much deeper evil at work for any logical negotiations.  And that evil wants the blood of humans for its personal consumption.  The only way to deal with it is to flood it with the blood of its own supporters.  Not the innocent.  And that is the only way.  I’m happy Trump is willing to try.  But the only solution is a lot of blood from the bad guys.  And the best definition of good in all human history has been defined by the Holy Bible.  And that’s the foundation of the entire fight.  You can’t make peace with that evil.  It has to be destroyed, and nothing else.

Rich Hoffman

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

Defending Erika Kirk: Democrats make themselves victims over everything, conservatives don’t

There is a lot to talk about regarding Erika Kirk and the reaction that many left-leaning people have had about her during the memorial for her husband, Charlie, who was recently murdered.  This is part of a larger study that we need to conduct to determine whether we can all coexist in the same world.  What people think and why is often very dangerous, and we have to start thinking about those types of things realistically.  Having personal freedom does not mean the same thing to all people, so it’s nearly impossible to have a meaningful and structured society when everyone doesn’t agree on what “good” is.  And that was never more apparent than in how people from the political left viewed the way that Erika Kirk dealt with her husband’s death, which was a very public enterprise.  Turning Point USA is a group of young people who have fully committed to the pursuit of conservative freedom and spiritual alignment. As such, nothing was shocking about their memorial service, especially for those who attend church on Sunday, a common occurrence, especially at large mega churches.  The Turning Point memorial for Charlie Kirk was held in a stadium in Arizona, which filled to an overflow crowd outside.  So it was an experience that godless heathens from the Marxist left could not understand.  And they certainly didn’t understand Erika Kirk’s approach to life in the wake of her husband’s death.  Because Erika was able to speak to people and contain her emotions, wear makeup, and dress well, people are suspicious of her and are talking about it extensively.  Those types of people would understand Erika better if she fell off the fence and went on a drunken binge, as other left-leaning people do.  But because she was able to hold it all together, people are very suspicious, even conspiratorial. 

This raises an essential point about society in general: conservatives tend to be above-the-line thinkers, meaning they take responsibility for their actions and are always looking for ways to improve things.  Where Democrats are often perceived as perpetual victims who look to society to fill in the gaps, they are below-the-line thinkers, as we call them in business – people who prioritize their own needs over others’ positive efforts, seeking to live off the positive efforts of others for their basic sustenance.  So when faced with a crisis, and a deeply emotional circumstance, Erika Kirk did as conservative women tend to, she looked for proactive measures to accommodate her very negative feelings on the murder of her husband, and the loss of the father of her very young children, with proactive positions.  And that came out in her various speeches.  Now Charlie would be very proud of Erika, including her walking out onto the stage to give a speech on behalf of her husband, accompanied by rock concert-like pyrotechnic effects that juiced things up for the audience.  Democrats in that same situation would be looking for excuses to fall apart, because that is their natural state of existence.  They would want to become intoxicated, to dress all in black, and to cry instantly, drawing attention to themselves so that people would feel sorry for them.  That is what all Democrats do; it’s what separates them from the rest of the world.  It is what makes them broken people and social menaces to themselves and others.  They could not understand a person like Erika Kirk, who had the personal strength to speak to the public so soon after Charlie’s murder and would even go to the trouble to put on some makeup to make herself presentable.  

Again, Turning Point USA excels at the entertainment aspect of their political efforts, and it should come as no surprise that they leveraged the memorial service to amplify their efforts.  Charlie Kirk would certainly approve, as he poured his life into the conservative movement and would undoubtedly appreciate how his memorial service was handled, including the way President Trump spoke during it.  It might be hard for Democrats to understand, but that doesn’t make it a vast conspiracy.  I’m sure Erika Kirk had to do a lot of acting to get through those few weeks, where she felt like shutting the world out while she grieved.  But she married a very public husband who had been very publicly assassinated. So to do him justice, she had to address that public in a very public way.  So she had to dig deep to get there, and what she did was conducive to the way that above-the-line people approach life in general.  People derive the strength they need from compelling leadership personalities.  Don’t cry about things that you can solve for yourself.  And don’t go out of your way for pity from a public that should never be in a position to give it to you.  That is, in general, the way that conservatives approach their business, and it’s very different than those who are attracted to social management in the form of Marxism, where the down and out want to stay that way so they have an excuse for all their bad decisions in life.  They don’t want people like Erika Kirk to put pressure on them to be better than they otherwise dare to be.  They want to be victims in life and cannot imagine taking charge as a reaction to tragedy. 

Without question, there is a lot wrong with the Charlie Kirk murder that should be a lot more forthcoming.  With Kash Patel, a friend of Charlie Kirk, in charge of the FBI, many people expect better, proactive answers.  However, we are dealing with a deep and elusive evil that operates in the background in a manner that is very difficult for people to confront.  So I don’t know that Turning Point USA and Erika Kirk are willing to just move on from the motivations of Charlie’s killer and to take the surface investigations all too quickly.  But part of the way that evil hides in the background, and into the lives of below-the-line Democrats, is in the notion that putting trust in Christ will rid them of the burden of carrying the cross, so to speak.  And when Erika said she forgave the murderer of her husband, she was also putting the burden of that anger aside, which is a consistent Christian means of dealing with stress.  And I attribute that to the Turning Point USA position in general, with Charlie Kirk, who wants to get back to the business of what Charlie stood for, rather than spending a lot of time crying over his loss.  For conservatives, the goal is to get out the message uninterrupted.  Not being encumbered with grief and misery.  Democrats don’t and will never understand a proactive approach to misery, so to fill their void, they will resort to conspiracy theories.   When in truth, they don’t have it in them to think in any other way than to be broken people.  Democrats are broken people who seek attention in times of crises because they feed off pity and emotional distress, which is why they are dangerous to society in general.  We can’t have all these different people working toward the exact same social necessities when they are so far apart.  And that has been grotesquely obvious in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder.  We’ve learned many hard truths in the wake of it that will require real action in the future.

Rich Hoffman

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

What’s Behind the $55 Billion Electronic Arts Deal: Fighting the new method of empire building by investment firms

War never went away; the idea of conquering another nation, or its inhabitants, in the way that Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, or even the modern communist movement did, persists.  All that really happened was that the nations of the world were neutered; however, the desire for conquest went underground and has since emerged in the finance industry.  Why did Napoleon invade Russia?  Because he wanted to rule over the largest empire the world had ever seen.  And so it is the same desire that a modern bank looks at a good, privately owned company and seeks to raid it, destroy it, and collect its assets for its own use.  Why did the Vikings raid other territories and kill all the men, and rape their women brutally?  To show conquest over them, to capture them, and rule over them.  And in the communist movement, the way to destroy capitalism as the world understands it is to control the means of production.  So, when people want to know why Electronic Arts suddenly wants to go private after being public for so long, and everyone is scratching their heads over the $55 billion deal, the largest of its kind ever, I’m saying this is a trend to prevent invasion, rather than to conduct innovative business.  Publicly traded companies have been vulnerable to radical leftist politics, which ultimately destroy their brands, so the trend of tomorrow is to maintain good old private ownership.  And this is something I am all too familiar with.  And most people don’t see it until it’s too late because the invaders are the types of people who work outside the rules of good business conduct.  And those rules are usually defined by what happens within the four walls of a business.  But the invaders are just as aggressive and malicious as any empire seeker ever was, and that power and desire for control starts with companies like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, investment firms that run majority stock options to control the conduct of large companies that, in turn, control vast amounts of the population and their income. 

For instance, large banks like Wells Fargo have Vanguard, the investment firm, owning about 8% of their stock, BlackRock owns 7.9%, and State Street owns 4.1%.  Add them all up, and those huge progressive investment firms control a significant number of banks like that. We have seen very aggressive, woke policies embed themselves into those banking practices.  BlackRock isn’t shy about it; they are very aggressive about progressive politics, and when they own more shares of stock than the average 401K investor, they control the essential direction of the company, who they hire, and how they conduct themselves.  And it is that kind of menace that has essentially destroyed Disney as a company.  And they are doing the same to all large companies.  For instance, GE Aerospace has a nearly identical stock management portfolio, with Vanguard at 8.7%, BlackRock at 7.8%, and State Street at 4.2%.  See a pattern?  That translates to Vanguard controlling $27.4 billion, BlackRock $24.6 billion, and State Street at $13.2 billion.  Where did those investment firms get all that money to be able to buy up all that stock, and control that much of so many huge companies and banks, and to set policies of woke politics to steer them all in anti-American ways?  For Disney, it’s the same formula: Vanguard at $16.7 billion, BlackRock at $13.2 billion, and State Street at $8.2 billion.  Among the three, the same pattern emerges, and from there, power and control flow into every aspect of the industry.  The purpose of their enterprise was to control the means of production as Karl Marx envisioned it, and the method of achieving this was to be publicly traded. 

The crime of the century essentially started with the 2008 banking crisis, where the Fed began buying up a lot of bad debt. Through quantitative easing, the printing of money, they infused it into Wall Street, allowing people like Larry Fink to clean it up by buying up large companies.  To sustain the perception of value, they would clean up their portfolio by acquiring other companies and integrating them, attempting to conceal the inflationary trend of printed money that would lose its value on the open market.  It might look good on paper for everyone’s 401K plans, but what was lost as they imposed themselves on their conquered assets was the companies themselves.  This has become grotesquely obvious at Disney, where the public has rejected the new money-driven company in favor of Uncle Walt, who represented Main Street USA.  That vision was attacked by these big globalist bankers and investors who had the same motivations of invasion as any tyrant the world has ever seen.  However, the form of battle remains the same.  For those big companies mentioned, the conquered management hires people who facilitate the invading culture. Because of the nature of people to appease the powerful, they don’t question their reality so long as they can get a paycheck.  Who controls the paycheck, then controls the individual people.  But how did Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street get all that money?  Because they printed it by gaining control of governments, such as the United States, through the Federal Reserve.  Whoever controls the money supply can theoretically control the world, on paper. 

I’ve been dealing with this kind of thing very up close and personal myself, and I’ve had to explain it to many hundreds of people over these last several weeks.  And most people don’t understand it because the invasion is happening on a vast scale that is even bigger than the management at those investment firms.  Larry Fink is aware of what he’s doing, to a point.  But it’s even bigger than him.  However, it’s no surprise that a giant video game developer would want to step off the publicly traded treadmill and seek to go private, where it can have better control over its management.  EA has been successful for a long time, but it’s challenging for a company to maintain its momentum once it matures, showcasing flashy PowerPoints and spreadsheets that demonstrate the kind of profit that keeps investors engaged.  And the big firms and their radical leftist politics need that cover of publicly traded companies to hide their influence over all these big firms.  So, it’s no surprise, especially now that the trend is emerging to see huge companies like Electronic Arts stepping away from the publicly traded scam.  This all became very clear to me as I watched an enormous bank do some really dumb things that made absolutely no fiduciary sense, but in the context of conquest as outlined by those top three investment firms and their global objectives.  It’s not the value of the companies themselves that they are after, but the need to hide their efforts behind real manufacturing that has not yet become encumbered by woke politics, and can still produce tangible goods.  Because those large firms are dealing with fake money printed by an out-of-control Federal Reserve, the value of the money means nothing to them.  But what that phony money can buy under the assumption of publicly traded companies does give them power that nobody else without that kind of access to the money supply can fight off.  At least for now, until more and more companies do as Electronic Arts is doing, and that is to step back into private ownership so that they can hedge away the influence of the liberal monsters of Wall Street, these practices will be a danger to any economy.

Rich Hoffman

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

Under New Management: The difference between the back of the train and the front

It was a good accident while I was shooting the video for this article, when a train came by.  I tried to wait for a previous, huge train to go by, but about 10 minutes later, another came, almost as if the trains wanted to help me make my point.  Because I was discussing the Metaphysics of Quality, a favorite topic of mine from Robert Persig’s famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I think it’s one of the most important books that the human race has ever produced because it puts its finger on a very allusive idea, which is why some people are better than others, especially in the field of business management.  And these days, now several years out of Covid, and a world obviously not prepared for Trump to be in the White House, a lot of companies are flat-footed on this current economy.  There was an assumption during the COVID pandemic, and all the way up to last week, that different rules would govern the world, a kind of socialist administrative state where work was bent to the preferences of the workers instead of the needs of the business.  And people are shocked by these very capitalist rules.  All over my town, signs are going up to let the public know that their companies are under new management.  Most of them are restaurants that have been too slow and understaffed for too long. Many people thought they would be able to work from home to stop the spread of COVID, which, in retrospect, was a laughable endeavor.   Yet the entire world tried to think it and actually put it into practice, which was one of the dumbest things ever.  To my point, which is why I can say that our COVID response, even as it was artificial, was really dumb. That train helped me make the point right on time, leaving a perfect demonstration of what the heart of the problem is with all these restructurings. 

What the world needs, especially from every company and every family, is a leader who leads from the front, where all the action happens.  Using a train metaphor, the front of the train, at the cutting edge, is where all the critical decisions are made. For instance, how fast should the train be going? Does it need to turn onto a different track in case something falls across it, posing a danger to the entire train?  Operating the train needs to happen from the front, where all the controls are, and the leader can see what’s coming before anybody else.  However, most leadership cultures, and I can say this after dealing with many tens of thousands of people, most of whom have advanced degrees and extensive experience in high-tech sectors, are behind-the-scenes people.  People who sit in the caboose collect data and report the contents of the train as it moves along.  The information they process can be helpful, but by the time they see it, the front of the train, especially on a very long one, has already passed the point where something was observed.  For exemplary leadership, by the time the people in the back of the train see it, it’s too late to do anything different.  Most management in the world, whether it’s a small company like a private restaurant, or a large company, or a government, functions from the back of the train because that’s where it’s safest, and people generally don’t like danger.  That is why good leadership, let alone outstanding leadership, is so rare in any industry.  It takes a lot of guts to run things from the front of the train. 

When people say they are under new management, they are trying to tell their customers that things are different and that they’ll get more responsive service from the organization, and they allude to this leadership quality.  As if to say that their management is new, and therefore the opportunity to be better is in the future.  But to be honest, the ownership is usually just throwing darts in the dark, and they don’t know the difference between good leadership and bad, because they are too afraid of the cutting edge at the front of the train to make decisions there.  It’s scary at the front, and most people in the world, more than 99% of them, would rather be in the back of the train.  I have literally dealt with consultants at every level who proclaim to know a lot about these things, who are in that consulting business because they are afraid of life at the front of the train, where all the scary stuff happens.  They don’t want scary things in their lives, so they do what many people do who aren’t very good at life: they teach.  Nothing is safer than putting the train on pause and studying its contents while it’s not moving, in a classroom environment where there are no dangers of driving through day-to-day life.  And this isn’t some fluke opinion; it’s actually a flaw in the way we teach generations of people in a classroom environment, and why those who survive the schools of hard knocks are actually better prepared for authentic leadership.  Leadership isn’t taught as much as it is learned in the challenging places that the world presents. 

The problem with all the COVID protocols and the obsession with moving the world into an administrative state management condition, where people could sit in their living rooms in their pajamas and tell others things from a Teams call, was absurdly stupid.  Yet, that is why so many companies are now struggling to meet customer demands.  The marketplace did not go the way it was expected to, and virtually everyone is struggling to catch up.  Many organizations are seeking new management to replace the old one, and they are posting signs to let their customers know that they are trying to find effective leadership, even if the kind of leadership they are looking for is actually one of the rarest commodities in the world.  Good leadership thrives at the front of the train while most of the world desires to hide in the back.  They might make a lot of noise back there and bark out commands, but on a fast-moving train, by the time they see them, the train has already moved well beyond the point of decision-making.  And that is the core of the problem; it takes courage to run things from the front of the train.  And our schools don’t and can’t teach courage.  They teach people to be in the back of the train, where the bootlickers and con artists reside. They are that way because they lack courage and have to fake it to make it.  They learn to appease the teacher in a static classroom, and once in the world, they do the same from the back of the train.  And that is why most management in the world is ineffective.  But then we marvel when we see individuals who have great success at almost everything they do.  This is why it’s called “Metaphysics of Quality” by Robert Pirsig, and it’s one of the most outstanding books on the subject of business that has ever been written or thought about.  I’ve read numerous books on business, including some of the most popular titles on Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.  All that means nothing if your organization doesn’t have a leader at the front of the train.  And you can put all the signs out about new leadership, but it doesn’t matter if all that leadership is where most leadership is in the world today – at the back of the train, hiding, where it’s safe.  Leaders need to love danger and to make decisions unafraid as they face it moment by moment.  That is the difference between success and failure.

Rich Hoffman

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