Tag: Department of Justice

The Wounded Deer Strategy: When banks seek to destroy business for politically strategic reasons

The practice of financial institutions abruptly severing relationships with clients—often termed “debanking”—has emerged as a serious threat to American businesses, particularly those in politically sensitive sectors like defense contracting. This phenomenon is not merely a business decision; it can resemble a calculated impairment strategy, where a bank or lender deliberately wounds a company financially, leaving it vulnerable to acquisition or collapse by opportunistic players, such as private equity firms. I refer to this as the “wounded deer strategy,” drawing from a vivid analogy: imagine a majestic buck, seasoned and resilient, evading hunters for years. One day, lured by trusted advice toward greener pastures across a road, it is struck by a vehicle, breaking its legs and leaving it helpless on the roadside. The driver speeds away, and soon a truck full of opportunists arrives, claiming the easy prize as a trophy without the risk or skill of a true hunt.

In the business world, the “trusted advisor” is often the bank that has provided liquidity and guidance for years. When ideological or political divergences arise—perhaps a lender’s leadership shifts toward progressive priorities incompatible with supporting defense suppliers under a particular administration—the institution can withdraw credit lines, demand accelerated repayments, or impose punitive terms. The company, suddenly cash-strapped and unable to meet obligations, becomes the wounded deer: limping, exposed, and prime for plunder by private equity firms eager to acquire distressed assets at fire-sale prices.

This is not hypothetical. Reports have highlighted cases where companies face account closures or service denials seemingly tied to political affiliations or industries disfavored by regulators or bank leadership. For instance, defense contractors and suppliers aligned with certain administrations have encountered scrutiny, with some executives and observers pointing to “politicized debanking” as a tactic to undermine supply chains indirectly. While direct evidence of widespread ideological targeting in defense remains anecdotal in public discourse, the broader pattern of debanking—often justified under vague “reputational risk” guidelines—has affected industries from cryptocurrency to politically active individuals and businesses. In one high-profile context, executive actions have sought to curb such practices by requiring risk-based, individualized assessments rather than blanket political exclusions.

The vulnerability stems from the absence of strong guardrails. Banks hold immense power over liquidity, and without legislative protections, they can exit relationships with minimal recourse for the client. A clean “divorce”—mutual termination of lending without malice or destruction—should be possible, but too often, the exit inflicts maximum damage: frozen accounts, called loans, or reputational smears that cascade into further isolation. This leaves companies unable to pivot to new lenders quickly, especially in capital-intensive fields like aerospace or defense, where contracts demand stability.

Compounding this is the explosive growth of private equity, which thrives on distressed opportunities. Private equity firms manage trillions in assets; global private equity deal value rebounded sharply in recent years, reaching $2.6 trillion in 2025, with buyouts alone nearing $1.8 trillion. Assets under management in the sector have ballooned, with estimates placing private equity-held companies at record levels and dry powder (uninvested capital) fueling aggressive acquisitions. Firms often use leveraged buyouts—acquiring targets with borrowed money loaded onto the acquired company itself—leading to high failure rates: roughly one in five large leveraged buyouts results in bankruptcy within a decade.

Brendan Ballou’s book Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America (2023) provides a stark examination of this dynamic. Ballou, a former federal prosecutor and special counsel for private equity at the Justice Department, details how firms acquire businesses—often retailers, medical practices, nursing homes, or other essential services—using minimal equity while saddling them with debt. Profits are extracted through fee structures, cost-cutting (including job reductions), price hikes, and quality reductions, shifting resources from productive enterprise to financial engineering. The result: higher costs for consumers, lost jobs, and weakened companies. Reviews describe the book as “infuriating” and “essential,” highlighting how private equity has reshaped the economy by prioritizing extraction over long-term value creation.

A parallel Ohio example illustrates how regulatory pressure can wound companies, creating openings for corruption and plunder. FirstEnergy, facing challenges from Obama-era policies promoting renewables over traditional nuclear and coal, sought bailouts amid financial strain. This culminated in the House Bill 6 scandal—the largest corruption case in Ohio history—involving $60 million in bribes funneled through dark money groups to secure legislation subsidizing failing nuclear plants. FirstEnergy admitted involvement, paying $230 million in penalties, while executives and politicians faced charges. The scandal exposed how wounded utilities, pressured by federal regulations, turned to political influence rather than market adaptation—ultimately harming ratepayers and eroding trust.

Private equity’s role in housing offers another cautionary tale. Firms like Blackstone (often confused with BlackRock) pioneered large-scale single-family home purchases post-2008 crisis, converting them to rentals. While institutional ownership remains a small fraction nationally, concentrated in certain markets, it has driven up prices and rents in hotspots by outbidding families with cash offers and low borrowing costs. Tenants face added fees, and communities lose owner-occupied stability. This mirrors the “plunder” pattern: acquire undervalued or distressed assets, extract value, and leave diminished foundations.

These examples underscore a systemic issue: without regulatory constraints, financial institutions can act as activists against disfavored sectors or politics. Large international banks, with global priorities over domestic patriotism, pose particular risks. They fund diverse causes, yet behind the scenes may undercut supply chains supporting certain administrations—eroding American infrastructure indirectly. Fiduciary responsibility demands impartiality, but temptations arise when no guardrails exist. Ethics alone fails; self-discipline yields to pettiness or ideology.

Ohio can lead by enacting legislation to protect businesses. Proposals could include:

•  Mandating civil, non-destructive terminations of financial relationships, with notice periods and transition assistance.

•  Prohibiting impairment tactics driven by political or ideological motives, with penalties for violations.

•  Strengthening fiduciary standards to prevent malicious wounding.

•  Requiring transparency in debanking decisions, allowing appeals or independent reviews.

Such measures would encourage local and regional banks—more rooted in community values—over distant giants. Entrepreneurs deserve protection to innovate without fear of becoming roadkill for ideological or opportunistic predators.

The stakes are high. A thriving economy relies on confident investment and job creation. When private equity controls trillions, often through plunder rather than creation, and banks enable impairment without consequence, the foundation weakens. Ohio, with its manufacturing and defense ties, must act to install guardrails before irreversible damage. Reading Plunder and examining cases like FirstEnergy provides the intellectual foundation; legislative action provides the solution.

Bibliography

•  Ballou, Brendan. Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America. PublicAffairs, 2023.

•  Morgenson, Gretchen, and Joshua Rosner. These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America. Simon & Schuster, 2023.

•  McKinsey & Company. “Global Private Markets Report 2026.” McKinsey, 2026.

•  Preqin and iCapital. “Alternatives Decoded,” with data to February 2026.

•  U.S. Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission filings on FirstEnergy/Ohio nuclear bribery scandal (various, 2020–2025).

•  Ohio Public Utilities Commission decisions on FirstEnergy penalties (2025).

•  Various reports on debanking, including executive orders and congressional investigations (2025–2026).

•  PitchBook and KPMG analyses of private equity trends (2025–2026).

Footnotes

¹ Ballou, Plunder, on leveraged buyout bankruptcy rates.

² McKinsey Global Private Markets Report 2026, deal value statistics.

³ Preqin/iCapital data on private equity AUM growth to $7 trillion by end-2025.

⁴ Wikipedia and AP News summaries of Ohio nuclear bribery scandal involving FirstEnergy and HB 6.

⁵ Reports on institutional single-family rental ownership (e.g., Blackstone/Invitation Homes strategies).

Rich Hoffman

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Yes, We Are Going to Arrest Judges and Put Them in Jail: “Imagine” a world where law breakers actually get punished

Yes, to answer the question, we will put judges in jail.  If they break the law, they will be arrested and thrown in jail with everyone else.  And that is a lesson that Judge Dugan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, learned in late April of 2025 as she was trying to help an illegal alien escape as agents were in her courtroom to deport the guy.  We have been talking about the radicalism of our judiciary, who have come to believe that they don’t have to live by the same rules that the rest of society does, but that they have gained king like powers to resist temporary challenges to social order by elected representatives, like Trump in the White House.  So their goal is to put on the brakes and use the process to stall out temperaments.  Their commitment to the hostile policies of the Open Border movement, which is globalist in nature, was never more evident than in their resistance to the Trump movement.  During the last term, we saw that resistance to the popularly elected Trump came from the FBI and other forces at the Department of Justice.  Now the shoe is on the other foot, and Trump has control of those arms of government.  Because people gave him that power through an election, and now we see as a last line of defense these radical leftist judges who always think they could make up the law from the bench and build the kind of society that they’d like as liberals.  This has been a tactic that has emerged more from the background, the longer Trump has been in politics, because the radicalism was always hidden behind polite society.  And to expose it, Trump needed to make society less polite.  We were dealing with a “screw you over with a smile on our faces” culture that was very manipulative and malicious. 

But Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested by the Pam Bondi Justice Department, with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino working on the FBI side, and we suddenly have many different government agencies we can feel good about.  Before Trump was elected back to office, the FBI was helping judicial radicalism, which is why all these sanctuary cities thought they were going to be able to defy Trump.  But now that cover story has been stripped away, the judges are all alone and exposed.  A former ex-judge in New Mexico was also arrested with his wife for essentially doing the same thing as Judge Dugan. Retired Magistrate Judge Joel Cano and his wife Nancy were arrested at their home by Homeland Security, now ran by the great Kristi Noem, for tampering with evidence by destroying the cell phone of his wife as they were harboring Cristhian Ortega-Lopez, a 23-year old Venezuelan national and suspected member of the Tren de Aragua gang.  When they say, “but there is no evidence,” they say stupid things like that because they know their role in destroying evidence and think we’ll never figure it out.  These old judges who think they are in command of the legal system know that to get convictions, you have to have evidence.  So we have a whole subculture of radical, Marxist liberals who think that if they destroy the evidence, our judicial system will never prosecute and get a conviction.  I have seen this process up close, so it’s a huge problem.  Marxists have been playing on the gullibility of good Christian people for many years, and honestly, we’re tired of it.  That’s why people voted for Trump: to give us these new government agencies that had been corrupted by indecision in the past, but now will enforce the law, even when we know that people like Hillary Clinton are destroying the evidence of her email correspondence.  Or that proof of election fraud was wiped out by the courts, which wanted to certify someone they politically support.  Or in the case of illegal immigration, this judicial couple felt they had the power to change immigration law with a protest by using the system against itself.  And now with Kristi Noem, that shell game is no longer working.

And that is the real fear, the radical left’s observation about arresting judges for getting in the way of Trump’s deportation policies.  Before Trump was elected, he made it clear that he was going to go to war with the drug cartels.  And now we see who has been helping them ruin our country, all these radical leftist judges who are sympathetic to the destruction of our country.   Go through the musical libraries of couples like that one in New Mexico. You’ll find a lot of hippie music and progressive artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, and they are probably in love with John Lennon’s communist song, “Imagine.”  These are not flag-waving Constitutional patriots.  These are hostile hippies now aged and abusing the power they were given as legal professionals to articulate their politics as senior citizens.  And whatever Judge Dugan thought she was doing by trying to sneak off an illegal immigrant in her courtroom through her private chambers only indicates how deep this problem has been for decades.  These judges have been trying to cripple America with soft on crime policies and to change the nature of the American people with open border policies written while pot smoking losers who now run public policy sit around and listen to that stupid John Lennon song, “Imagine.” 

Well, “Imagine this,” a world where lawbreakers go to jail.  And those in charge of judgeships are arrested for using their bench as a political weapon to undo law and order, rather than preserving it.  Finally, we have a Justice Department, an FBI, and a Homeland Security willing to do the job as needed.  And this is just the beginning.  So yes, we will be throwing more judges in jail and prosecuting the radicals regarding judicial review.  If they want to be relevant in co-equal branches of government, they better be willing to work as hard as Trump does to do a good job.  Up to this point, the people we have had in the White House had too many advisors, and they enjoyed the ceremonial aspects of the job too much, but they weren’t in love with the work.  These judges don’t work very much; they drink too much wine and listen to too much old hippie music, which corrupts their minds about the task.  And they aren’t going to stop Trump with weak political positions and a 9-to-noon daily work schedule.  The world isn’t going to slow down to the political sentiments of the Marxist left.  They will have to compete with capitalism, with value, and with laws that protect those values, rather than being an insurgent trying always to undermine them from their benches.  And regarding evidence, action is some of the best evidence of what people get caught doing.  And Judge Dugan was caught tampering with the arrest and deportation of an illegal immigrant.  But she’s not alone.  We need many of these people to clean up our system.  And it’s good to see that we finally have people willing to do the work.  One arrest at a time.  Put them all in jail.  And if we need bigger jails, let’s build them off the money we save by destroying the drug cartels! 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Fake Prosecution of Trump: Hiding the complicity of the 4th branch of government

The criminal referrals by the January 6th Committee were astonishing in many ways, by essentially an out-of-control government that was effectively fighting for its very existence with the fake prosecution of President Trump. What January 6th was from the outset, including the riots that took place on that day, was a massive cover-up of the election fraud that took place, that American intelligence agencies caught through Twitter and Facebook to have conducted massive tampering in the election results. Ultimately Trump only lost to Biden by 45,000 votes across five different states, and the work alone by the FBI and CIA would have easily altered those results. Biden was put in place by American intelligence, and the January 6th Committee was created and did its work as a cover for the crimes they did, in much the way that the CIA tampers with elections in other countries. Why wouldn’t they do it in America? Especially to protect themselves from a SWAMP. As it turned out, the January 6th Committee was every bit the political hacks that they were accused of being, and all they had, in the end, was a phony report trying to blame the riots at the Capitol on Trump because of the kind of language he used, like “fight like hell.” What this corrupt government wants, which feeds this fourth branch of government under the table like some deficient dog, is a complete collaboration by the public to empower them to a rule they never deserved to have. And through mass deception, they had that rule until Trump came along and showed them what people really wanted, which they underestimated in 2016. So in 2020, even if they were caught red-handed, they would alter the election results and put a sock puppet in the White House that they could easily control, which is how we ended up with Biden. And the entire purpose of the January 6th Committee was an attempt to completely desecrate the evidence of their behavior that caused the protests. 

There is a history of this: America’s intelligence agencies interfering with our elections; what happened to Trump isn’t the first time. Now there is plenty of evidence to show that the Kennedy assassination points in that direction. Why, well, everyone is sealing up the release of the documents explaining why they killed Kennedy. Even Mike Pompeo, a Trump head of the CIA, voted to sit on the documents, which the Biden people just continued. And what happened to Nixon just a few years later was, in many cases, worse. Instead of blowing off a president’s head in public, they destroyed him slowly and painfully in courts they controlled and in front of the entire nation to live with for the rest of his life. Knowing now what we do about the case, discussed in several books reporting on the incident now that many of the characters involved have died off, Nixon was perfectly innocent. Watergate was nothing but an excuse to create controversy that a genuinely good man would react to. All Nixon did regarding Watergate was be a good person who was way too honest for a dishonest, corrupt government too big and out of control for its own good. There was doubt in Nixon about his role in the break-in of the DNC, so prosecutors working with judges in completely illegal ways got Nixon to blink even though, at the time, he didn’t have all the facts. Nixon didn’t want to scrutinize the president’s office with controversy, so he stepped down, even though he didn’t need to. And shouldn’t have looking at the issue in hindsight. 

Once Ronald Reagan came along, he was much less boisterous after his assassination attempt. And after those first two years in office, Reagan declined quickly and showed the intelligence agencies that he wasn’t much of a threat. Reagan showed that he could play ball with big government, so they left him alone to ride off into the sunset. And what they managed to get with Bush was a partner, who was one of their own. And from there, things went downhill. Through Clinton, then Obama, up to Trump, the American intelligence agencies were picking our presidents for their own survival. The Washington D.C. culture thrived under those controlled conditions playing by rules that the intelligence agencies constructed. And everyone knew what lanes to stay in to survive. And if anybody stepped out of line, they were dealt with. Seth Rich comes to mind, as do many others. By the time Trump came along in 2015, many like me were fed up with the shaky system and wanted a change. The intelligence agency laughed; they had their pick in Hillary Clinton, someone they knew they could control and was too stupid and power-hungry to fight back, so they thought the usual games would work in destroying Trump. They made the Russian Dossier up out of thin air and tried to use that to keep Trump from running. But they didn’t know what to do with a truly self-made man who didn’t need the donor class. So the intelligence agencies overplayed their hand and were caught along the way.

By the time we got to the election fraud of 2020, the tampering of the FBI and CIA were so apparent that nobody was even trying to hide it anymore. And that’s ultimately what the January 6th Committee was created to do, is hide the complicity of big government and the intelligence agencies who wanted to continue to rule as the 4th branch of a shadow government. They had a track record of killing people and destroying lives, and that’s how they managed to have so many conspirators on the January 6th Committee. Many politicians have benefited from that corrupt system, and the intelligence agencies know who has been doing what and where the money came from. So if that information ever got out, their lives would also be destroyed. And that’s how this 4th branch of unaccountable government has managed to rule for such a long time, out of fear. Fear they inflict on innocent people they are supposed to be protecting. But with Trump, all this was exposed, and now they are exposed for the corrupt branch of unelected government that they always were. And they are fighting to stay relevant with that phony Committee that never had cross-examination from Republicans on it and then went on to harass everyone in Trump’s circle of power to hopefully destroy the president from running for a second term. And when I say only Trump could be president at this time in history, it’s because he is uniquely qualified to counter that invisible 4th branch of government that has always been the real problem. He’s rich and can afford to. He has a healthy ego that keeps him from being scared off the task. He’s charismatic in ways that rallies people to his cause. And over time, I think he has genuinely come to love America. He’s not the same guy driving around New York in his Lamborgini, flaunting his wealth. This is now a guy who really cares, and he has the resources to fight back. And people see that and understand that he and only he can fight back against this government monster peacefully, without riots.   And if we don’t support him now, we may never get another chance to beat that SWAMP again. That is what the January 6th Committee fears most and their intelligence agencies who run in the background and pull their strings. 

Rich Hoffman

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The People I Hang Out With: Many people consider Steve Bannon to be the most dangerous person in the America

Before I go into a full-throated defense of Steve Bannon, the Trump strategist who recently was sentenced to 4 months in prison for defying the January 6th crooked court and the illegitimate Department of Justice put in place by Joe Biden and his plans to destroy America, I need to answer a question that the Butler County Sheriff’s department asked the Lakota school superintendent. While being interviewed by the police for his bizarre sexual lifestyle, the school superintendent was looking for help from his friend, the Sheriff, so he name-dropped me to remind him of a political rivalry within the Republican Party. It appeared to work because the police did not take further action even though the charge involved children; they blew it all off as “pillow talk” among “consenting adults.”  That is a subject all its own, but during the questioning, the police asked the superintendent, “who does this Rich Hoffman run around with” where the answer came back, “far-right winged” (people.)  As if I was hanging out in my spare time with lunatics who wear half-shirt tank tops in their backyard while cooking a dog to eat over an open fire with confederate flags flying over the house. (for people concerned with history, the Confederate enslavers were all Democrats, while the people freeing the enslaved people were all Republicans. Just a tiny little detail)  I usually don’t talk about my “behind the scenes life,” but since I saw that question posed by the police, I’ve meant to address it adequately because the Steve Bannon case reminded me of a dinner I was at that involved the prosecuted voice of the War Room that the Liberal World Order wanted so much to shut down. I’m proud of him, and I think this action against him will only help his cause.

Also involved in that police interview was the new Lakota school board member, Darbi Boddy, so her involvement with me in a posh dinner a few months ago where we were at the VIP table together has relevance. Darbi was sitting next to me; actually, her sister was next to me, and Darbi was next to her. In front of me was a senator. Next to him was a big-time political influencer. Next to him was a judge. Next to him was a political activist. Next to me at the following table was a State Representative. And next to her was other political bigwigs. The food was excellent.

The conversation was heavy. I was set to speak at this event, so we were in the center of the room. And you might say it was an event very much concerned about the affairs of our political order. It was hardly an event that contained a bunch of crazy right-winged loons. And as our conversations were focused on lofty concerns, I received a text message. As I saw it, I showed it to Darbi, and it caused even more discussion with a bit more weight added to the subject matter. It was a text from Steve Bannon, continuing a conversation we had been having all day, and as happens from time to time. I usually don’t think much about these things, but in the context of the police interview where the question came up, what kind of people do I “hang” around with? Well, that would be a good example. And I’m proud to include Steve Bannon’s name among them.

I figured out my role in the freedom movement a long time ago. I have a bedside manner that solves problems, whereas, on shows like the War Room and the old AM radio broadcasts that I used to participate in, the focus was on addressing an issue, but there never seemed to be much time to talk about the solution. For Steve Bannon, that is how the War Room works, talk about a problem and get people activated to help answer it with community activism. He and I had talked about this because there had been times when he was obviously considering me as one of his contributors. I shy away from those kinds of engagements because my gig is to give people the confidence that they need to take action with my bedside manner. For me, there is never a time to panic. There is never a bad guy who can’t be beaten in whatever way is needed. I am an optimist in every sense of the word. While my blog has millions of visitors, I consider what I do to be more of a slow burn than the urgent discussions that often make up talk radio content. People read and watch my stuff and think about it for a long time. And I like to keep the money out of the First Amendment business as much as possible because being small and nimble is more important than attracting an audience that advertisers would want. To do what I do, I need to remove as many woke influences as possible, so lean and agile are essential to my task, and I need the autonomy to work to my own schedule and subject matter. 

While Steve Bannon is on every day from 10 AM to noon, then from 5 PM to 7 PM to do his War Room podcast, he even works on Saturday from 10 AM to noon; my schedule is that my published content goes up at prime time, 8 PM each night, every night all days of the year, but I produce that content at my leisure. I have a busy life, so I usually do my work on these matters between 2 AM and 5 AM in the morning while the rest of the world sleeps. I have a very tight schedule during the waking hours that has something new going on every 15 minutes and lasts until well into the evening, past 8 PM. So, part of my thing is being able to control my time to do it instead of working toward a fixed schedule. I need that extra freedom to perform my task, whereas Steve Bannon is like a clock; he’s always on time and doing his work, even when the FBI is raiding him for harassment. So to additionally answer the question by the police about who I run around with, and some of the names I’ve mentioned, and talking about my daily schedule, it concludes with the obvious answer, I’m not this busy and spending time around those kinds of people because what I do isn’t heavily sought after. 

Suppose you don’t have a track record built over three decades of being right about things and having information that influential people find extremely valuable. In that case, you don’t find yourself talking to the kind of people I mentioned at that table. The political enemy wants to believe that everyone has the same problems that they do, so they imagine that people like Darbi and I are all about one political topic and that we spend the rest of our time waiting for someone to tell us what to do next, such is the life of the typical liberal. Rather, in my case, it is hard to give everyone the kind of time they want from me, and for me to do what I do, it requires vast amounts of flexibility to perform the task. But the need to perform those tasks is heavily sought after, and if I didn’t have a track record of truth and cutting through the fog so reliably, then I wouldn’t be at events like the one mentioned. And the only reason that I say it here is its relevance to Steve Bannon, who is considered by many to be the most dangerous person in the world. I don’t think he is. But I sure am proud of him and how he has stood up under heavy intimidation by an insurgent force in the White House. He has been tough. Darbi Boddy has been tough. And so have many thousands that I can think of off the top of my head who are fighting back against liberal tyranny wherever it shows itself. When I go to events like that VIP event, I think of how the people involved are answering a call that started with the Progressive Movement, and specifically Saul Alinsky. The radical left punched America first, and it took about 80 years for the America First movement to punch back. But that’s what we are doing now, and I would say I’m proudly “heavily” involved on many, many, many fronts. And I wouldn’t call any of the people I’m interested in as “fringe” or radical. They only have in common that they don’t like bullies, and they aren’t going to take it. And fighting back is the only answer, which is the kind of people I hang out with. Hopefully, that answers the question that the police were seeking. 

Rich Hoffman

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Ricky Shiffer Attacked the FBI: Don’t get caught playing their game, the way to beat them is to take away their money

The frustration that Ricky Shiffer experienced when he attacked the FBI headquarters in Cincinnati is understandable, just as the January 6th rioters were understandable in their anger over election fraud. But I say to them and anybody else thinking about the injustice they see coming out of the FBI and law enforcement in general, the law is against them. Don’t let them bait you into making a bad move because all they have on their side is the attempt to victimize themselves and gain public sentiment by victimizing their position. Even though he was upset about the FBI raid of Trump’s home, Ricky Shiffer should have been cool and allowed the process to play out, even though the great fear is that these law enforcement types are manipulating the law to cover their own crimes, just remember that they do not have the legal position of merit at their backs. They have no other option but to try to win public sentiment through the traditional “sacrifice of public service” display. But people see what is going on, and the way to deal with these things at this point is through the election process. Fight to ensure we have free and fair elections, then use elections to remove these corrupt people from their positions. That is the case whether we are talking about local issues like public schools where obvious crime and misconduct have occurred. Yet, the authorities in charge are grossly abusing their power, or it’s the FBI office in your community. For me, the Ricky Shiffer story is a local one, it happened in my neck of the woods, and I understand there are lots of people out there like him. They are angry, and they want justice. But, the bad guys know how to twist things to their advantage, and Ricky should have never let himself be drawn into their trap. Because once he was, they could then control the narrative, which is all they really care about anyway, controlling public perception and using their manipulation over the media to continue their abuse of power fueled by taxpayer dollars.

I see all these bad things that the FBI has been caught doing as advantages. I would say the same to the local school board problems or the corruption of a local sheriff, where the law is certainly one way for political enemies but quite another for their friends and associates. Without the measure of a law and order society to compare to, there wouldn’t be any way to really say that things are out of control. And that’s when people like Ricky spring into action when they think there is no hope for justice and that they must take it upon themselves to defeat bad guys and restore order to the world. Part of the plan of how evil works in the world is to drive people toward the sense of desperation that causes them to remove themselves from the best strategic decision and then present themselves in a vulnerable way. From there, then they are playing the FBI game and falling right into their hands. When Ricky Shiffer attacked the Cincinnati field office, he might have made a few people think he was doing a good thing on Truth Social, Trump’s very good social media site. Still, he weakened his argument by allowing the pressure they created to inspire him to move off his already good position and go to them instead of making the FBI accountable at the ballot box with new management. Part of their goal in supporting a Democrat political party in America is to push people into a sense of desperation so that they act against the law because they have been led to believe that it is no longer respected. That is part of the strategy, and during the years of Trump in politics, this impression has only gained more bold action. But that says more about them than it does their opposition, the Constitutional conservatives who have gravitated toward the MAGA movement of populism.   The administrative state, which the FBI is struggling to protect with its bloated bureaucracy and big government ideas, is showing all its cards and building a case for their elimination in the future day by day. Let them make it because they are their own worst enemy.

Ultimately, Ricky Shiffer’s greatest power wasn’t a gun or threat of violence against the FBI. The January 6th protestors didn’t need to raid the Capitol building to prove their point. They were made to feel desperate by the regime in control. We’ve watched the Swamp in Washington attempt to use public sentiment against the protestors, even though the world had watched all through 2020 that liberal rioters were unleashed in all our cities and did far worse. Things go wrong when you get caught playing the game that the bad guys want you to play. The greatest weapon Ricky had, and we all have, is the power of the purse, the funding mechanism to feed the beast. That is where the administrative state is weakest, whether it’s the local school system or the corrupt national FBI. Don’t charge them with your guns and aggression, hoping to bring things to a conclusive resolution with a show of force. The FBI presents themselves with a show of force because it’s the only thing they can do. They do not have the law to their back, and much of what they did to Trump has put them in a bad public relations position. It has cost them far more harm than the fear of the public turning against them and attacking them where they work, like the Cincinnati field office. 

The way to attack is to reduce the size of government, vote for the kind of people who understand that smaller government is the way to go and choke them out of their funding. I know it doesn’t come out very sexy; it’s not like the movies we’ve seen where it’s a three-act play, the presentation of the situation, then the trouble is shown, then there is the climax at the end of the movie where everything is resolved. These legal problems are a running gig day by day and year by year. And if you look at things in the long run, we have learned a lot more about our FBI and their true nature based on how they have acted toward Trump, which has been very valuable. Before Trump, only conspiracy theories were talked about on talk radio at 2 AM in the morning. Now there are thousands of podcasters talking about these crimes from the FBI in the middle of the day all across the country. So, things are getting better the worse they look because now we can see what the FBI and law enforcement is really about. And that information can then help us know why we must defund them and replace them with something much more manageable and better for our society than the thugs of lawless bureaucrats they have become. It’s not a cliché to say that knowledge is a more powerful weapon than anything else, but it’s true.

Knowing what we are dealing with is far more important than whether they followed the law or not because we can then establish intent. And once you’ve done that, you can see the situation for what it really is, not how they want you to see it. And from there, you can decide what to do about it. But when you discover that these are bad people who have been up to no good, don’t let that knowledge rot you to your core with audacious revelation. Be cool, use the law to your advantage and manage them through the power of the purse. Taking away their money is the best way to harm them. That is a weapon that all the guns in the world couldn’t do better. And it’s time we use it for the purpose of good in the world.   It takes money to run all this evil. Take it away from them; then they will have nothing to fuel their activity.

Rich Hoffman

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