Tag: Donald Trump

Shakedowns at Lakota: The trolls robbing openly the business community

It’s not often easy to understand the many veiled ways that a school system, any school system, extorts the business community for extra cash in the pay to play scheme that is what has become of government schools. When anybody talks about the teacher unions as a negative radical force, it goes far beyond the wages that destroy budgets that school boards are constantly having to deal with. It actually seeps into the management of the school system itself flowing over into zoning and finance. When we see these radicals in action they usually present themselves as nice cordial people, perhaps with too much jewelry and perfume–even the guys. Their pant suits would make Hillary Clinton proud as they profess to be “all about the children,” which nobody would argue with because they don’t understand the details. But when the lights are dimmed a bit, or these union radicals are sipping their lattés at Starbucks, their true intentions become much clearer and a hatred for the rich and industrious comes sharply into focus, even as they make plans to strike against a school system over more money such as what seems always to be happening in Chicago. And from the letter presented below, this practice of harassing businesses isn’t just happening in my home district of Lakota, it’s pretty much everywhere that labor unions operate with taxpayer funds.

What makes stories like this hard for people to understand is that its not the direct action that progressive teacher unions create themselves, it’s the results that they instigate as a radicalized political entity. Anybody who has the endorsement of a labor union and is running for school board is playing the game and do the bidding of that radical element. This example is within Lakota, but the same story could be told in Mason, Monroe, or any government school. The foundation for this particular practice at Lakota goes back to the severe mismanagement of the school board that went on when Joan Powell was running things. To a large degree Julie Shaffer has carried on the tradition along with Ray Murray and Brad Lovell. Ray lost his seat a few years ago to Todd Parnell. Lynda O’Connor and Todd have been two votes toward solutions and are both business friendly. For this upcoming election, Jim Hahn is poised to join the school board and like Todd and Lynda, is a pro-business candidate and would be part of the solution. But before we can talk about that we must define the problem that is expressed in the letter presented.

The names were blacked out to protect the innocent on the letter shown here. Even though I have permission to use the letter in its raw form it’s not really necessary for the story. The story is that a real-estate investment by an enterprising opportunity has been trying to gather up the funds to initiate the endeavor and they are being told in this letter that the common practice in public schools operating in this region are demanding even more money to leverage control over the project before a shovel ever hits the ground. And that threat will continue until the owner or prospector of the property makes a payment to the school for the increased value assessed by the legal entity who is also part of the game. Essentially that means that any investment coming into an area doesn’t just have to look at the costs of the project itself, but the amount of extortion money that the local school system applies to them. Of course, if they don’t play then as the letter says, they will be “blacklisted” and will have trouble elsewhere.

Such as in the case of Lakota, this is why incoming projects, shopping centers, home developments either move to some friendlier district without the kind of leverage that Lakota has or they just buck up and shut up so they can do business in our community. The teacher’s union create the false narrative that their employment makes a great school which attracts investment by developers. They have the media platform to get a sympathetic ear from both print and television news because the kids are used as a shield to advance the topic. But the chaos is driven by the insatiable need for ever more money that is always increased by the labor demand for unreasonably high wages, which must be paid for by the “rich,” property owners. Those property owners are of course the general taxpayers who own real estate—they are all looked at as soft targets by the teacher’s union out for progressive changes to society in general. But it is the business owners who take the biggest hit, just as this letter explains. If they want to do business in Lakota, or any school district through Ohio and Pennsylvania, they will have to pay the troll living under the bridge between finance and the local school system.

The worst part of all this is that it is the crazy labor costs that are driving the activism. Business owners typically don’t want to get involved in contentious disputes because the teacher’s union will threaten quite openly to boycott their work, which to any business could mean complete destruction. Its hard enough to come into a community with a business plan to get funding for the project, but then to survive a shakedown by the local school that might put 7% to 10% extra cost into the project. Then to have it all threatened with bad press and a bunch of angry latté sippers from the teacher’s union is often a “not worth it” decision. People may look around Lakota’s district and declare that everything is great, there are lots of businesses and lots of residents. But what isn’t talked about is that there could be more if the school system wasn’t such a negative impact on potential investors. When it is wondered why Lakota has had declining enrollment, this is one of the contributing factors. Or why young people move out of the area once they graduate. Or why Liberty Center still hasn’t leased out all its available space in spite of all the wonderful things it has to offer to the community, the cost of doing business is too high for most, so it limits our opportunities as a community.

Meanwhile the demand for such high cost appropriations does come from the teacher’s unions who are always threatening the school district with increased costs which pushes not so bright school board members like Ray Murray, Brad Lovell and Julie Shaffer into participating in these shakedowns to keep from having to go to the voters every couple of years to get more levy money to pay the unending appetites of the radical Lakota teacher’s union. The businesspeople are easy targets because they often can’t afford to defend themselves once they have sunk a lot of money into a project, then are stuck holding to it once the bleeding starts. Sure, the labor radicals are nice to them and are not shy to ask for more shakedown money any way they can get it with cordial conversation at public events, but make no mistake about it, the practice is vile and is just as criminal as any thief looking to rob a bank. It’s the same thing, only the school districts wait for some investor to come along with bright ideas to do all the work, then once they are too far along to turn back, find they have to secure more revenue to appease the trolls in the school district. And that is just disgusting. It is certainly happening at Lakota in abundance, but to be honest, it is happening everywhere. The reality is that nobody has the guts to cover it which is why it continues to happen on and on and on.

Rich Hoffman

Pot Smoking and Ray Murray: The school board candidate who wants to shoot teachers if they have a gun

The Ray Murray I knew back in 2011 was nowhere to be found at the VOA Miami University debate on October 22, 2019 for potential school board candidates. I always thought Ray was a nice guy, but the person speaking at that event sounded like a drug induced lunatic. Suspicious of the things he said that night it became clear thereafter that there was a good reason. Under Case Number 0000477720 Ray looks to have been convicted of possession of marijuana and had to serve a year of probation. After seeing that, I would normally doubt that such a report would be accurate. So I checked it with two different sources and, after watching him in action and looking scraggly and worn out in ways I wouldn’t normally associate with him, there is good reason to believe it and then some. He sounded like a guy on drugs as he opened the door to scrutiny by talking about his years as a Chicago police officer and a champion for transgender politics. He painted himself for an election to be a virtuous person, but reality has something else to say.

Here is the problem with electing people with serious issues into a budgetary position, once they are compromised, whether it is in several broken marriages, drug use, being a cop and being scared of being shot at, people like that tend to side with the worst that our society produces. While its fine to feel sorry for them, and if they find meaning in life in a church by becoming some definition of a pastor, we should cheer them on for recovery. But we should not sit them down and ask them to control a budget of nearly $200 million while sitting on a cash surplus of over $100 million. If we did, we should expect all that money to go up in smoke just like any other pot smoking loser. Compassion is one thing, endorsing failure with elections however is something else.

I would go further and say that anybody who does drugs of any kind, even drinking is a cause to not vote for someone onto a school board. And Ray isn’t the only one guilty of this kind of scandalous behavior. I would say that his partners of liberalism on the school board have done far, far worse. Should we talk about it, well let’s just say, we don’t want to embarrass their children, although I would argue that honesty dictate that we should. When we vote for someone to represent us on a school board, or a trustee, commissioner, representative, senator, anything, we need to know what we are voting for. If we decide we want to vote for flawed people, then that’s fine. We shouldn’t be surprised when those flawed people get bad results, but at least we know what we are voting for. If Ray needs help with drugs, lets get him help. But that doesn’t mean we should put him in charge of millions of dollars.

Compromised people tend to look for redemption in public acts, which is why a lot of liberals are dangerous. People like Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer are so compromised with embarrassing things that they have done in their lives that they are looking for redemption with elected office, and they are using taxpayer funded resources to cover their weaknesses. Because they want compassion for the ways they have lived their lives, they are quick to support topics like transgender policies so that they can hide in the crowd and get redemption. They vote in favor of the teacher’s union because they need a cover story of friends to hide their own weaknesses behind with a big banner above their heads stating that nobody is perfect, lets show some compassion for the downtrodden. That sounds fine coming from a church pew on Sunday, but in the world of money, finance and education, it has no place. People who live their lives clean and don’t drink themselves into oblivion or smoke a bunch of dope to forget about all their problems in life, should be in charge of things and have the public trust. And if they get caught doing bad things, we may not blast them out of a cannon and forget about them. We may give them a second chance at life, but certainly we wouldn’t elect them to a board to handle a multimillion-dollar budget.

Being likeable isn’t the same thing as being logical and cool headed when tough decisions need to be made. One thing that must be considered when we are talking about school board candidates that have shown mental instability, and drunkenness and smoking pot or elements of both conditions, is that upon election we give them a badge to get into any building within Lakota. If they are depressed about something who is to say that some drug dealer selling them a bag of pot won’t get a hold of that badge and use it to get into any school building on a rampage of violence, the kind of potential tragedy that we have all been talking about. What was it that Ray said at the debate, that if a teacher had a gun, he would want the police officer to shoot the teacher? Yes, that’s what he said, does that sound like a person who has it all together? Yet his only answer to the problem is to trust the system, yet what if one of these loose cannon school board members ends up drunk and passed out somewhere and someone gets a hold of their badge so they can get into any school? No matter how much we spend on security, you can’t prepare a school to defend stupid and reckless behavior on behalf of the school board members.

Many think its hip and cool to have pot smokers and drunks on the school board. But its no wonder that they always seek institutional support because if something goes wrong, its likely going to be their fault and they want to always reserve the right to hide their faults behind good intentions, such as transgender support and spending that $100 million surplus on give-a-ways to keep anybody from looking too deeply at them. Of course, the teacher’s union wants compromised people on the board of education, because it makes it easier for them to defeat the board upon contract negotiations. When we elect school board members, we are electing our representatives. The teacher’s union has their representatives and they stick together. We elect ours with these elections, so why would we want to vote for anybody who has a union endorsement? We shouldn’t. Then we must ask why the union is endorsing them. Well, the answer to that is that they think they are easy to beat in contract negotiations. If you are the teacher’s union, would you rather go up against a tough business person like James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor, or some dude caught with pot or a person who can’t hold their liquor in public and ends up in compromising positions, all too often. The answer is obvious.

Its not wrong to want to help someone like Ray who no matter what has gone on in his life is at least getting up and trying to do better each day. But when there are problems managing marriages, money in his personal finances, and with substance abuse, then why should we think he can protect his badge from some malicious personality, and to protect our budget surplus. He’s ready to spend all of that $100 million over a 38-year period and to shoot teachers when cops come to a school during a mass incident if they have a gun. Ray might be a good neighbor and a nice guy to go to church with, but he clearly has trouble understanding money and cannot take a strong position on ethical decisions. Being one of the misfit toys out in the world does not make him a good representative of our school board. And feeling sorry for someone is not a qualification to make management decisions.

Rich Hoffman

Everything You Need to Know about the Lakota School Board Candidates of 2019: The Teacher’s Union is ready to steal $100 million

It’s not my favorite topic in the world, but locally, the school board race for Lakota in Butler County, Ohio is a great opportunity for improvement, or a projected, unmitigated failure. And in a lot of ways, how goes things in the Lakota school district, the rest of the country follows, due to the amount of money that is involved and the situation involving government employee unions and the overall position of the Trump administration during a second term not yet resolved. There is over $100 million of surplus in the Lakota budget that the teacher’s union is licking its chops to get a hold of, and they are up for a contract renewal in 2021, and they have picked their candidates in this one. They want the budget novices Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray to be the winning votes during those negotiations and have supported them during this election. So, I have provided the full video of the recent Miami University VOA Meet the Candidates debate which was very well done I might add, so that voters can make up their own minds about this upcoming election. The differences between the candidates couldn’t be more obvious as presented here in the format totality.

Obviously from that video Lynda O’Connor has a lot of experience and is business friendly. I’ve known her for a long time and after sifting through the smoke of political theater have come to trust her with millions and millions of dollars of budget. So much so that I have felt I didn’t have to cover everything little thing that Lakota has been doing, instead looking more at national and international issues involving the Trump administration. But local issues will always be the core of what we do in our republic. The quality of who we vote for regionally has a direct impact on the national elements so we should never take our eye off the importance of local elections. And for that, Lynda certainly has my vote. And so does James Hahn. This is his first time running for the school board of any kind and he was obviously a little nervous in the video. I know him as well and can say that he’s a lot more comfortable with a balance sheet involving vast sums of money than either Julie or Ray is. I actually know all of them well at this point and without question Lynda and Mr. Hahn are the far better choices, especially for the many millions of dollars that are at stake.

Ray and Julie both will say in interviews and in those latte sipping formats with other voters that they don’t care about endorsements from either political party. Yet they are endorsed by the teacher’s union at Lakota and those members are very active on Facebook and other social media networks pushing for these two big spenders to be on the board so they can have easy access to that $100 million. Its like a bank robbery being planned through an election. The money is sitting there in the vault and the union plans to break into that safe to take it by electing union insiders onto the board and taking away fiscal conservatives like Lynda out of their way with a simple vote. It’s an off-year election so voter turnout will be typically low. The union members and their families will show up to vote for the pillaging of that surplus so that is what is at stake in this election, theft, or protection of that $100 million surplus.

It was in that video which I referred to earlier in another article that Ray Murray had said that it would take 38 years to spend that much surplus money, so to his mind, why not spend it and give it to people who need it. He was speaking just like a bank robber in the Old West preparing to loot a town for the plights of the poor and downtrodden. Only I’m not so sure that Ray Murray is the good pastor of a church that he says he is. Without question Ray is a likeable guy full of charisma, but so are a lot of bank robbers and other types of villains. If they can get something out of you without things getting messy, of course its better for them, and I would contend that is precisely what Ray is up to. I don’t think he’s as stupid as he’s acting in that video. If he and Julie get on the school board together, they will give that surplus money to the teacher’s union that has endorsed them and we’ll have another very contentious school levy in 2022 which is not that far off.

Of course, we have a choice at this point, we could elect James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor, (both of them) to get a third conservative vote on the school board to protect that money. It would be like hiring extra security at the bank so that looters couldn’t rob the money. Jim doesn’t need to know much as a first-time board member, he just needs to understand money, which he does. The debate itself didn’t go too far into these issues because it wasn’t meant to. It was a nice surface community thing that was meant to be a softball game so to be in the realm of Ray and Julie’s comfort zone. Conservatives never look as good in those types of debates because they tend to talk over the heads of common voters. The details of such large budgets require smart people and both Lynda and James are, but such a debate format doesn’t want to show how smart people are, only how compassionate, giving, and likeable they can be which feeds straight into the union narrative for their looting scheme.

It was a nice event, the debate, but I did notice something that was unusual about those types of events, before the narrative went down the rabbit hole on transgender bathrooms, guns on teachers—or rather the lack of them, and how we would never spend that $100 million surplus in 38 years. At the beginning of the debate there was no pledge of allegiance to the flag. I’ve been going to these kinds of events for many years and there is always some sort of acknowledgment to the flag of the United States. But not this time. Lynda and Jim are trying to bring to the board of education a conservative presence to protect the budget surplus that we currently have at Lakota. And they are also trying to create a friendlier business climate to steer away from the extortion tactics of the past by Lakota against potential investors. And they are both flag waving Americans. But as the board is now, Lynda is outvoted 3 to 2 and Lakota like all public schools is controlled by the very progressive America hating teacher unions. And the evidence was clear in that debate by the absence of the pledge of allegiance. Thieves don’t honor the structure of the bank of the investors. They just want to rob it and to use the money for their own efforts. And that is what the teacher’s union at Lakota wants to do with Ray and Julie, elect them so that the surplus will fall into the hands of the robbers. And to hell with the American flag, and the conservatives of Butler County who live in the Lakota district. They are counting on everyone staying home on election night so that they can sneak into that bank and take that $100 million without firing a metaphorical shot and enriching themselves in the process at all of our expense.

The question is, will you let them?

Rich Hoffman

Ray Murray Thinks it will take 38 Years to Spend Lakota’s $100 Million Surplus: Why people like he and Julie Shaffer should never be in charge of a budget

$100 million is a lot of money to liberals who only see future pay increases for subpar work leading to easy labor union contract negotiations. And clearly one school board member, Julie Shaffer displayed at a recent meet the candidate’s night at the VOA Miami University Campus Lecture Hall how little she knows about money. Her partner in such a perspective was Ray Murray, the former school board member coming back for more and local pastor pontificated that we wouldn’t—couldn’t spend that much money of a surplus for 38 years, so to his utterances why not give it all away. Now you can see dear reader why it’s dangerous to elect these kinds of people into a management of our tax money. Instead of respecting that money and understanding that the surplus wasn’t really one at all, but a debt leverage problem that needed attention, they tried to paint the fiscal conservative on the board, Lynda O’Connor as a Chicken Little for pointing out that deficit spending is not a healthy condition. No wonder the teacher’s union is licking its chops to get Ray and Julie back on the board and managing their contracts a few years out. They already have that money spent whereas Lynda and the newcomer James Hahn understand that $100 million is not that much money, especially when you look at the overall budget needs.

I did get to talk to Matt Miller the Lakota superintendent and the very good treasurer Jenni Logan, recognized throughout the state of Ohio as the very best in her field, and they assured me that they were going to tackle the deficit spending problem. Sure, it’s fun to spend money like there’s no tomorrow, but smart people like Jenni, and Lynda understand that $100 million as a surplus isn’t much when the operating budget is around $160 million per year, where the only product is educating students, (or babysitting them) and they aren’t doing a very good job at that either, getting a recent poor report card from the state that shows money does not improve results. The teachers need to work harder and worry less about transgender bathroom policies.

I was encouraged to see many friends from the business community not sitting this election out, they are not impressed with the $100 million surplus either. They are wondering why Lakota can’t lower their tax burden if they are operating at such a surplus and not considering spending pauses so that they could continue to build up elements of our community that really matter, jobs and recreation that make a community what it really is, and not just a cesspool of employment for a liberalized labor union trying to program our children into future Democrats. Had they not been there this election might have a different tone, but even the spending addict Julie Shaffer had to watch her mouth so not to sound “too” Democrat in such a conservative district even with pro spending liberals showing out in full force to support future contract negotiations. The smart people want to see James Hahn elected instead of Ray or Julie because that would put a third conservative on the board and would help manage that surplus responsibly. But if left to Ray and Julie, to Lynda’s point, the money will all be gone in around 5 years. Jenni gets it. But Matt didn’t look so happy to see me, and not so excited about focusing on the deficit spending aspect. Elections have consequences and a lot of people are waiting to see how this one turns out.

The best thing to do with the money would be to lessen the burden on future taxpayers to inspire more investment and continued growth. What is lost on Ray and Julie as to the role of the school board in the community is that they not only have to manage the quality of the school, but the cost and to understand the balance between the two. The way it has been, which has sickened me to my core, is that school districts leverage their power to tax against future investment. If you want to play in their school district then they expect you to pay, which is something I will be covering much more in subsequent articles. I can understand the tension in the room at that candidate’s forum. I understand idealistic people with a bloodthirsty zeal to support their school system without understanding how the cheese is made behind the scenes. It’s much easier to just focus on kids and transgender bathrooms, whether or not busing is available and the quality of the sports program. But the question remains, what makes a school district good, is the businesses that attract jobs and good quality applicants who need housing, places to eat, and shop. Or is it the schools that we pour millions and millions of dollars into that just go to overpriced teachers teaching our children radical leftist political activism only to have those kids grow up and to move away. I would say it’s the businesses that come first then the schools that reflect the quality of a well-managed community. And that is something no school system wants to admit to, because it would destroy their extortion racket that they have politically on a community, and financially.

There is a reason so many real estate people are involved with pro levy endeavors, or government labor union types. It’s because behind the scenes schools leverage themselves into the business community with subtle threats directly attached to their ability to tax. Pay or be destroyed, or don’t do business altogether. Being in pro education anything groups like I was last night the people are not the risk takers who go out and obtain financing for some next new great thing, they are just average people who want to feel what they are doing by investing in Lakota will make their kids like them when they grow up. They want to think that the education system will fix all their deficiencies as people. That is certainly the case of Julie Shaffer and her past protégé Joan Powell who were part of those upside-down deficit spending habits that almost destroyed Lakota and the community it sits in. The reason there is a $100 million surplus now is because so many kids grew up and away and new kids did not replace them, so Lakota has declining enrollment that will continue into the future, and that took the pressure off our budget tremendously, but the deficit spending has continued and will so long as there is a three vote majority against proper budget management.

As Julie said trying to defer blame from herself, school boards don’t pass levies, they don’t demand further tax increases. They leave it up to the voters. But what school boards do however is mismanage the money we give them. They cave into labor union demands for ever increasing rates of pay that is not connected to any performance standards. And when Julie won’t take her part of the blame for the deficit spending and when Ray, who was there all along thinks it is party time at Lakota, that they have 38 years to spend that $100 million surplus, well there is the problem. We have a chance to fix it with this election, but people are going to have to show up to vote. If they don’t then the same deficit spenders will be in place, the labor unions will love it because Julie and Ray would gladly approve a contract negotiation because they don’t have the guts to deal with a strike or bad press for standing up for the taxpayers. And they will lead the charge against the business community to twist their arms into silent approval or else boycotts from the radical union members will come after their brand with a fury. And none of those questions were asked at the candidate forum because as we all know, it’s something that people just don’t talk about. But it is every bit the core of the problem.

Rich Hoffman

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Creating Crises for Change Agency: Why so many are so angry about Syria

It is truly scary to think how close we came to having Mitt Romney as president in 2012, Mr. Pierre Delecto. If you add him to John Kasich who was governor of Ohio during that election, its no wonder the GOP lost all the time. Those guys just suck. Horrible representatives of conservative values and in the scheme of things, before there was a Donald Trump in politics, they were the good guys. We all suspected how deep the deep state was, and why we had troops all over the world supporting make work wars just for the benefit of having something to do and always a crisis to manage. You would think that more Democrats would be happy that Trump is pulling our troops out of Syria and asking other countries to pay their own way in matters of conflict, but nobody in government is happy about it, because essentially it exposes them for not really having anything better to do. They create the crises, then they send resources to manage the crises, all the while enriching themselves in the process. And now that we have a president that is exposing that scheme people like Romney are apocalyptic. If there is anything good coming of it, it is that conservative radio and talk shows are finally starting to see how the game has been played all along. Rush Limbaugh had a particularly good show about it, seen below, as did Laura Ingraham on Fox.

One of the first rules of change agency is to create a false crisis, a situation where people in a panic will make decisions, they otherwise wouldn’t make to usher in a change state to their daily lives. And nothing provokes change more than a war without end. I would think that the Hollywood anti-war protestors would be supporters of President Trump due to his desire to turn away from that chaos of global war machine politics. Instead they have turned toward the next crises, an invented diatribes like “climate change.” They are hoping to see the President impeached before the swamp is drained and all their tricks for creating crises are exposed. Wars used in this modern era, as we have clearly witnessed by the evidence, are make work programs for the lazy, and institutionalized thinkers, such as the Harvard educated Mitt Romney. Trump’s election has turned the world he thought he understood on its head leaving us all thankful that the common sense of the American people made an important change in electing Trump before it was too late, which in 2012 was at the precipice. Many in the Tea Party movement were seeing the writing on the wall, much earlier even than 2009 when things really started to get heated. But the panic now, for losers like “Pierre Delecto,” is that their make work wars have been exposed and that the world will forever be changed, and that they don’t understand their place in it.

Rush was correct, these political class players used our love of military, patriotism, and country to create a military complex that we would cheerfully send over seas to manage other people’s problems all in the name of crises management. Yet the crises were created by hidden agents operating behind the curtain, infusing a little anger here in some socialist cell in the Middle East, or making it so that America couldn’t fly into space but through Russian agents due to cutbacks at NASA. And we were all supposed to accept these ridiculous limits and provocations and like it. Then when we elected a different kind of politician that would turn the GOP into a true Republican Party, politicians like Mitt Romney and John Kasich fell into an all-out panic. They had spent their lives learning the rules and now the rules were all thrown out the window. If we had elected Romney, the Republican Party would essentially slide more to the left and become what the Democrats would like to be about now.

You can see the weakness of these arrogant institutionalists when pressed, Mr. Pierre Delecto uttered “C’est moi,” just to show everyone how educated and “New English” he is while confirming his clandestine Twitter account so critical of President Trump. He was so eager for some reporter at Slate to sniff at his breadcrumbs and tell the world that Romney wasn’t such a boring guy after all, and that he really hated the president desperately, because essentially, he had lost at his chance. He’d rather have someone in the White House that he understands even if they are from the other party. Sounds a lot like James Comey as he talked about drinking wine while leaving Washington after being fired from his job by Trump as another worthless beltway bureaucrat. These people, who we used to call conservatives are simply coastal liberals who have no idea what makes the rest of the country tick, and they have no desire to learn because they are representatives of institutionalism, and that behavior seeks to justify themselves through chaos and crises. They never did want any solutions to any problems, they just wanted problems so they could appear to do things about it, while making themselves wealthy off the process. A quick look at how much incoming senators make as opposed to what they make leaving office tells the whole story. It is insulting that these types of people were upset with Trump for wanting to host the G7 at Doral. I still think he should.

If not for the Trump election none of this would have been exposed, but it is now. Better yet, conservative outlets are no longer treating the subject as a vast conspiracy, but as real news, as it always was. The best thing that could happen is that people like Mitt Romney and John Kasich be flushed from conservative thinking and that the GOP form under the small government tendencies of the Trump administration. The hypocrisy couldn’t be more obvious, even from a giant media company like Disney who should love the Trump administration for its anti-war stance, its solution-based trade wars, and economic sanctions which hit villains in the pocketbook, not in innocent collateral damage. If it’s not obvious by now, our military is not exactly a bastion of conservatism. They are by nature big government bureaucrats which Trump learned while trying to put them in his administration. Troops might vote for Republicans, but generals are very liberal in their thinking, and they love to have perpetual wars with no solutions in sight because it keeps everyone fed with make work programs and reasons to celebrate with dinner parties for the heroes of the movement. You would think that more people would support pulling back the troops but now that someone in the Executive Branch is actually planning to do it, without asking for permission, the outrage is rather explosive, and for our benefit, very revealing. There is nothing new about it, but we do now see a truth that has always been there. And it’s a good thing that we finally did, and that news types, such as Rush Limbaugh are finally addressing it for what it is. We had to admit that our GOP was not fully conservative and that our former politicians were just as corrupt as the Democrats. To me, Trump’s anti-war stance is a liberal one, and he is not what I would call a strong conservative. But next to Mitt Romney and John Kasich, and many others, Trump is the most conservative politician to ever sit in the White House, or anywhere for that matter.

Rich Hoffman

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The Debt Clock at $23 Trillion: How the Trump “pro growth” plan is our only hope

A frequent reader here brought up an excellent point that has been bothering me regarding the amount of spending that we have in our government and our failure as a country to deal with the national debt which is presently almost at $23 trillion. I remember when it was only at $16 trillion and it was a big deal for the Republican platform, and clearly since Trump has been elected, it has not been a priority. Because there were essentially two problems that had been planted in American culture by those who wanted to destroy it for a transfer bail out into the United Nations, which was the strategy all along. The first of those problems was that we were borrowing at a high level to essentially chain us through regulatory compliance to the rest of the world who could then pull our loans and control us as a nation tossing out that pesky Constitution because as a nation we couldn’t afford to live up to it, and the second, we shipped all our jobs overseas so that there would be no way to pay the debt even if we wanted to. When Trump was elected his first method of attacking this problem was to stop the bleeding, which he has done. You can read the comment below:

When is he going to fight to lower spending? I like Trump for the most part. I love that he is pulling us out of Syria. But we cannot continue to spend like this.

Jason E Koslow

https://usdebtclock.org/

 

I hadn’t yet answered Jason because it required more than a five second answer, due to its very good point. If I know Trump the way I think I know him, which is quite well—I would venture to say that being an optimistic person that he is he plans to tackle this whole problem in the second term of his presidency now that the seeds for a great economy have been planted. And he plans to not do it by cutting, which many Republicans would think of as the first objective, but he wants to do it with growth. That is after all how he personally became a billionaire. In his mind, he plans to do for the country what he did for himself. Growth is the ticket out of debt, and he’s created the foundation to explode that growth.

Then you read his comments about why he couldn’t host the G7 Summit at his Doral golf course due to all the controversy and it brings to mind Jason’s point more succinctly. There are forces in the American government that are quite common, they persist actually into half the country that tend to vote for victimization representation in the form of Democrats. They don’t want to show off the potential wealth of America, they don’t want our billionaire president to show the world that he knows what he’s doing in building Doral. They’d rather the event happen in some government building with limited running water so that other countries not be so seduced by American capitalism. But for Trump that was precisely the point, to inspire more investment and that explosive growth that he has been counting on. And he was obviously disappointed in the small thinking of the press and the Democrats in general. Thinking small is not one of the things Trump has ever been good at and he has no desire to start now.

Under Trump’s next term which he has helped along with deregulatory practices and access to NASA, commercial space travel will become big business. Hyperloop transportation will become common language and the tremendous growth potential of his trade deals and bringing jobs back into the United States will contribute respectfully to the GDP. Then and only then will that clock begin to tick backwards and from my vantage point, it couldn’t happen soon enough. The great risk is that another year of this will put that debt up toward $25 trillion which is a major problem. That huge sum could be paid off with new space mining operations for rare metals. The amount of money that the commercialization of space could generate is stunning, and Trump is counting on those seeds to bloom to cover the debt. But he has to get elected first and for that to work, he has to protect what he has started from Democrats who want to torpedo it for their own future chances.

Which brings us back to why there is a debt to begin with. The Democrats wanted to crash the system, they set all this in place during the Obama administration and for Trump to stop it he would have to turn inward, which would have played into the hands of the Democrats who planted that seed long ago. It was their insurance policy for their own existence. What they didn’t count on was for Trump to come in and turn the ship around and for Republicans to stand behind his “pro-growth” vision. Trump trusts the innovations of the private sector even when they come from his enemies like Jeff Bezos. By getting government out of the way, the private sector could generate many trillions of dollars in additional GDP and that is the plan. But he can’t mess with the economy during an election year and start cutting our way to prosperity. We must grow. You can’t bring reality to people addicted to government services because that would end his election and the prospect for any future growth, so Trump is playing a big round of poker here, and he has a lot of chips on the table.

If it was anybody else, I’d worry. But the way that Trump handled himself personally during the 90s gives me the feeling that he can do it again with the American economy if he has our support. He certainly has my support. He has stopped the bleeding, now for part two, we must build up the blood. I would argue that an operating budget for America needs to be much less. But if we can turn the clock backwards with growth, well then, why not. I personally think there will be enough expanding market emerging in the 2020s to pay off our national debt and get to a positive position by the time we are settling people on Mars. But first the Democrats literally have to be destroyed as an opposition not just in politics, but to economic growth because for them the debt clock was a form of terrorism that was supposed to go off by now, only we elected Trump to bring back all our oversea business and to deregulate ourselves back to a growth based economy. I tend to think that one more election will do the job and free Trump and the supporting Republicans into launching those pro-growth initiatives. But we also must consider that the Democrats know all this and they are set to do anything to survive, and if they could destroy the economy in some way during 2020 to keep Trump from getting re-elected, then their debt clock becomes a driver again, and a means to destroy America and to merge it with a world management system. There is a lot of stake, and nothing that we can take for granted.

Rich Hoffman

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The Secret to Toyota: Guns’n’Stories in VR and the benefit of play

I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with people this week wondering about me and they seem surprised that I know so much about Toyota manufacturing systems at a holistic level and that I play so many video games. And as I explained, I see the two as the same, not separate endeavors. To understand why the Toyota company did so well culturally in the realm of business is not in reading and understanding some magic book, or a three day course given in Tokyo where someone stands over you with a cane to beat you with it if you get the incorrect answer to a question, as many believe is necessary. You won’t get it from an MBA program from any college, its one of those things you either get or you don’t. In Toyota outsiders call it the Toyota Kata, which is doing something over and over again until the task is second nature. In their organization managers were successful in establishing a “kata” of success as defined by the target conditions management sets to achieve superiority in the marketplace. Simple. Yet the world struggles with this concept so it is my hope to help it out a bit with this little article.

Playing video games is an excellent way to develop an internal “kata” to use the Japanese word, for training yourself to get used to winning. To identifying what the target conditions for victory are, then learning the rules for getting there. Every video game may be different just as every workplace can have its challenges, but the idea is the same for everything. Once you learn and expect to win, by nature of instinct you’ll get used to identifying what target conditions need to be found to support victory. Once you can do that in a video game, you will train your mind through a kind of kata to finding it everywhere, in relationships, in business, with your children, in society—everywhere. So, it should not be such a surprise that I play many hours of video games per week. The byproduct of that behavior pattern is to constantly push myself to complete those games and to win whatever the parameters of victory are. Knowing what victory looks like is half the battle and so many people just haven’t trained their minds to measure reality in that way, especially adults.

I have a new VR game for my PlayStation called Guns’n’Stories: Bulletproof which was an absolute delight to me. It is an amazing virtual reality shooting gallery type of game where animated villains attack you from all directions while you stand in the middle of various wild west towns gunning them down with a multitude of very fun weapons. I completed the story mode of the game over this past week and found it wonderfully enchanting, a nice vacation from the rigors of daily life. And I was replaying several of the levels last night while I had the television on listening to Fox News and the reports that the Democrats stormed out of the President’s office over the troop pullout in Syria. I took a moment to think about how much information was pouring into my brain, between the VR headset and furious action from the game as hundreds and hundreds of bad guys came at me to shoot down as fast as I could, then the news broadcast going on in the background as my wife was telling me about all the events of her day, it was a lot. But I’ve trained my mind to deal with all that, and that isn’t that much more unique than a typical day at the office.

The difference between Toyota, or most Japanese companies, is that they have not forgotten how to play with ideas as a culture whereas we have in the West, from Europe to North America. We look at work as, well, work, and the Japanese don’t, its just another part of their life. They enjoy the work most of the time and that is one of the key ingredients to Toyota’s success as a company. Playing a lot of video games over the years allowed me to do much the same with my own life, there isn’t always time to play a football game with a bunch of people, or to go shooting somewhere that you can actually shoot targets by the hundreds of thousands, or fly around in some vessel engaging in dogfights. All of that is play, but more seriously all those games have objectives toward winning the game and in playing them the target conditions for victory are always occurring. You as the player must discover them through playing the game. And the benefits continue long after the game is over because the process has wired into your brain the ability to discover target conditions in everything, even when you aren’t playing video games.

I watch so many adults struggle in life over this very basic misconception. They wonder why their wives don’t love them or find them attractive anymore as they complain that their car is in the shop again, their house isn’t big enough, and that they are overlooked in their jobs for the next big promotion. They ponder why their kids seem indifferent to them as they grow up because they have sacrificed so much as the parent to give them a good life and they feel unappreciated, and of course all those behaviors show up in their work. At 5 PM on the nose they are leaving for that long drive home where they are met in the kitchen by an indifferent spouse with their own version of the same problems. Then when talking to me, they say, “video games are for kids. I’m busy making a living and living in reality.” Of course, to that I say, “reality is defined by your interpretation of it.” If you don’t have the tools intellectually to make reality work for you, but rather against you, then its no wonder you are miserable.” In truth, by playing games, video games or some sport for fun, you are actually helping train your mind to identify target conditions for success, which is what Toyota as an organization does for all the employees that work for it. They know how to define success and getting there becomes a kind of game instead of feeling like just more pointless work. Give people that autonomy, you give them more than a good job, but a good life.

It is always a treat to me to play a cool game like Guns’n’Stories: Bulletproof in a virtual reality environment. After all, to me for that time that the headset is on, that is reality. And to take a break in that kind of world is a real treat. Whether its actual reality or virtual reality the objective is the same, to define target conditions and endeavor for a win. By achieving victory, the mind gets used to seeing and striving for the parameters of victory, and if truth be told, that is the key to the Toyota Kata. Knowing how to win and learning to strive for the ways to do so. Empowering people to win and share in the ownership are the keys to any success. So, from that vantagepoint, video games aren’t so silly, but a good tool for training the mind in how to learn to win.

Rich Hoffman
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Hunter Biden is a Loser: Giving the “Rich” a bad name as a typical government looter

My favorite part of the Batman movies is the wealth and justice aspect of the hero and how he uses his resources to do good in the world. A world that would otherwise be bleak if not for his efforts. That is the story of Bruce Wayne, a kind of modern Zorro, who did the same during the American expansion period in film. And so it was in the most recent story telling exercise of the Batman movies where the villain Joker was emphasized that my favorite character by far in that film was Bruce’s father Thomas, presented in the blockbuster film ‘Joker’ as the rich mean villain. Thomas was the kind of rich person that I understand, as most of the people I know best in the world are all rich and millionaires by status. They are not the villains that Karl Marx and his followers would make them out to be, they are examples of what people should strive to be. They are only villains to those too lazy to do the work of becoming one themselves.

Just like in real life, all rich people are not equal. Some make their money by working hard, smart, and better than their rivals. Some loot off those efforts and become wealthy by providing access to other people. So not all people making over $200K a year are equally part of the 1% that movies like the Joker seek to attack. There is no place in America where a room full of wealthy people dressed in formal attire watch movies together while the poor protest outside. That thought might exist on college campuses and liberal bastions of panic and anxiety, but they do not happen in America where everyone, no matter how educated, how poor, what their family name may have been, has a shot at success based on the merits of their life. Yet the very kind of people who are most demonized for their improper allocation of money are those like Hunter Biden who was the son of a powerful Vice President who was paid for access to the American government as opposed to Don Jr and Eric Trump. The Trump kids were put to work by their father to earn what they made where-as Hunter Biden was just a nameplate and leverage for the clueless Joe Biden and his power given to him by the most villainous means possible, political leverage of a fictional aristocratic brokering firm called the United States Government.

You can almost feel sorry for Hunter Biden who appeared on Good Morning America this week in an attempt to answer Trump’s criticisms of his family. Looking at his face and general non-verbal impressions, I couldn’t help but think “drug abuser” with his sunken eyes, and his timid personality. Not exactly the kind of guy a woman would want to marry if they wanted a reliable husband to cut the grass and bring home a steady paycheck to keep the refrigerator stocked. Hunter Biden is a player and now at this stage in his life he is looking over his back more than he’s looking forward, because everything he has done in life has been given to him, so he fears that someone will take it away.

But what would anybody expect from a father who looted from people his whole life and gained power because of the threats of his regulatory burdens that he could otherwise place. For Hunter Biden to sit on so many boards and be paid so well for them is an obvious payoff to allow those companies to function without the threat of a senator to leverage them for some loot like a pirate on the choppy seas of capitalism. People like Joe Biden don’t make things and do things to make their money, they are simply government pirates who steal from those who do, and that’s where their power comes from, in the regulatory power we give them as a government. Companies looking to mitigate their risks with intrusive governments solve that problem by putting the kids of powerful people on their boards to keep that regulatory burden from happening. John Kerry’s kid comes to mind as well, it’s a common practice in what we call “the swamp.”

The type of wealth that the Trump kids come from is earned and built. It doesn’t come from stealing from those who do things in life, but it is the type that comes from hard work and efforts at expanding the economy. When President Trump built his wealth, he used to put cash in the pockets of people like Biden to keep government away from his businesses, just like everyone else feels they need to do. But that type of wealth is far different than being paid 50K per month to sit on a board of directors and sniff cocaine all day with loose women to appease a senator who loots for a living. That’s a far different thing, you don’t see the Trump children just getting jobs on boards because their dad is the president. They made all their money before he became president. Him sitting in the Oval Office actually costs them a lot of money in opportunity cost. But they have decided that the long-term vision of the Trump name is more important than a few million more dollars from a foreign hotel deal.

Yet the question of wealth value is to demonize it all and to prop up the losers who perpetually come up short in life due to their low ambitions. In the movie the “Joker’ it wasn’t an accident that Thomas Wayne was confronted by a person who thought he was the illegitimate child of the billionaire while he was taking a piss in the bathroom. They could have framed the scene anywhere, but the filmmakers chose to do it in the bathroom in a vulnerable position for Wayne. Wayne was disgusted at the future Joker for all the reasons many people who work hard to overcome obstacles are when confronted with those who give in to anxiety, weakness, and laziness. The kind of people that Thomas Wayne represented in that Joker story do work hard and use their ambition to overcome obstacles, so they are naturally offended when some loser comes up to them begging for money and trying to use victimhood to extort resources from them through guilt or a threat of violence. They know that the way to appease those types is to put their kids on a board of one of their companies to placate the politics. In the case of Thomas, he was just planning to run for office and solve the problem himself, like the real-life Donald Trump did.

Trump was famous for saying that he would fire his own kids like a dog if he thought they were lazy, so he instilled in them a work ethic that is obvious to this day. They would be somebodies with or without their father being in the White House. But Hunter Biden would be a big time nobody if his father was not a senator for his entire adult life. That is the difference between a winner and a loser, and the value of the wealthy and the wealth acquired by a looter. They might both have money, but not all of them contribute to the betterment of civilization. But all are demonized by the Karl Marx anarchists and big government socialists who want everyone under their thumb for threat of reprisal. And for Hunter, that is why he is a loser. It’s not because he was unfortunate enough to be born into the Biden family, but because he was too lazy to build his own way, and instead rode on his dad’s coattails. He is rich, but he’s still a loser and everyone can see it.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump’s Illustrious Base: Why the President’s pull in Syria is a great thing

Several of the weekend commentators on Fox News seemed spent after a few days of President Trump’s efforts where they were astounded at some of the things he had been saying. Even Republicans were showing their frustrations as Trump was pulling troops out of Syria to let Turkey and the Kurds fight it out and allow the region to do what it needed to. America is the number one energy producer in the world, the global oriented despots can no longer justify such troop movements to “protect” oil in other lands. We have our own thank you, so why else would we send troops all over the world to stabilize other countries? Trump managed to piss off everyone, yet his approval numbers don’t seem to be moving no matter what anybody tries to do to him, which is mystifying all the dirty tricks that politics knows to play. So, both sides grudgingly admitted that Trump was playing to his base as if that diminished the efforts, and it is there that our present topic is concerned.

When I talk about our education system, and I mean the global education system, the teacher in the front of the room preaching about things from the vantage point of a democracy, where the many rule, it is quite clear to me that it has been wrong for the human race. It doesn’t work, and when the adults of our lives try the same tactics, they used in grade school to push people into doing things, it becomes embarrassingly clear that it was always the wrong method of igniting young minds to life. The headlines on Monday morning regarding Syria were that several Republicans were breaking with the president over troop withdrawal and that this was dangerous in the middle of an impeachment hearing that was set to doom the president with an official congressional witch hunt to remove him from power. President Trump seemed completely unfazed, even angry and this left a mystified reaction to his critics on both sides of the political theater.

We are taught in our grade schools that if you want to go further, then you can only get there by bringing other people along. That you can’t accomplish much as an individual, that the key to all power, prestige and truth can only come by holding the hands of other people. So, in that regard, the perception of power is therefor in how many friends you have, how many people you can get to agree with you, and even the validity of a thought is based squarely on how many people join your alliance. The value is in people and their buy-in to your concept. However, that is not how it is in actuality. For many people not skilled in leadership, they have no choice but to make alliances with the masses. They may not be the strongest, so they make peace with people who might beat them up. They may not be the smartest, so they must find a way to acquire information they are not capable of obtaining. Yet true innovation and leadership do not come from such places, and our education system should strive to make more people self-reliant in their thoughts and actions to build more leaders for which the world is starving.

Trump like all great people of instinct listens to people and measures their reaction to things, but he is able to make decisions as a self-reliant human being. The trouble with the Beltway culture is that everything was built as a “go further together” type of endeavor, so very few people do anything on their own, including using the restroom. “I have to go to the bathroom; would you like to come too?” That is the kind of world that our education system has created, and it is short of what reality requires. Trump is that type of individual who does not need validation for his opinions. He doesn’t need a bunch of generals to tell him whether or not we can get out of Syria. He can make that decision based on his observances. He doesn’t need the threat of impeachment to control him into the warm arms of his political party for support, because he knows he can beat both fronts. So why yield? They need him more than he needs them.

Our education system, and thus everything that comes after, our adult lives, our business conduct, our politics, philosophy, everything is built on the childlike state of needing the approval of our peers because as young people that is the only measure we have to learn from. However, a good confident person quickly learns that society can only go so far. The true innovators must go into the scary depths alone, because groups and their opinions are slow, and the weakest link then decides how far into the dark you can travel. The greatest treasures in life come from individual experiences and the leadership that comes after. The masses are always willing to follow the brave soul who goes into the scary places, so that they don’t have to match that level of insecurity. And that is the way the world works. Its not to take the strong and make them as weak as the weakest links, its to encourage more people to become stronger and more independent, and for those who never develop such a level, to learn to be a good steward as a follower, which most are happy to live with.

Those assumptions are why the Beltway types just can’t admit to themselves what President Trump’s base really is, they refuse to see it, even though it is right in front of them. That base is very powerful, and most politicians would dream to have it. The Democrats certainly don’t have it and they want it desperately. So, all they can do is criticize it. And older Republicans who have bought into that liberalized education system of everything must be done together is reluctant to accept the premise that the reason for the folly was so that the weak could feel part of the process. And when I say weak, it’s not so much a criticism as much as it is a reality. Some people are lazy, and not naturally intelligent. They lack the drive to become the most they have the potential to be, and that’s fine. They can be the followers, because the world needs them too. But they don’t have a right to cripple our existence so they can feel equal to the most ambitious, such as President Trump obviously is. Their hatred of him is not because of anything he did, but it’s because he has made it clear that he doesn’t need them and that is a very insecure position for them to be in. And they aren’t happy about it. But there is a base of American opinion out there who would support someone like a Donald Trump regardless of whether or not he was a Republican or a Democrat, but because he is a free person who can stand on his own reckoning. And that’s who we want in the Executive Branch. Not the politics as usual antics of poor education philosophies and group think. But the lone, solitary thinker who can act without the influence of institutionalized contributors. And for that reason alone, he will win again in 2020, and neither side of the political spectrum will understand why.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump’s Minnesota Speech: A new class of leaders only America could produce

Well of course it was OK to enjoy the Trump speech in Minnesota a few days ago. I certainly did, and most of the people I spoke with in the aftermath did. Trump is saying what we all have been feeling for a long time, and it feels good to hear someone else say it. I would go on to say that if you have the opportunity to support a business candidate on your upcoming ballot, like I do for our local school board in Jim Hahn. Its not that you’ll get someone like Trump, but the differences between a battle-hardened representative from the private sector and someone just looking to be part of the government employment network is quite clear at this point. And when I say that I’m not talking about a person who has learned to navigate corporate America as a mere employee, but a business owner or member of top management who has learned to work under pressure and great risk to be successful, and to bring that swagger to management in government. The real truth to the reason that so many in the Beltway culture hate Trump is not because of what he says or does, but its simply because they can’t compete with him due to life experiences. You can’t fake it until you make it at the level Trump is at as a person, and that drives people who do crazy, because they can’t hold up.

The wonderful thing about President Trump and all his independent wealth is that it has given him a freedom the rest of us have around our dinner tables and among our peers to vocalize his true passions where others who gained their status in life by licking the boots of someone higher on the steps of life then gaining access to new opportunities. Trump is and has been for all his life free of that behavior and it has given the world a unique personality to deal with these government problems and I think its just wonderful. Trump is a product of what kind of person can be produced in America. Running businesses certainly help mold that type of person, then gaining independent wealth is an attribute that is quite rare in the world.

The adage that we all answer to someone is one of those statements that was created to prevent people like President Trump from ever seeing the light of day and is a falsehood. The truth is, and most successful people know it, is that once you show that you have something special in the world, people don’t control you, you control the people who want what you have. That power can be hard to deal with and it can wear on you that everywhere you go that somebody want’s a piece of your time and energy. That is a byproduct of success. But it’s a truth about the way the world works that government bound politicians do not understand and are quite terrified of, the self-reliant person who does not fear their legal bureaucracies, the leverages over corporate America with more rules and regulations, and other shackles placed upon independence to prevent people from knowing that it is they who make the world tick, not the political class. When you are truly free and at the point of the spear the way Trump has been for all of his life, due to his family giving him an obvious leg up in life, then the understanding of how to manage circumstances where lesser people are involved becomes much easier. That is why Trump can go up on a stage like he did in Minnesota and throw back color to his accusers and have a lot of fun at their expense, because they don’t own him, and therefore, when he makes himself available to us, the voters, for representation, it’s a rare opportunity.

The roots of that adage about control is that really, until the United States emerged, no matter how successful you may have been in life, you had to bend the knee to someone somewhere, likely a king or queen. Perhaps even a religion. Nobody was self-reliant to the point Trump appears to be. But in American culture bending the knee to anybody isn’t a requirement. Having some special skill is what gives you that freedom, and once people know you have it, you find yourself in command of your circumstances. Circumstances don’t control you. Trump could have been another rich kid who just sagged his way through life jumping from one Lamborghini to another with beautiful women hanging on his arm, a different one every night looking to use their looks as capital to secure a better life for themselves using their assets while they could, before their flower wilted. But Trump took big chances and had won at life and he has emerged as a person forged from those risks, and that has given him the kind of freedom and confidence that it took to stand in that 20,000 person arena even as the House threated impeachment, and to stick it to all the lesser people quite spectacularly. Sure, he was saying what most of us have been thinking, but we often don’t get to say it from such a platform. And to hear such a thing to people who have spent their lives licking boots to get their promotions, their sexual partners, and their material assets is one of the most terrifying things they will ever hear. Because here was a person not afraid of what “others” might do to him, because he knew they were powerless to do it. And in the audience were people who felt the same way and wanted that level of freedom for themselves. What would become of those who did live that way, that is the root of their fears.

Particularly the way that Trump talked about the Joe Biden scandal and the FBI attempted coup against his administration was the difference between a person who truly had independence in life from their own personal wealth gained not through favors, but through honestly earning the money. Nobody else in Washington D.C. can claim such a benefit. They do owe somebody something everywhere they go. The politicians are always begging for money and trading favors, the attorneys are always trying to get a good case arranged through those connections, and the government employees on payroll learn to toe the line so that they don’t lose their cushy jobs that they know they wouldn’t get anywhere else. People who live their lives in such a way, which is most people, don’t have the kind of freedom Trump has to say what he thinks whenever he wants to say it. But America as a country is designed to produce people like Trump. And they are out there, some of them occasionally want to run for public office, perhaps more now than before Trump came along. But whatever their status, watching Trump give his speech under a lot of pressure, and to see him have so much fun as the heat of the pressure cooker was obviously being turned up, is something that only a seasoned veteran in business could relate to and it was obvious that due to that success we have a rare opportunity to get more Trump types in elected positions. Nothing would be better. Trump’s speech was more than just a defense of his positions and a strengthening of his base for a 2020 election. It was a spit in the eye for centuries of aristocratic controls that are coming to an end in our lifetimes for the chance at freedoms few have ever realized. And that is what the accusers of Trump are really afraid of. Their world is changing rapidly, and they know they won’t be able to hack it in the new one, for which we should all enjoy immensely.

Rich Hoffman

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