Tag: Donald Trump

Dancing to the Songs of the Universe: The girl in the white hat and her fiddle

I am always touched, no matter where in the world it is, when I see one of these street performers giving everything they have for a chance at getting noticed. Many of them are extremely talented and if only Hollywood or the record industry would just discover them, life would be great! But that’s not often how it happens and scenes like this one with the young girl performing in an open European market street are common, especially in Europe. Yet I really love watching this girl perform. That video was actually from over a year ago, but every time I see it I am enchanted with her raw ambition and lust for life. I could listen to her play music all day long and never tire.

It’s not a secret that I love children. It’s also no secret that I am not a big fan of teenagers and young twenty somethings. Out of all the ages of human development I have always hated those stages of people’s lives, the sexual age. With children, like the girl in the video playing wonderful music for tips, ambition and dreams are still alive. With teenagers and young adults many of the dreams of childhood surrender themselves to the impulse of nature to simply find a mate and to reproduce. With children their minds are coming alive and their individual ambitions are ignited. But once puberty kicks in nature is taking over and it is the liberal reminder that individuals serve nature, not the mind over nature itself. While kids have their minds growing, they are at the best that humans can ever hope to achieve. The sad story is that once they surrender that growth to nature, then it is seldom that they ever recover and they grow into adults that are constantly yearning to return to their youth, for the rest of their miserable lives.

Then occasionally you see a girl like this street performer will show up with her little hat and a fiddle and throw her dreams to the wind and hope that the shared experience will lead to good fortune. But in the honesty of most children there is just the lust to experience life in some profound way and share that expression with great ambition and talent, which is obvious in her performance. This girl reminds me of a young lady I saw who was about ten years older perform on the streets of Canterbury several years ago. My thoughts on seeing her was that she should be on America’s Got Talent, or some other high-level broadcast. But if every such person would be so discovered we couldn’t hold them back from filling a country of their very own, which is in a lot of ways why America was born. Every village around the world from India to the Congo have similar young people bursting with talent until they start giving birth to kids of their own and their dreams of ambition are lost to the pressures of reality. Sometimes, which I am always encouraging young people to hang on to, they get into their upper years with that ambition still attached, or they resurrect them. But often the case is that such ambitions are lost once the yielding to nature occurs, then such people are forever changed, and they never return.

I love seeing that these people are out there and I do cheer on that this bright young girl might hold her talents close even if Hollywood or some other entertainment market doesn’t give her a job, that she continues to perform like this for the raw ambition of protesting against nature and instead remain as humans were designed, playing their brand of music against the backdrop of the universe and whatever songs spring forth.

I am also a person who doesn’t like dancing, I don’t do it. The reason is that the music is reminiscent to me of nature and most music worth dancing to is of the low intellect pubescent variety. The music is made by people in their young adult phase and the goal is to get people into the mating rituals, the low thinking of sexual frustrations and hunger. It has often made me weary to go to dance halls, night clubs and those types of environments and watch bright young people surrender away their guarded bodies to the mosh pit of a mob that grinds against them in sexual ways in full view of the public as primitives would in a village orgy. We are not talking about the songs of the universe in this case, but the lower standards of the human desire to breed then die like some springtime flower that has done its duty, flowered, then bake away in the summer sun until its just a wrinkled up mound of vegetation dead by the first freeze of autumn. That is where that kind of dancing takes everyone, and its very sad for me to see, if I must admit as much.

But the music this girl is playing to, and dancing is of another kind. Its not intended to be sexualized, or even provocative, but is an affirmation of a musical score that was provided to her life for which she put her own spin on with her fiddle. That to me is the essence of what human life is and why it could have so much potential if only people would behold it and interact with it honestly. While most of these street performers in the world are hoping to get noticed, or to earn enough tips for the day to pay their way through that day of life, it is the last vestiges of childhood dreams that I see. These people are resisting to get that life crushing job, that boss that just doesn’t get it, for a chance to hang on to the dreams of childhood just a little bit longer before rent payments and healthcare dominate their thoughts, while their childhood lives and the freedom of thought that came with them are still there.

Here is this girl, defiant against the changes coming to her life playing music to the songs of the universe and all the hopes and dreams that come from an independent mind squaring off against reality itself. And the crowd gathering knows what they see. They have long surrendered to those pressures but they give the girl a tip because in some small way, that is one of their last acts of rebellion against the forces that are ruining their own lives in the vast wasteland of their existence, to give that girl a small tip of support and hope for her sake that the world might notice. And for the range of that little song the girl in her bright white hat and her sandals playing in the streets of a big city her declaration that she is independent and free, and not just putting her life in conjunction with human ambition in changing nature to a musical score of thought—but she is in command of it.

We might be thinking that once the music stops the bite of nature will come after her, and rip her to shreds like what happens to most people. But as she bows at the conclusion and people clap, we suppose that the grim reaper is just around the corner. However, I think that so long as she has that fiddle in her closet, or under her bed, no matter how many kids she has, or how many loved ones she knows who lose their life to the ailments of nature, that she will be alright. She may never taste fame or fortune, but so long as she can play music like that, she will always be a free person and will be among the most wealthy among us in the history of the human race.

Rich Hoffman

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The 25/25 Rule: Get better, don’t yield to weaknesses

A lot of the methods of business have been on my mind lately due to the work I’m putting into a new book I’m working on called the Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. In it there is a chapter on the International Journal of Production Research’s 25/25 rule and it is just another example of how the private sector is always trying to improve themselves so that they can make more money and stay relevant longer in a business environment. Yet government at any level never does and it shows in what their final products are. We joke about how inefficient government is, and people do desire jobs in the government sectors because performance standards are not part of the vocabulary, but it doesn’t take an accountant to realize that for every hour worked in a to heavy government environment that it is costing the taxpayer a tremendous amount of money because something like the 25/25 rule is not being utilized, and its very disingenuous to everyone forced to contribute to the madness through the tyranny of the IRS.

The 25/25 rule essentially states that you take the 25% of your business portfolio and not focus on it so that you can give attention to all your top customers. The effort was created to attempt to give more focus on organizational support for the best of your customers and requires a judgement call. The rule also assumes that there is always another 25% of your company portfolio that can be improved with cutting out non-value-added tasks. Can you imagine a school board meeting where such a conversation would take place? The teacher’s union which really runs all public schools would be up in arms and protesting in seconds, since the goal of any employee run management is to be as inefficient as possible so that the bar of expectations cannot be lowered, just ever inflated so that the “collective” is not pressured too much in any task. That is problem number one.

Yet even in relation to the private sector I think the 25/25 rule doesn’t go nearly far enough and is a very disrespectful way to treat customers if they don’t happen to be in that upper tier of a company’s portfolio. It’s not their fault that you as a business have focus problems and need to find ways to internally prioritize effort. While I do agree that there is always 25% of an organization that could almost always be eliminated in unnecessary process flow and streamlined operations, I also think that the task of every organization is that they need to get 25% better on their portfolios, not to ignore 25% of their current load so they can focus on their best and most important customers. A top-level organization is always doing that and getting better so that they can show off their capacity to handle pressure for future state growth opportunities.

What I find happening in organizations using the 25/25 rule is that its giving bad management another tier of excuses to use until they are forced to look in the mirror and admit what a bunch of losers they are. The intent of the 25% portfolio reduction is to manage overbooked businesses with a steadier workflow, with the notion that its better late than never getting it at all. To me this is reprehensible thinking and is the nature of that particular chapter in my book. The difference between the East and the West is that winning matters and some of the parameters of western thinking that determine victory is speed and accuracy—the drive thru window with everything in the bag that you ordered—the first time through. We want it fast and we want it accurate. This whole 25/25 rule had me thinking of the bullwhip competitions that I’ve been in over the years where you are supposed to be 7’ from the five targets in the Speed and Accuracy competitions. You are timed how quickly you can use a 6’ bullwhip to crack out the ten targets. For every miss, there is a 5 second penalty. Learning to do that competitive event is a good way to step beyond the 25/25 rule and instead to focus on improving yourself by 25% not passing along your inability to some down the line customer.

We see it all the time, we’re picking up some food at a drive thru, the restaurant is obviously understaffed for the level of business they have and lines are wrapped around the building with everyone waiting on their food. Additionally, the people who don’t want to wait in that long line go inside to order at the counter, hoping to step around the mess. But standard practice in every fast food restaurant is to use that 25/25 rule to deal with such carnage, and the first thing that goes is worrying about the dining room because it is the drive thru windows that have the timers on them and is how they are measured as a successful business. Such a place could be said to have a capacity problem and the managers will blame their high call-off rates and blame the weak condition of their employees as the reason for their victimized status.

I would argue that the capacity constraints are not in the machinery, since most fast food restaurants are built to do the business, its in the high turnover and generally unreliable nature of the employees they hire that causes all the problems. I find the fault in the managers who have such a bad staff that calls off too much, or the kind of people they hired to begin with, in not determining at the interview that their employees might turn in to unreliable employees, and that the management culture allowed the employees to call off often without consequences which is why restaurants sometimes are slammed and unprepared to deal with their customer bases. Hiring the right kind of people through the interview process then developing those people through proper management practices is the key to successful staffing which then solves the capacity challenges that are not related to the equipment itself.

The 25/25 rule tends to give bad management the excuse to hide behind this measurement system and give them a victimized status to explain away their failure. “My employees called off, so I couldn’t successfully handle the customer demands.” Yet it was the reason all their employees called off that the management system didn’t deal with, which is why there is a problem in the first place. The company should focus instead on having a 25% increase in hiring efficiency where their new employees have better attendance. Or the drive thru window workers get 25% faster than the less experienced newbs. Or that you can run the whole operation with 25% less people. Those should be the targets and people who do things like that bullwhip competition that I mentioned understand that process because it simply wouldn’t be permissible to complain that the competition was too hard and that they didn’t have the speed and accuracy to compete. That is the nature of my new book, is to change the thinking about these kinds of things from a victimized status to a proactive one. If you want to do something, don’t blame the conditions. Get better, and acquire the skills needed for success.

Of course, the obvious hatred for President Trump by protectors of the status quo, the government employees who have been sucking off the system hiding behind a lack of standards reviews, or the government labor unions who have their own rules, such as a 99/99 rule. Unions are only willing to give 1% toward performance review, or a process improvement. They aren’t willing to sign up for any performance expectations because they don’t want the bar set where their lazy employees have to live up to. While that makes for a nice job for them where they get paid whether or not they actually do anything, the benefit to the end use customer is us, in that they cost too much money. At least with President Trump a part of our government is starting to think more like the private sector, and that’s the way it should always have been.

Rich Hoffman
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The 25/25 Rule: Using Bullwhips to understand Overcapacity problems

I have enough for my book to include this small sample from the upcoming Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  There is still a lot of editing to conduct and it will likely be a 2020 project at this point, but thought my audience here would enjoy it, since so many people have been asking how it is coming along.  So enjoy this short sample:

The 25/25 Rule

There are many rules of practice that businesses use to manage their capacity, such as Warren Buffett’s 25/5 rule, or the International Journal of Production Research’s 25/25 rule. With Buffett, he states that out of the top 25 things that you want to do in life, you should only focus on the top five, until you’ve completed them. And with the 25/25 rule the goal is to reduce focus on the bottom 25% of your workload and to squeeze improvements in process out of another 25%. Thinking like a gunfighter however, these measurements in business are only new ways to present targets to hit and have their own sets of problems that unless looked at correctly, are useless. As I have spoke about, there are many weapons that gunfighters can use to do their business, guns are just one of them. Another is the bullwhip which I find has many direct correlations that apply to conceptual business matrixes such at the 25/25 rule.

As I have said about the bullwhip and in fast draw shooting in general, the primary objective is to do the most work with the most power in the shortest and most accurate time span possible. With bullwhips, to get the maximum impact out of the end of the weapon with the minimum effort it requires the handler to project that effort toward a target at a proper moment where the crack will occur in space and time. It is really quite an effort in physics to be able to crack out the flame on a candle with a bullwhip which among those who can call themselves experts, is a common act. When hitting targets with a bullwhip the effort looks effortless when done correctly as most of the action happens within a second’s time of measure. But there are many small steps within that second that must occur correctly to make such a thing happen, especially under the burden of timed pressure. Yet even just cracking out a flame on a candle with all the time to do it in the world takes a very timed approach to inflict the minimal effort to get the maximum results of cracking the whip so near the candle that the sonic boom created blows out the flame.

When companies utilize the 25/25 rule essentially what they are saying is that they are over capacity due to their sales departments over booking the facility and that they are picking the bottom end of their 25% of business portfolio to ignore so that they can focus on their top percent of valuable customers. The problem with this approach is that it allows bad management to hide behind a method of measurement and to use the analysis to disguise bad approaches to solving the problem. In the Cowboy Fast Draw competitions and Wild West Arts work that is like saying that the weapon handler needs more time to do a good job. But as we know in gun fights, the fastest and most accurate were the ones who won the duels. There were no rules for taking time to deal with the incompetence of the duelists. If the gunfighters were incompetent, they were killed. And the same holds true in business.

The aim of the Western Arts isn’t just to enjoy the historical nature of traditional weapons used in war within American culture but is to represent the necessities of living within a western society. The needs of American business is one of those requirements, and not connecting those proper metaphors to the function of business can lead to detriment, which for too many companies is a common occurrence. Such as the case with the 25/25 rule the way it has been proposed to help companies with their problems of overcapacity. The solution to those problems are experienced in western competition where speed and accuracy are measured. There are many very good shooters in the world and very good bullwhip artists who have trouble with the fast draw competitions of Western Arts. They look great when performing for audiences until the pressure of time is added, then things get tough and people start reacting poorly under duress, which is the point.

Most consultants in the United States and Europe are following similar methods of reducing push systems and instead incorporating pull, where one element of a supply chain does not ship until the downstream source is needed. The 25/25 rule is an element of this thinking and it essentially dances around the true villain which is incompetence. If a manager either upstream or downstream just can’t handle the pressure and has a hard time recruiting and retaining good employees, they will obviously have trouble doing the required job. The 25/25 rule gives them some cover to then focus only on their valuable customers and letting the less valuable fall off the portfolio. This might look great for the internal measures of a production environment, but it doesn’t equal the task of the sales department that is trying to book work and help a company profile with new business. The incompetent managers within an organization might be angry toward sales for bringing in more work than they feel comfortable handling. And that is the core of the problem. Many of the Lean consultants do have good ideas but they try to use peer pressure to level load a facilities production output instead of focusing on making the individual contributors better.

I have seen many really good bullwhip artists struggle with the speed and accuracy competitions that are in the Western Arts events, because the rhythm and pressure of a timed competition throws off everything and they would argue that if the rules were not so rigorous, if only they had more time, they could do better. Well, who couldn’t? The point of timed pressure is to sort out the good from the bad and in business that is certainly the case. Thinking like a gunfighter, anything less than fast and accurate would mean death, and it does to businesses also.

It is up to the weapon handler, such as in the case of the bullwhip artist to get better and to acclimate themselves to the conditions of the battlefield. If doing a speed and accuracy competition with bullwhips between 15 to 12 seconds is the parameters needed to win, then that is up to the bullwhip artists to get better to compete in those parameters. In the case of businesses where sales provide jobs and the various program managers within the organization determine that the scope of work fits within the company portfolio it is not up to the weaknesses of production to decide that they can’t live up to the expectations. They must get better to meet the needs, not hide behind some bounty hunter rules created to make their business thrive while the businesses that hire them suffer under their own incompetence. Rather than try to force the industry to deal with the artificial constraints created by bad management, companies should strive to get 25% better to meet those market needs and to create value for their customers. What if a town sheriff stated to the population looking to them for protection that to be a good representative of the law that the criminals needed to be 25% slower in their threats and actions of aggression so that the sheriff could handle the danger? Instead, it is up to the sheriff to get faster, and to be better. And if more bandits come to town, and are smarter and faster yet, it is up to the law to get better to keep the peace. So, it is with any business. The customer needs what they need, it is up to the company to give it to them, or to figure out how to without going out of business in the practice. And that only happens when you force everyone to get better, not playing to the weaknesses of the workforce managed poorly by the incompetent.

Rich Hoffman

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Republicans and Democrats will Never Work Together: Above and Below the line thinking

I learned a long time ago when dealing with the Lakota school system, the government school in my home district, that most everything related to government functioned below the line, which is a saying in the private sector especially popular among business consultants. In the private sector such definitions are used to convey troublesome cultures that are unprofitable. Above the line, positive affirmations are often the key to solving financial problems in private sector companies, but in government such things never happen, and the expectation is that they never will. I was told by so many labor union employees within the Lakota government schools system that private sector metrics could not be applied to things like schools, and government in general. That was of course before Republicans elected a businessman like Donald Trump to the White House, which has changed things significantly in how government operates. Trump fires people and is constantly moving people around to find the best fit, which should always have been happening in government. But until recently, it wasn’t even a consideration, which is of course why government tends to operate poorly, too expensively, and always below the line.

When I talk so poorly about Democrats its not political in the way that has become fashionable, it’s by conjecture of the evidence. If I were hired to fix a company I would have to first overcome the issues with the below the line thinkers that are always a part of every organization and use some means to correct that situation, either by terminating them, or changing their mindset to above the line thinking. We have the same problems in families, you can’t have a bunch of positive people who want to make a happy family and mix them with a bunch of below the line negative types who want to be victims at everything just so they can use failure as a shield for their own laziness. So of course we will have such people in our political system that we must vote for in the ballot box. Of those, Democrats certainly represent below the line thinking and the big government approach to everything where Republicans are above the line. President Trump is an excellent example of an above the line thinker, his business background lends itself naturally to that type of person. His popular television show was about teaching young project managers how to think above the line and not be victims, and to be successful. Then of course that is what he has been doing as President and the results to the economy are obvious, just as any company would experience when led by such a person. But Democrats are all about below the line thinking and in the scheme of things, the two just can’t co-exist without one destroying the other.

Examples of above the line thinking would be the ability to make choices, to be personally accountable, to always seek solutions, to take action. Examples of below the line thinking are to blame others, wait for others, to see failure, to see problems as obstacles. No company works well when it is filled with below the line people and it would be the consultant’s task to change that below the line culture into an above the line culture, and there are all kinds of tricks to get there. But the essence of the need is that for success to happen, switching people from below the line thinkers to above the line is not an option. We can’t live with below the line thinkers and expect to ever have success at anything. And that is the lesson for us as a nation politically.

The same holds true in everything we do whether it is trying to hold together a marriage, to build a family, running a business, or running a government. If a government is filled with a lot of below the line people, then there is no chance at success. And in my experience when trying to figure out why a multimillion dollar budget wasn’t enough for the teacher’s union, I learned quickly that there was no way to solve the problem so long as below the line people were the ones doing all the negotiating over budget allocation. You can’t solve problems with below the line people because they use problems to hide their aversion to solutions, because solutions take away excuses which leave those types of people vulnerable in ways, they aren’t comfortable with. And when such people are in control, money is wasted, resources destroyed, and nobody is ever responsible. Thus, problems rule the day.

Its not a matter of people having different opinions about things. It’s a matter of whether or not people want to solve problems or not. Those who don’t will never be able to negotiate better conditions because they need the below the line thinking to hide behind. No amount of negotiation will ever solve anything with such people, as they will constantly try to undo anything that is ever solved. And that is the state of the entire Democrat party, its all about victimhood, its all about excuses, and ultimately hopelessness. When we talk about Republicans and Democrats getting along as they once did, well I don’t know that they ever did. Thinking or John F. Kennedy when he pointed to the moon and proclaimed that we would go there, as a Democrat he was a very above the line thinker in that fashion. And he was also murdered because whether the killing was a lone communist sympathizing gunman or a government conspiracy from the deep state that wanted him out of the White House, a solution based presidency was not wanted. So he was killed.

When it comes to this topic, we can’t just let below the line thinkers rule us from their negative standpoints, and still retain our above the line values. Those things never go together and they never will. Democrats will never play well with Republicans and that is a political reality we must face. So it is not wrong to demonize Democrats for not wanting to be part of any solutions. In any company where the below the line thinkers are standing in the way of solutions, they must be removed. Its not an option. So neither is it when those same types are in the way in politics. There is no such thing as a fair world where all people get to have an equal seat at the table. There is only winning and losing, we are either doing one thing or the other. But both things can’t happen at the same time. We must make a choice. Will it be Republicans above the line or Democrats below the line in what runs a government and everything that spawns off it.

I would say that it is our modern task to figure this out and to apply such concepts to our elected offices. We should expect above the line thinking from our politicians and our government, just as we would from a well run company. If we want to have good Thanksgiving dinners with our families, we should encourage above the line thinking among all the participants. But if some of the grown up children are still mad at their parents for their own lack of success in life and are trying to blame the college they went to, the attention they received from mother, or even who among the siblings had the bigger bed growing up, then there will probably be a lot of backstabbing at family gatherings and Thanksgiving will be miserable. Everyone is either working to solve things in their life or they are using problems as shields to maintain their below the line status. And so long as government schools, judicial buildings, IRS collections, and everything under the umbrella of government is below the line, and supported by Democrats wanting more and more of it, then there will never be solutions to inflated budgets and poor performance. The solutions to those types of things is in changing behavior, not the politics of the individuals. What people call themselves are not nearly as important as to whether or not they are below the line or above the line in their essential thinking.

Rich Hoffman

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Don’t Shop At Walmart: Anyone against guns is against the idea of America and is an advocate of domestic terrorism

Do you know what the difference is between “us” and “them” the political right and the political left, both of which cannot have a stake in the future of America because the philosophies of living are just too dramatically far apart? “We” talk about doing things and “they” do them. Such is the case with “us” talking about making Antifa a terrorist organization, which it clearly is, then the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passing a resolution declaring the National Rifle Association a “domestic terrorist organization.” While the resolution is purely a political stunt, what is at stake is the branding of guns in general and any group or individuals who defend the right to have them—as terrorists. This as Antifa members beat people senseless, harass elderly flag waving veterans, and espouse brown shirt socialism from their corner Starbucks with outward threats of violence and mayhem. Even the now wimpy Walmart is in on the game of banning ammunition and pistols from their inventory refusing to sell them to their customers under pressure from these same forces.

The same mode of attack is at play as Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok suing the FBI for wrongful termination even though they are the ones who committed the crimes, or the school levy supporter who advocates to boycott any business that does not support their mandatory tax increases, or the drug advocate who wants to ignore that all these mass shooters were depressed fatherless young people who by their indicated states had altered their mental acuity into dangerous assassins. The political left doesn’t care if 5 people are killed in a mass shooting or 50. Much higher numbers are shot and killed every weekend in Chicago. The goal for the left isn’t to eliminate shootings and mass killing. If they were for life, they wouldn’t be supporters of abortion which kills many more people every year. So do car accidents, and stabbings. For them mass killings, which they have their hand in the philosophies that cause them completely, are opportunities to exploit their real aim, the abandonment of the Constitution the re-invention of America, and the acquiring of power for a large central government over an independent republic.

My advice to you dear reader is not to shop at Walmart due to their activism against guns, which is the backbone of American life in so many ways. I am writing a book on that subject as a matter of fact and I could easily fill it with content as large as War and Peace. Of course, that would be too long, so editorial considerations must be made in the process, and I’m certainly not going to try to define it here, in these little 1200-word articles. Its beyond the scope of this subject. However, Walmart has built an empire off the American lifestyle and once they turn against guns and their users, they are headed in the wrong direction and are victims of the radicals rather than helpers of a better world.

My wife has to drag me to a Walmart every time we go. She likes it, has a loyalty to them for offering goods at the lowest price possible. But what I see is an ocean of mediocrity and I like to avoid the place and the smell. My thoughts on the matter are that low prices tend to bring out low expectations in life, so in a lot of ways, Walmart has hurt people, not helped them. Lowering the bar for living a good life may not be the best thing. After all, what good is an expensive item gained cheaply if you cheat the real value. The only way to pull off that hat trick is to actually lower the value of the product itself which is the case with Walmart. The value of Walmart to a person like me is that I can buy guns and ammunition while my wife shops for groceries. If I can’t do that, then I have no value for Walmart.

And that’s the way it always is, it’s always conservatives who move toward a position that the left claims—its never the other way around and that is because conservatives are such nice people. They are just and they do have empathy while the left is like that spoiled teenager that can never be made happy. What we never talk about is why they are never happy. Its not because they don’t want to be happy, but because they use their unhappiness to change policy for themselves, so they can get one more hour on their curfew, or the keys to the family car for a night out on the town. The left throws fits of rage for the hell of it, so they can bring hell to the rest of us. They expect us to compromise while they do nothing to meet us halfway. So why in the world would we do it knowing that?

The reason is that conservatives are smarter than liberals and are naturally averse to conflict. They would rather use other aspects of their intellect to solve a problem than fight and that is what the left exploits, because like a spoiled teenager of loving parents, or guilty parents, they know they can get away with it. That is precisely how Antifa expects to inflict terrorism on us, and why the FBI drifted away from justice and became radicalized. They knew they could get away with the effort, so they went for the aggression, because nobody was standing in their way.

I am a proud member of the NRA. I just renewed my membership which I do every year at this time just so I can have the privilege of renewing it. I like knowing that I am a member, so the renewal is my way of keeping it fresh in my mind. And within that membership I see and hear from the true backbone of America, and I like those people. I take offense to it when they are called names and when my organization is attacked and called a terrorist organization. To whom? The actual domestic terrorists within our borders—the political left?

For me I do have other tools to fight with than violence and I spend most of my life using those tools. But unlike other conservatives I am not against meeting violence with violence. If that’s the only language that the left can speak, well I can assure them that I can shout louder than they can. I am not OK with Walmart turning anti-American, I am not OK with my group being called a terrorist organization. And I am not a supporter of Antifa terrorism, radical levy moms and their boycotts of businesses, teacher union losers striking for more money when kids need someone to watch them while their parents are working, and I’m not OK with an FBI that tampered with the last American election and expects to get away with it. Guns mean that my life will not be controlled by those kinds of people. Removing guns from society means those types of people will decide how I live and that isn’t acceptable. The debate isn’t one of gun control, its about what kind of America we want. Mass shootings are caused and exploited by left leaning political activists for their own brand of terrorism, and it is not the task of the political right to appease them unopposed. Since we can’t trust politicians, we have the NRA, which people like me make up. And when it is attacked, I consider it an attack on me. And that is not a good strategy on behalf of the real domestic terrorists, the political left.

Rich Hoffman
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Failure is Never an Option: Trump is right, bad companies blame the tariffs, not themselves

I’m glad President Trump said it, its true, badly run companies are using the tariff war with China as an excuse for their poor performance. I agree with him. That is usually the case any time an organization is caught performing bad, they will use any excuse to hide their own behavior. In public school systems they always blame the unfunded mandates of the state, or the allocation of the state money, but what is usually the case, its their lazy union employees who are the cause of poor performance and the unwillingness of the school boards to fight them. In the private sector the same kind of blame game goes on, only in business there are constant exercises in management review that exploits the real problems. Not all companies, in fact most companies, are not well run so price increases due to the China trade war or long lead times from suppliers is an easy target for losers to blame for their own problems. So, it was good to see that we finally have a president who has run businesses, and understands how things really work, instead of some out of touch politician who believes everything advisors tell him.

Good management is to close gaps when it is obvious that they need to be closed, such as in the trade deficit with China. For all the bellyaching that is made about how bad the trade war is hurting farmers in America, Trump has moved $16 billion collected from the realignment of the new tariffs on Chinese goods and sent them straight to the farmers since they have been targeted by China. And as Trump pointed out, there are many more billions of dollars that we are collecting now that we weren’t before, so the farmer issue in losing to China isn’t even a consideration. And neither are the complaints where price increases are being blamed by the tariffs. As far as revenue collection, the United States is making money. As far as supply chain management, companies always knew the risks of doing business with a communist country, and they should have had contingency plans. That they didn’t says a lot about the kind of companies that they are, lazy and unprepared, so the tariffs are an easy target for the incompetent.

Almost before the trade war started between Trump and China I heard business insiders starting to blame the poor condition of their supply chains as an excuse to either push out lead times or jack up their prices. But if they were actually a well-run company, they would have already thought about those things, even a year out and they would not be affected by a trade war with China. Blaming the tariffs for anything is the first sign of people who don’t know better, and are bad managers of the elements of their life which interact with business. Before Trump came along nobody said such obvious things so we should all be grateful that Trump is willing to take on big communist currency manipulators like China but also the big companies in America who love to hide their out of control management on politics. Most of the time, the fault is theirs and theirs alone.

Every organization that runs a budget, whether it is the large government schools of nearly every community in North America or a large corporation like Apple, they are expected by reality to produce and to do so well. The challenges that come along whether its unfunded mandates or the supply of metals are tasks that all management is supposed to deal with. Nobody wants to hear excuses; they just want results and that is ultimately the value that companies bring to their markets. An excuse is not a value, it is simply a means to explain away failure. But from my perspective, and this has always been the case, failure is never an option.

I was very encouraged the other day; I was at a stop light and a large tractor trailer pulled up alongside me. On the trailer was a company motto stating, “failure is not an option.” I thought to myself, there is a great company. Any company or organization that puts that as part of their branding is at least trying to avoid the blame game of failure that is part of their business. Someone is always failing them, the question is, will they accept that failure or overcome the imposition? A company that does not accept failure but simply moves on from it is one that is trying to be successful. But a company that says, our business is hurt by the tariffs with China, or the interest rates that are at play, or we are having a hard time hiring people because everyone is on oxycontin these days, those are all loser statements. They may have roots in reality but accepting them for poor performance is detrimental to any organizational behavior.

A great football team doesn’t stop trying to win if their star player goes down, or if the referees call a bad game against them. Those things might actually cause a team to lose, but blaming those elements are loser statements. Accepting that failure is the first step in losing and any company that blames things for their poor performance is acting as a loser, and not taking the steps that success requires. To win at anything overcoming barriers to success are expected. If a company doesn’t have the talent to do so, or the will to do it, then failure may happen. To explain their inadequacy to their share holders and other carriers of the public trust, they might blame tariffs or supply problems. But in all honesty, it was their job all along to overcome whatever opposition to success that there was, and to win the game, whatever it may have been. When people say that “it’s not whether you win or lose, its how you play the game,” they are partially right. How you play the game is all important in whether or not you will experience success. But even in that popular statement are the seeds for failure planted. It implies that even if you lose, if you played a good game, then you are off the hook. Bad companies have become very good at looking like they are playing the game well with lots of nice charts and excuses, but ultimately it is how you play the game, and whether you win or not. Nobody likes second place. Everyone loves a winner. The goal is always to win and to overcome impediments.

Excuses are for those who are lazy or stupid, incompetent or up to no good. I often decry labor unions because they are often to blame for a company’s lack of management, or the organization as a whole of something like a public school where the inmates run the asylum. Management at these places often throw their hands up and say things like, we failed because none of the union workers wanted to work the weekend, or we had a strike and couldn’t bring in raw materials. But what they are really saying is that they have no control of their business and weren’t thinking far enough ahead to have contingency plans. Such companies are blaming the tariffs for their poor performance and they make Trump a target for their failure, but in all reality, they own that failure. And nobody else.

Rich Hoffman

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I’ll Take The Art of the Deal over The Art of War: China has already lost the trade war

You can go back a long ways, even to the time where Doc Thompson and I talked about the China problem on WLW radio frequently. You can Google me or him on the topic of China and discover that this issue is not a new one. Long before there was a President Trump, people like us were trying to wake people up to the fact that modern warfare was not in tanks, guns and troops, it was economies and China was seeking to knock America off the ladder and to become the dominate player in the world as a communist country of everything financial. And they almost got away with it. I would vote for Donald Trump again, and again, and again if only to get out of his entire presidency this one thing, taking on China and halting the incursion into our lives that was well at play before his election. What people don’t seem to realize is that China was sucking out of the American economy over $500 billion per year in trade deficits. When we talk about the United States operating at a trillion dollars per year deficit, that is where half the money is going. If Trump hadn’t come along when he did, we’d all be in big trouble right now, Obama and Bush were all in on the deal. China was going to rule the world as a communist power, and even members of our own government were seeking to make it happen.

I was pretty furious that the public school in my home district of Lakota was sending teachers to China in exchange programs intent to learn how we could be more like them, because as an education institution, it should have been the other way around. I was even more furious when visiting the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis that they had an entire exhibit dedicated to learning about the Chinese way of doing things, as if preparing American students for the inevitable takeover. The United States was poised by a lot of dumb politicians prior to President Trump to give away American wealth to the Chinese and they were going to be handed the keys to the world just for showing up as a global communist power that leftist economists wanted to breathe to being since the same experiment in Russia, and Vietnam had failed.

China was never as powerful as authorities told us. As a communist tyranny their society naturally lacks imagination and deep philosophic thinking, and that is clear in their culture, as it is in every communist society. That is not a political statement, it’s a human one. It doesn’t matter if the subject is the sad housewife who spent her entire life serving her family only to see them all grow up and away giving her little back in return or the business professional that has poured their entire life into their company serving their bosses then dying one year after retirement, people are happiest when they are free to act and think what they want when they want to. Capitalism allows for more of this behavior than centralized controlled societies. That society may be the contents of a marriage between two people where one clearly dominates the other, and the other is a miserable wreck of a person, or a company and its employees, where top down authority is more important than horizontal harmony. China as a power is too centralized for their billion plus people to think for themselves. They have the workers, but they don’t think freely which is a huge impediment to an expanding economy built off wealth production.

The whole trick worked so long as America could be coaxed into giving away their wealth so that China could have it. So long as America followed green agenda points with over regulation while China could do anything to the environment and nobody would say anything—especially the climate science activists who secretly knew the name of the game was and will always be for them, global communism. They want a welfare state so they can sit around collecting a government check while their lazy asses play video games all day, and they vote accordingly. But they do not represent the intellect of America, that’s why we voted for Trump. To avoid this downward spiral.

Its time to say all this because this issue as I said has been around a long time. My friend Doc Thompson was recently killed by an Amtrack train, which I still find uncharacteristically odd, but whatever. He’s not around any more, but this China problem is exactly as he and I said it would be nearly ten years ago. And I for one am extremely happy with how President Trump is playing the situation for American advantage. The Chinese are exposed. The American economy will start to see plus revenue as the money flows out of China and back into the United States. That isn’t to say that we don’t have to solve our spending problem in America, but Trump isn’t president to do that. He’s there to put money back in the jar. We’ll fight later about how to spend it. His job is to stop the bleeding and he is certainly doing that.

There are a few YouTube videos confirming what I’m saying, and a few business analysist types on cable news who agree with me, but I have found it shocking that with all the great intellect that we have in America that more people just don’t understand the problem with China and what they have been up to. However, I did spend about ten years of my life reading The Art of War not just in the words that were printed on the page, but in soaking up their meaning in the way that the Chinese think. The book itself dates back to around 500 BC to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and clearly that has been the way that the Chinese not only came to power after World War II where America did all the fighting for them only to lose the entire East to communism, in Korea and Vietnam. Was it on purpose, I think so. Our government wanted communism in the East and it looks now that FDR and his partners in government wanted communism, not to hinder it. One of the people I most admire in the world was Claire Lee Chennault, the leader of the Flying Tigers who was tasked with defending China from the Japanese. After reading his book, the Way of the Fighter its clear to me that the United States military only wanted him to preserve China for the obvious communist invasion coming out of the Soviet Union. People disliked Ronald Reagan for standing up to Russia in the same way that they hate Trump for standing up to China, because they wanted communism to rule the world, and that has always been the fight. Its not new, but is to those who don’t read books, and haven’t been screaming about this issue from the rooftops on national radio shows for years, or writing about it as extensively, and solitarily, as I have.

For a change America has its own book on strategy, The Art of the Deal and the author of that book is the guy in the White House. The Chinese wish they had back Sun Tzu but all they can do is read his words. For America, the sequel to The Art of the Deal is applying those tactics to real life as we speak, and the result will be an end to Chinese communism. Trump knows that the financial status of China is all paper tigers and shadows on the wall made to look bigger than they really are. The reality is that they are going to collapse the longer they fight, and that is why these protests in Hong Kong are happening now. The people there know that this is their best shot at freedom so they are taking it. And I am so proud to have Trump in the White House fighting this fight even though many of the people around him in Washington D.C. are cheering on the Chinese. Their betrayal tells us who they were all along.

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota Wants Another Tax Increase to Pay for their Progressive, Radical, anti-American Teachers: The lawsuit of Emily Osterling

A little bird landed on my shoulder recently to tell me that my local school system of Lakota was thinking about attempting another tax increase on property owners after years of declining enrollment, and poor performance, and it sent my blood into a boil. My position on school levies is pretty clear, especially these days. When I’ve been against them before it was largely a cost thing, public schools were just too much of a burden in their communities and they weighed them down needlessly. But now, we have seen that not even the extraordinary costs were even worth the trouble as the kids coming out of these schools are just a mess. Little birds have a way of always coming back and what’s more, its not just one, no matter how much time passes. What they whisper is the kind of things that are truly things to be angry at, because the audacity is something to behold, because if you really do care about kids and their futures, which I do, then this public school scam of sucking so much money out of tax revenue for poor management by the school boards is something that we all must deal with.

For instance, that same school board which is proposing to put another tax increase on the ballot perhaps as early as 2020 also is trying to get transgender policies enacted for the sheer progressive intention of social theatrics. A school like Lakota which is one of the largest in Ohio and has many thousands of students, only has a handful of students who would lay claim to any kind of transgender policy. While a person like me would argue that transgender anything has nothing to do with education and is purely a creation of the progressive political movement, accommodations are made at Lakota for that very specific minority. So there is no need for costly modifications or even the wasted effort by management (the school board) to embark on any kind of transgender diatribe. It’s not even something that a school board should be discussing in relation to budgetary considerations. In any kind of world that type of cause and effect proposal is completely non value added to the end use customer, the children and their families and really is at the heart of all public schools. They simply don’t produce anything of any real value to the world and have worn out their welcome.

In business, it is common no matter what the size for management to ponder how to squeeze cost out of everything so that a company can make money and survive. One of the ways that is done is to determine what elements of a company create value for their end use customer while putting all the other efforts to a category of waste to be eliminated from their processes. When a school system like Lakota is in the mode of thinking that transgender issues are a value to their end use customer, the tax paying public, then there is a big problem and it becomes an even bigger problem when they consider any proposal that increases taxes on a future ballot.

I am clearly aware of the Emily Osterling case who sued Lakota for transgender issues which cost $175,000, $75,000 coming directly out of board funds. Osterling was a long time teacher, one of those employees that I have said for years was overpaid for the kind of work that she was doing. The school board had determined that her activism into transgender rights was cutting into her actual duties, so the activist was put on administrative leave. The school board was trying to do the right thing and get rid of a troubling, and expensive employee that was pushing off progressive causes onto a learning environment that was supposed to be teaching kids. A few years prior in a close vote that Julie Shaffer was pushing on creating a transgender policy at Lakota the issue was narrowly defeated not in a small part due to the two conservatives that sit on the Lakota school board in Lynda O’Connor and Todd Parnell. The progressive activist Osterling wouldn’t let the matter stand and continued to push the agenda which eventually forced the board to settle with her such an extraordinary sum of money over something that most people can agree was not a value to the end use customer, the students and their tax paying parents.

And that is where the real problem is, that the employees of Lakota and every other public school are runaway activists intent to perpetually run up their labor costs and to ultimately turn our children into progressive advocates of liberalism and launch them into a life of confusion and turmoil. On the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati Osterling cited that her administrative leave in September of 2018 to begin termination proceedings based on “flimsy and retaliatory allegations” was somehow out of step with the actual needs of the community, and it is in those kinds of employees that jack up the extraordinary costs of the employees at Lakota which cause the need for ever more tax money to be wasted on them for the basic luxury as acting as glorified babysitters.

Osterling was a prominent Lakota teacher’s union official and a National Education Association board member, and co-chair of the NEA’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender caucus—otherwise as an employee, she was a nightmare—expensive and underperforming toward what the value of an education to children really needed. As part of the settlement Osterling had to submit a letter of resignation on March 26th of 2019. The problem is, she is just one employee at Lakota which has many hundreds just like her, only not quite as vocal. Even when it was obvious that Osterling had to go, it took moving mountains to get her out, and it was expensive.

I didn’t say much on the matter because I felt the school board, at least a few of them, was doing a good job. Julie Shaffer continues to be the entry point for activism allowing people like Osterling to feel they even have a platform to speak from. My history with Julie goes back a long time, our debates can still be found by Googling them which were aired on WLW radio some years back. Of course when she and her board members back then couldn’t win a school levy three times in a row because they couldn’t make a good argument for the money the board was wasting, she turned to identity politics to try and bring great harm to me personally which remains to this day an issue of contention. I offered to put the matter to rest by supporting a tax increase which I knew Lakota wanted to propose soon, but only if they allowed teachers to arm themselves in the classrooms to protect against a mass shooting. Of course, they ignored my proposal which pulled my support of any levy off the table. I’m willing to pay teachers to get gun training and to protect kids from bad people, but I’m not willing to support progressive union activists like Emily Osterling. The school isn’t there for the employees, its there for the kids, pure and simple.

Due to the lack of management, again, not by all the school board members, but there is still a three to two vote against logic in Lakota. If that ratio could be turned around, and activists like Julie Shaffer who obviously has serious problems and is aligned with the radical elements of the employment base, money management might occur. But under the current leadership, Lakota plans to consider another tax increase soon and we’ll be back to all the same old tricks and nonsense again. I don’t think any of us want that. I don’t want expensive employees and lawsuits that are non value added to the end use customer working at Lakota. I thought it was wise for the board to try to get rid of her, which they did eventually. But when members of the board are encouraging the Emily Osterling types along, that expense is on them, not the taxpayer.

Rich Hoffman

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I Love Being Right: James Comey should go to jail

Not to brag or anything, some people are good at certain things. Some people can throw a football downfield accurately and under pressure, some people can dance on their toes and appear light as a feather, and some people are great at math. We all have our things that we are good at, and some of us work hard throughout our lives to become better at more things. For me, my thing has always been the ability to break down people upon meeting them for a short time, and to structure conditions based on that relationship. I can tell most of what I need to know about people within a few minutes of talking to them, and it is with a great amount of pride that I figured out James Comey very fast. Due to the nature of this recent Inspector General report from the Department of Justice I am enjoying more of the “I told you so’s” because it implicates James Comey, the former director of the FBI as a liar and cheat who was an activist against an incoming president of the United States and grossly abused his power to instigate the overthrow of an election. Then tried to blame it on the Russians. Thinking back just three years ago I was particularly proud of myself for my comments on CNN during Anderson Cooper’s show when I stated on air that Comey had lied during his testimony and should go to jail.

Of course, for television I didn’t want to be that hard on him even though the host wanted me to say so much. At the time even considering such a thing was extremely scandalous and we had only had Donald Trump as president for a few months. We really hadn’t had a chance to see Trump operate under pressure and all we knew about Comey was that he was projected as an honorable man. But I watched his testimony with the CNN crew the entire time and my thoughts about the guy afterwards wasn’t that it implicated Trump, but that it did the entire FBI, and at that moment, nobody was ready to accept that thought.

CNN had brought a bunch of Trump supporters, me included, to Rick’s Tavern in Fairfield, Ohio to watch the entire event as it unfolded on live television then to get our reaction to see if our support would wane for Trump. It was quite shocking to the CNN crew afterwards that none of us had pulled our support for Trump and that some of us, like me, were convinced that Comey was guilty of some bad crimes. The behind the scenes talk that day made me feel a little bad about it because the thought at the time was that such a consideration was so outlandish that it was in the realm of tin foil hatted conspiracy theory. Yet I am pretty good at these things, so I said what I did on television anyway and it was painful at first, because a lot of people saw it. But I had to stand by what I thought, and as it turned out, I was more than correct.

And it goes to say that I was right about all the others too, that the Justice Department was covering for the Clinton family and their many crimes. That like the Epstein scandal the private server had a lot of embarrassing information on it which is why Hillary had it to begin with. The FBI certainly didn’t want all that information out. They did their part to create the illusion of a republic while all the while steering our government toward a Democrat run dictatorship that would eventually melt into the United Nations as a governing body. All that was in place and people like James Comey felt that helping those things along was part of his “higher calling.”

I hate to say it but once you’ve known them in some form or another you’ve known them all. I know the kind of parties that James Comey and his wife went to in the back yards of their expensive government paid for homes with friends and neighbors, all of whom were connoisseurs of wines and fashion, and who planned long couples vacations to Europe for shopping trips in Paris and Venice just for the hell of it. They could tell you the vintage of an exotic wine with their pinky held out, but couldn’t tell anybody much about the names of gunfighters popular during western expansion, because to them that part of American history was to be erased and reset to a new world order. Comey thought that attribute honorable, the destruction of America into a global order, so lying about it was not a problem. It was considered to him collateral damage. Of course, the White House ran by Obama knew about all this, they are the ones who provoked it. And the arrogance in getting caught you can see now that they are no different from typical unionized activist caught by their employers for doing something wrong. For Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok to think about suing the FBI for wrongful termination, and Comey for insisting that he is owed an apology is just another page out of the union playbook for disgruntled, and spoiled workers who have lost touch with reality. That playbook states that when guilty, attack to keep the investigation off the details, just as in football when the other team blitzes, you throw the ball down field because someone will be open. Only in this game we are finally on to it, and these guys are guilty of some very bad things, domestic terrorism at the very least.

I am used to playing poker with these thoughts of mine simply because the audience that hears them isn’t always ready for the truth. The truth is the truth, but there is power in controlling the way that people come to it which is far more powerful than any concealed carry permit. Knowing things about people and understanding how to use that power is very helpful as a skill, so I don’t always blurt out what I am up to. That would be stupid. But it is good to say something so controversial on television so far ahead of the truth and to rub people’s noses in it a bit. It’s very “satisfying.” Of course, there are many ways to speak the truth, you don’t always want to blurt out in raw form what you think. Sometimes you do, it depends on the circumstance. But on a big national issue where at the time nobody felt comfortable in agreeing with me, the report from the IG was very satisfying. Now I would encourage you dear reader to continue reading what I have said with this understanding and to prepare your life accordingly. Because a country where the President ran by Obama thought it could use the levers of power in the way it did to overthrow the Trump election is a country already too far gone to ignore. We can’t just trust elections anymore, we must consider everything is against us, and to be vigilant. It may take more than just electing Trump to set things right. And that is a hard truth we all must face.

 

Rich Hoffman
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Its all about Branding: Trump Doesn’t Need Fox News

Of course, the rules are the same for every local candidate as it is in presidential elections, a public official like Donald Trump has a right to protect their brand, for it was their brand that we voted for and continue to support. When that brand is attacked, a public official has a right to protect it. Like most businesspeople, President Trump understands his brand and has done a great job over the years of building it, so it is with no small concern that he would seek to lash out at those trying to destroy his brand. Yes, he has a right to allow his supporters in the White House to dig up dirt from The New York Times reporters who have been activists against him and to seek to destroy them. Why not? And in the great relationship between Trump and Fox News, if the cable news station wavers, as it has under new leadership post Roger Ailes, then yes, Trump has a right to go after them. This nonsense about “journalistic integrity” is a lot of garbage. There is no integrity in the news business, especially in corporate media. It’s all entertainment based and designed toward ratings and for that, they should be very grateful toward the Trump brand.

It was embarrassing to listen to Brit Hume sound off about how Fox News does not work for the president, especially after Trump has given unfettered access to Fox News over the last four years or so. He’s been around long enough to know the game and he comes across sounding like an idiot. To consider that Fox News or anybody in journalism is “protecting” the public with a free and open press is foolish, and for people not to be upset about attacking Trump’s brand when that is what they voted for is disingenuous. I’ve never liked the part of Fox News that has Brit Hume in it, or Juan Williams, the disgraced NPR personality who was brought to Fox by people like Bill O’Reilly out of fairness and friendship. With Ailes out and O’Reilly out and the hiring of Donna Brazile there are obvious signs that the network is turning to the left because they think that’s where the future audience is. But it isn’t.

I never enjoyed the commentary of Charles Krauthammer for that matter when he would appear on Bret Baier. I have watched Fox News because they cover more that concerns me than other stations, but they aren’t nearly conservative enough for me. I would sit through the Krauthammer segments cringing at his institutional diatribes and do something else until he was done. Fox would claim itself to be fair and balanced, and I think that is generally true, but what they have been doing lately under the guidance of their new CEO Suzanne Scott is a sharp turn toward progressivism. And that isn’t much different from before, during the O’Reilly days where Fox News started the horse race with Hillary Clinton two years before the election. They wanted to tell the story of the Democrats and they have been soft on them even when crimes were committed. I would never say that Fox was a hard-hitting news organization. They just didn’t do as bad as the rest of them.

Where was the coverage of the Epstein molestations ten years ago when it mattered, when news outlets like Alex Jones were reporting what was going on and who was involved. Today Jones is de-platformed, you can’t watch his shows except on his website while outlets like Fox and CNN continue to be the dominate forces in news. But look at what they’ve gotten wrong, or rather, what they haven’t covered that has contributed to so much evil. If they really wanted to be fair and balanced, and unafraid, they would have not covered the Epstein rapes and connections to Bill Clinton conspiracy theories but would have followed the evidence to the real villains.

The same could be said of the FBI scandal where the attempt to overturn the Trump election was pushed to small segments and very little activism. We’re talking about a story bigger than Watergate, but nobody wants to touch it, essentially because most of the corporate news world is in on the action in some form or another, either from ties to government leakers or the Washington parties that are hard to get invites to. Fox News lets Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson do their rants on television, and they turn loose a few reporters to dig up the stories because it does feed the Trump base which is a huge part of the Fox News audience, but they never drive the story to a conclusion that would otherwise force resignations or public outcry. They do enough reporting to get people to have an emotional response, but not enough to cause change, so Brit Hume isn’t checking the powerful and holding them accountable. Fox News is just pointing things out and letting them drift into history the next day.

So, what right do they have to attack Donald Trump’s brand, but not to have him and his people shoot back? Why would anybody in the media think such a thing was viable, or even acceptable? Then for others to warn Trump not to upset Fox News because they might not cover his rallies and other events giving him a platform to the public. To suggest such a thing is to propose that it was the media that made Trump. But what nobody is talking about is that it was Trump’s brand that made Fox. Does anybody know what happened to Megan Kelly? She locked horns with the Trump brand and where did that get her? Out.

I wouldn’t say that it is just Trump’s brand, it could be anybody who has worked hard to build their name. They may use media to get there, but it isn’t the media that makes them, they are simply the benefactors of good television drama. They don’t make or break people the way that media operators want to believe. They need the brand of the dynamic in order to put content on their stations and that is the secret they don’t want anybody to know. But Trump understands it, and so do his supporters.

These same rules apply to the local press, wherever in the country you may live dear reader. They are all pretty much the same. They need you more than you need them. In this day and age where there are so many more options to get your name out and to build up your brand, you don’t need Fox News, or even NBC News. You don’t need to suck up to the Disney network of ABC and whisper in the ear of the local newspaper reporters, because nobody reads them anymore, because the content is boring. But they do need you, and Fox needs Trump. Trump doesn’t need Fox. That is the way the game goes and its time everyone realizes it. Especially that media. They are not the makers of the world and those who keep it in check. Rather, it is the branding of politicians that do the most good, because they do have to protect their brand, and that keeps them honest. Not the reporter or their networks. Sorry Brit Hume, but you aren’t very relevant to the scheme of things. And more and more, you are just a boring addition to a network that has added more boring people, not gotten better over time.

Rich Hoffman
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