Tag: Donald Trump

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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I Think of Sean Hannity as a Long Haired Hippie: Republicans need to stick together and vote in the upcoming election

One thing is for sure. I think of Sean Hannity as kind of a middle of the road guy, he loves his police, he loves his military, and he loves teachers and like President Trump, is willing to continue to give those government workers infinite amounts of money and to call it patriotic. That’s not me. That is where the debate is, its not in the difference between Democrats and Republicans. The discussions in the form of management by elected officials is varying degrees of conservatism where big government types like Sean Hannity and Donald Trump have battles over resource management with people like me who think that every assumption should be challenged and squeezed for all its worth. And now that we are in election season its time that we have that hard discussion and put the best people in place to help manage our government with the least resources that we can find. It’s not that I don’t support people like Trump in the presidency or Hannity on his Fox News show, but there are things they say and do from time to time, largely because they both come out of a very progressive state and city in New York, that make me cringe with exposure to liberalism. If we really want to solve the problems of our age, there are going to be some fights, and to waste time on those fights, the right people need to be fighting, not some liberal losers who shouldn’t even be part of the discussion.

I’m talking about the various school board races that are up this year, and the various township and state races that ultimately shape the government of our states. We’ve had plenty of experiments with social causes and engineering by now to determine that our colleges, public schools and cities in general that are all run by Democrats have spiraled out of control and are placing those institutions on the brink of disaster. And in addressing those issues conservatives won’t go far enough in just taking up positions behind Trump and Sean Hannity, or Bill Cunningham in Cincinnati for that matter. They all talk a good game that is certainly better than any Democrat, but ultimately, they still want big government in the form of schoolteachers and police that inflate their community budgets and drive up taxes, without ever really asking whether or not those employees are worth it.

It’s not the teacher who teaches but it’s the state that decides what and how they teach that is the danger. If a teacher utters conservative values, they tend to be ridiculed by their unions and will find themselves out of step with the state. But if they preach abortion support, gay rights and otherwise calamitous despotism toward American ideas, then they are often rewarded as “teacher of the year” and paid to continue such activism which of course their students copy as one of their first worldly experiences. The system obviously hasn’t worked, the products of our modern times can show that clearly, so it should provoke us to act with each new election. There is no promise that our votes will give us 100% of a clone of our own values, but it is a lot better than nothing. And nothing is what happens when conservatives aren’t elected because liberals get their unchallenged activists into the city councils and school boards and spend our tax money as if there is no tomorrow, because often they don’t intend there to be.

I have lots of disagreements with conservatives, but I have yet to speak to them in person and find a person I don’t like. I have met President Trump and I love the guy. There are a lot of things that he has done in life and still does and thinks that I would never do, but overall, I can find more in common with him than not. I think we both love the American flag and can build a relationship off that as a foundation. The same with Sean Hannity. He comes across to me like some long-haired hippie who loves police way too much. I agree that our society is better off with cops than without them, but I don’t think we should trust them without question the way he advocates. Cops lie like any employee does and they need to be managed by exception not through collective bargaining, because they aren’t all equally valuable, just like schoolteachers. We need to have the discussion of their value and to do that we need the right kind of people to have those discussions. Democrats have proven that they just aren’t capable.

So it is up to us to have these various discussions and to sift out the good from the bad and sometimes that means that people’s feelings will get hurt a little bit when they find out that they aren’t valuable just for showing up for work, but are measured in how effective they do their jobs. Giving a blank check of approval to any sector of our economy is just foolish and some Republicans are foolish. Yet the discussion we have about value needs to happen with them, not the people who have screwed up everything for the last thirty to forty years. In every election we need to pick the best people we can get to help manage our political affairs. We may not like everything about them, we may even have some differences with them, especially regarding school boards. But we need to vote for them and help them get into a position to have a discussion at some point. Talking to a liberal on a school board is just a waste of time. They need to be replaced with every decent conservative that we can find so that we can have a debate. Currently no debate is possible, we get unfunded mandates from the state, nobody challenges them and due to their helplessness, they create liberal cultures within our schools where the next generation gets brainwashed into Democrat thinking. And that has turned out to be terrible for our children.

My advice to you dear reader is to treat this election with some seriousness. There is some sanity that is returning to the political system, largely for Trump to take the credit, but its time to raise the bar to a level that Democrats can’t live up to, and that needs to happen for the benefit of us all. We can no longer afford to keep that lowered bar down where they can participate just so we can call everything equal. We need to focus on actually doing something and electing good people to do good jobs in their elected positions. It is not bad to have disagreements with people, what is bad is that no common ground can be found because the political values are so extreme that basic conversation cannot even take place and the battlefields are yielded to Democrats just to avoid dealing with them because they are such a pain in the neck. Support Republicans and other conservatives even if they are to the left of where you are. Having a debate with them is better than a debate with someone who isn’t even from the same planet. And that is how you must look at these types of elections.

Rich Hoffman
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D23 and Star Wars: Liberal ideas are rejected everywhere, especially in a galaxy far, far away

It’s important because it involves so many parts of our culture, but as I occasionally do write about Star Wars it is interesting to watch as how its meaning has changed for people over time. Personally, when people ask me how I’m able to do so much on such a range of things, it’s because I use mythology to grasp concepts so that there is room for ideas to be conceived and to grow. I would compare it to a bowl to hold something like popcorn in, the bigger the bowl, the more ideas you can hold. Mythology is how the human race holds ideas that it can then grasp and work with, and the bigger the ideas, the better functioning the society. In a lot of ways young people have more than ever lots of vehicles to invest ideas into, not just the movies that we all grew up on, but video games, a lot of literature, and all the streaming services that are available such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. And to make those streaming services flourish there has to be a lot of content and Hollywood, as I have been saying for years, is struggling to produce. We live in one of the most creative times in human history, but we have more than ever also witnessed how liberalism in general in a culture of mass competition for ideas shows the trends of society and nothing more vividly displays that trend like Star Wars, because it is at least a cultural measure that everyone can pretty much agree is a standard mythology of our culture. Not everyone likes it, but it manages to touch most people in some way or another making a great platform for analysis.

So to catch everyone up on where Star Wars is, there is a movie coming out this December, it’s the last film of the nine part series that has been going on for 40 years. It’s an important key to whether or not Star Wars survives into the future because as of now, it only has nostalgic value. Young people don’t necessarily like it on its own, its more something that they can share with their parents and grandparents, so the brand is struggling. Watching all the D23 news from Disney over this past weekend there is a lot to look forward to from arguably the largest media company in the world. But the evidence that as a very progressive company that has lost their way into making new and fresh ideas is obvious. Disney as a company is living off their legacy properties and what they’ve done many years ago, not what they have been able to do lately. With the exception of the Marvel movies, there hasn’t been anything fresh from Disney for years as they have taken for granted that people will buy into their products even though they are spewing with progressive political causes, such as race diversity, sex issues such as feminism, and elements of gay rights that most people just aren’t comfortable with. Disney as a company has tried to hide their massive appetite for capitalism behind progressive causes and it has hurt them tremendously—because they weren’t honest about it. They would have been better off to proclaim that they are happy to make money and not ashamed of it one bit instead of trying to sell themselves off as progressive activists laboring for every liberal cause known to mankind. Not so much at the stock exchange rate yet, but that is coming just as I stated years ago after the first new age Star Wars film came out, that Disney has really screwed up the multi billion dollar franchise leaving them desperate to fix it, which is what they are promising to do on several fronts starting with the new film coming out this December in addition to several live action television shows coming to their new streaming service, such as The Mandalorian, and a new show just about Obi-Wan Kenobi played by Ewen McGregor which fans have wanted for over 20 years.

Star Wars, especially the best parts of it such as the cantina scenes where Obi-Wan cuts off the arm of an assailant in A New Hope, then shortly thereafter Han Solo kills the bounty hunter Greedo in a blaze of gun fire, these modern progressive filmmakers thought that what they had made with Star Wars could be that bowl I was talking about that could hold lots of ideas including copious amounts of progressive sentiment. Even with the billions of dollars that Disney has put into Star Wars the fans have responded flat which was most notable with the most recent Star Wars movie, which I loved, Solo: A Star Wars Story. After The Last Jedi, which I enjoyed, fans had shown they had enough of Disney tampering with something they loved and they were rejecting the Disneyification of Star Wars outright, and not buying the toys, and merchandise at the levels that Disney needed them to in order to justify their investment. This has been obvious now that the big Star Wars lands that have opened in California and now in Disney World in Orlando and people aren’t that interested. I warned everyone way back in 2015 on radio and several articles, that the key to the franchise wasn’t Luke Skywalker, it was Han Solo, the space cowboy that reflected the American values of Ayn Rand and John Wayne, which has always been at the heart of Star Wars. Star Wars for people is best when it has those elements, not actors that were cast because they were Latino, or because they were women—but because the characters were good and the actors fit the part. When Disney essentially killed off the angry white guy characters and failed to replace them with new ones, they lost their audience. The Last Jedi was essentially a movie where all the white men were killed and the crazy progressive women were all in charge and people, real people who are out there voting for Donald Trump don’t want to see movies and stories about that kind of topic, and it has really hurt the Star Wars brand.

But I am encouraged, this year at D23 Disney is showing that they can take their money and do great things with it. I am rooting for them to get it right, I want their Star Wars Land of Galaxy’s Edge to be successful, I want to see Star Wars make a strong comeback for that next generation because it is still one of the best things out there to take our culture from where it was to where it needs to go in science and thought. There is room for big ideas in Star Wars, which is what I use it for as a mythology. It’s a big story with lots of bold concepts, but at its heart it was and continues to be a space western. So long as that formula is stuck to, Star Wars will be successful. If progressive concepts are placed above that formula, then its over for Disney and they seem to understand that now, after a decade of hard lessons.

I was enjoying all the news coming out of D23 and I sort of celebrated by picking up the Lenovo Star Wars Jedi Challenges video game which converts your smart phone into an augmented reality simulator and I have to say it is extremely impressive. But you can see clearly the hit Star Wars has taken to their brand. The unit just a year ago was being sold at Target for $200 and I picked it up this week for less than $50. I figured that for that much money I could take a risk and buy the Disney product and I’m glad I did. But considering what they had done to the legacy fans with the books and previous comics and other merchandise then gave those same fans a mess of a movie in The Force Awakens, which essentially killed all the old white guys and put progressive diversity in charge only to lose over and over again to a very inept First Order, not even I would pay that much money for a new Star Wars game. That’s unfortunate, because the game itself is just amazing, a real technical marvel and exhibition of mythology pushed to its absolute limits. Big ideas, big fun, and a major advancement of the story telling experience.

The lesson here is that progressive, or even liberal ideas cannot fill up that bowl of thought, and people won’t just accept those concepts because they like Star Wars. They like Star Wars because it represents values that most people share, small government, independence, and you gotta have guns. The anti-gun policies and hippie like love your neighbor stuff doesn’t go well with a franchise that is all about war and why wars happen. When you can’t even where a gun on your hip in cosplay to the new Star Wars land in Florida because everyone is crazy over weapons and terrorism, Disney has to understand that you can’t tell a story about peace, love, and trusting the government without weapons, and expect people to spend millions of dollars of their hard earned money on it, just so they can eat colored popcorn and drink blue milk. Star Wars is about fighting for independence, especially personal independence. In all Star Wars stories that are good are examples of institutional failure, even among the Jedi Council, and that is the heart of the entire franchise. Unfortunately, Disney was a part of that institutional thinking and it took them a long time to come close to figuring out the problem. I just hope its not too late. It would be a shame if it is.

Rich Hoffman

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The 1977 Act of Emergency Economic Powers: Ending communism once and for all

Not that its any kind of surprise, but it is important to note, Democrats do wish harm on you and me so they can have a hope of beating Donald Trump in the next election coming in 2020. They’ve tried everything, the Russian hoax, the constant name calling and belittling of his entire family, and openly mocking everything he has done over the last three years as President of the United States. Now their last and only hope is to harm the economy because its all they have left. Everyone knows that Trump is going to run on his great economy so its logical that they would try to harm it, and in so doing, would wish harm on every single American just so they can gain power. Make sure to remember that. They don’t care how many lives might be wrecked in the process, all they care about is gaining and keeping power. So the economy is their target and I am very pleased to learn that President Trump is perfectly willing to protect the economy with the 1977 Act of Emergency Economic Powers.

The economy is largely driven by sentiment. A happy society generally has a happy economy, so all the psychological mechanisms that make human beings do the things that they tend to do are what drive up economic numbers. The Trump presidency has only created good sentiment for the economy by reducing taxes, putting money back in the pockets of the people who create good sentiment, and deregulating the industry so that more people can participate at a faster rate. The low unemployment that we have had and several consecutive quarters of positive GDP growth are only scary to Democrats because its proof that the President’s policies have been working and show no signs of abating by the next election, so its now or never for them and they are trying to throw the kitchen sink at him in an all out effort to defeat him in the election. Its as simple as that.

China as a communist power has been leveraging against the United States for decades and there are plenty of Americans on the liberal side of politics who helped make that happen and wanted to drive our economy into the waiting hands of China. As a result, much more of our modern media is owned or is directly influenced by China making them pawns for Trump’s trade war which had to happen. China couldn’t be allowed to continue to mooch off the American economy the way they were. Any of my readers here know that I have been reporting for decades that China’s economy is directly tethered to America. Without America they have nothing. So in any negotiation with them, this must be revealed. Once China put $75 billion worth of tariffs on American imports Friday, it was the best move possible for Trump to order all American companies out of China and into some other market, preferably America. This of course shocked the world, but its nothing short of the best strategy. We aren’t talking about simple and free open markets here, we are talking about defeating at the very least communism once and for all. And for that, the sympathizers are furious, especially those domestic enemies in North America who have been trying to get communism put in place for most of the last century.

I don’t talk about it much because it was so long ago but my sentiments about communism and the political left was solidified a long time ago. As I have reported, I have had a colorful life and spoken often with people from all kinds of backgrounds. I’ve always been a conservative, but I have a personality that gets along with anybody anywhere about anything. I can speak to people from the other side without losing myself and that has given me the opportunity to socialize with many kinds of people over the years. And so it was that for a period in my life I was invited to all the big parties in Cincinnati that sort of hung off the University of Cincinnati who lived along the rim of Clifton overlooking the city in their very nice homes and I got to know their minds well. I spoke to them as I would anybody, with honor and respect, but any compassion I had for the other side’s way of thinking evaporated in those gatherings. Essentially, they were communists, they wanted communism in America and they were set to do anything to get it. And when I talk about these people, I’m talking about the Dwight Tillery crowd when he was mayor, and Roxanne Qualls and the type of people who hung on their every word. There were the top architects of the city at these events and producers of television and stage plays, owners of the media, all the big wigs of our “culture.” So I learned first hand what they were all about and it was quite clear that the left wing of politics wanted China’s communism.

Clinton was president during those years and those types of people were very ostentatious about their sentiments. They figured that it wouldn’t be long when China would simply absorb America’s economy and we’d all be working for the communist, so they were happy. When Clinton came to town they all rushed out to lick his boots and they were elated to do it. They put up with me and my views because they liked my charisma and they figured I wasn’t a threat. My America was dying and being compassionate liberals, they didn’t mind my acquaintance because deep down inside, someone has to do the work of living, and being natural mooches, they knew to stay close to a guy like me. So, I learned a lot from them, and those types of people haven’t changed no matter what city we are talking about. Only now their theories have failed, and they are desperately trying to cover their tracks whereas then they were just getting a few presidents, in Clinton, Bush and Obama who would prop up communist China and help bring that socialist philosophy to America.

In that regard it doesn’t hurt my feelings at all that companies in China are struggling to figure out to do with President Trump in the White House. But the bottom line is that this fight had to happen and its important that Trump do what he’s doing. The anger about it is obvious because the liberal political party has completely tethered themselves to China over the years and now with the Hong Kong protests and the squeeze from United States tariffs, the Chinese economy is in real danger. And this is all happening at exactly the right time, year three of President Trump’s term with an election year coming up and the potential of four more years of the guy. Liberals know they have no other window if ever to try to topple Trump, so the economy is their target, and they hope it tanks so they can save China and reverse the trend of restoring economic power in the capitalism of the west once and for all to end a debate that was subtly started with the publication of Karl Marx’s works and to restore to the world an economy that does not have communism in it, for the benefit of all.

Rich Hoffman

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How the Deep State Works: Whispers from beyond the veil

It’s not that Patrick Byrne is a hero or anything for coming out on live television and taking Fox News hosts off guard by revealing that he had done clandestine “deep state” work directly for the FBI’s Peter Strzok. The old hippie, Grateful Dead fan who was the CEO of Overstock.com had to resign because the William Barr investigation that is about to unveil the greatest scandal in world history is about to turn election year politics into a meat grinder for the Democrat Party, and he’s in the middle of it all. He has a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders so he did the right thing and stepped down while he could without the company tanking during the upcoming trials. None of that was surprising to me, but what was a little bit was the public reaction to it, particularly in the mainstream media. If you ever wanted to know about the nature and power of the “deep state” then what wasn’t said was far more powerful than what was.

The “deep state” essentially is nothing more than the static patterns of established society and their acceptance of the handful of options given to them socially out of their grade school days. As I have said for many years, and even the hero of the left Bill Ayers has said, the purpose of public education is not to teach people things, it’s to place them into categories of peer groups for which they will spend the rest of their lives. The deep state is the undemocratic official control mechanism that holds those groups together. So while we officially have a republic as a country, and many liberal media outlooks like to talk about our “democracy” and socialists like AOC “Cortez” are seeking to change the election system from an electoral college to a popular vote so they can count all their illegal aliens and other criminals for Democrat votes, the real power rests outside of that understanding and obviously members of the FBI were functioning from that understanding, especially Peter Strzok who was uncharacteristically caught.

This is nothing new, its just that the nature of President Trump, who is functioning outside of the normal controls of peer groups that are built in our public education system is wrecking the whole order of things because he is binding people together who normally wouldn’t associate with one another, and that makes him very dangerous to this “deep state,” and they apparently understood it from the very beginning. The Deep State themselves, whom Patrick Byrne calls the Men in Black don’t often do things directly, they get other people to do them—compromised people. And to avoid prosecution they get them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do. Then if things go wrong, the perpetrator takes the fall and the deep state continues in the shadows operating behind the legal curtain.

It’s not a conspiracy theory to assume that deep state actors inspire young influential people like these recent mass shooters to do some act of violence that might push legislators to embrace gun control measures. The deep state was caught trying to overturn a presidential election, so nothing is off the table for them. Patrick Byrne didn’t come across as particularly sane in his Fox interviews, but then again, who really is? The guy was nervous, obviously, he has probably done a fair share of drugs in his life if he’s the Dead Head he claims to be, which as a CEO of a company for twenty years leaves a lot of opportunity to have the deep state extort you for bad conduct. So, I can see how his story played out and it was hard to come out and talk about it on television when obviously the hosts were not ready for the information. It wasn’t part of the script, that was for sure. The story should have been the biggest thing to hit television in years, but less than 12 hours later, it was barely talked about except for the usual “conspiracy” channels like talk radio and a few YouTube accounts.

Yet that is precisely how the deep state operates and how it continues to remain behind the scenes. It’s not that they are some powerful organization that uses mind control to remain anonymous, but that they rely on the education system that we have to keep anybody from really seeing them, even when the evidence is right in front of everyone’s face. I’ve seen this method of concealment work several times, and I’ve told the stories here before, but will repeat them again for the sake of demonstration. At one of my high school reunions I was there with my kids and we were doing those contests where the people who were married the longest got a reward, and who had the most kids, who had visited the most places in the world, that kind of thing. I was the winner of something like six out of the ten categories out of my entire class yet there wasn’t much fanfare when I stepped up to get the awards. It was like I was invisible, and it wasn’t because people didn’t know me. In school I was one of those kids who didn’t fit into any class category and I rejected any attempt to put me in one. That led to, let’s just say, a very turbulent time in grade school. Counselors didn’t know what to do with me. Teachers couldn’t reach me because I thought of all of them as too stupid to give me any advice. I wasn’t afraid of the authority structure and was constantly in trouble and in the principal’s office, like every week. Getting my parents involved didn’t help. There was no peer group that I responded to. Nothing worked, and I liked it that way. The treasure in all that was that I grew up independent of any peer group and that is still the case to this very day. But the cost is that people only typically respond to stimulants that support their chosen peer groups for which they have accepted their roles during their grade school years. That means anything outside of their peer groups is invisible to them. So even though in our class reunion I had done more, seen more and lived a lot of life that would normally be talked about, because I wasn’t’ in one of the accepted peer groups the effects were pretty much overlooked.

A few years later I was involved in a big presentation in front of Cincinnati City Council that would determine the future for the Banks Project. My group that was doing the presentation were all of the same type of people I was, outsiders and proud of it. Not affiliated with any of the peer groups developed in our education system but free thinkers and charismatic individualists untethered to conformity. We gave a very dramatic presentation that would eventually become The Banks, only twenty years before it was designed and built. We knew we had done a good job but after not a single politician or developer came up to us to inquire more on our ideas. Now we could say that we were young people, and nobody was going to listen to us, only that most of the ideas presented that day ended up in the final design. So, it was obvious that they were listening. That presentation was a competition from the public and by no close measure, ours was the best and most dramatic. Yet we were painted out of the coverage and never even made the cut on television. That is how the deep state works. People only respond to what they understand and if they are presented with something outside of their realm of understanding, they’ll rationalize it into something they can understand. Such as the cargo cults of primitive tribes when they see an airplane, they might call it a bird and refer to it not as a miracle of science, but as an act of nature confusing the nature of flight entirely. And for such people if they encounter people outside of their peer experience, they may only see aspects of them that they can relate to within their peer group, but not the entire essence and until they can, they will view such people as entirely invisible.

And that is what’s going on with Patrick Byrne and actually the entire Trump presidency. None of this activity fits within the framework of our education system and the peer groups we have adopted as a society. It’s not that the events aren’t happening, they just aren’t happening within the context of experience that most people can understand and that is where the deep state does their work. They have been letting us believe we have a republic but in fact they intend to have a dictatorship of a sorts and they use our own ignorance as their greatest weapon, our need to be in a peer group and to function within its rules and regulations. In that regard, the deep state can rule forever, or so they believe. Until they must deal with elements that don’t adhere to the peer group system. Then they have trouble which is how this whole story is even coming into fruition to begin with. If not for the Trump presidency, we wouldn’t know anything about Patrick Byrne or any other deep state operatives. And the members of the media, even on Fox, anybody getting a paycheck to be part of the media culture, they are part of the peer groups that keep this kind of information from getting out. They are paid to ostracize the Patrick Byrnes of the world once they have stepped down as a CEO of a popular company and to consume them until they are no longer a danger. So this is all very interesting, and it’s going to get a lot better. Stay tuned! Many people, to use Patrick Byrne’s metaphor, are going to learn that Soylent Green is people, and that has always been the way that the deep state has viewed us all, until people start to learn the rules and threaten the entire structure.

Rich Hoffman

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Soylent Green is People: Overstock.com CEO, Patrick Byrne spills the goods

Rich Hoffman
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