Tag: Edward Bellamy

Dr. Fauci Learned Too Late: Americans will never accept the limits of an administrative state

The Limits of an Administrative State

In a lot of ways, I’m grateful for this mass chaos that we are seeing today.  I have been warning about it for so many years. Finally, there is context to the warnings.  Now people who don’t think about these kinds of government problems very much can see the cost of what a bad government can bring them.  I wish it weren’t so costly, but I think people needed to see it in a way that impacted them.  In their busy lives of paying the bills and picking their kids up from soccer practice, most people don’t have time to think very deeply about the things that impact them most.  And in many ways, the pressure put upon Dr. Fauci under the coronavirus management has been a fantastic exhibition of why the concept of the Administrative State is a perpetual failure every time it was tried.  But too often, these failures have been hidden behind successes that happen by accident.  Because President Trump left the White House and Biden came behind him, it left Dr. Fauci exposed.  As soon as we took away the positive sales talk of Trump, Covid-19 and its perpetrators were left open to their commitment to administrative failure. I’ve been talking about the Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward because it was the formation essentially of big government at the start of the Progressive era, from the perspective of 1888.  And its stupidity in assuming that creating an all-powerful administrative state would be the cure-all for corruption and door for all future progress was misplaced from the start.  Many have always known this, but not enough could see it clear enough to act on that knowledge, that is, until now. 

From the Sunday Morning interview with the defender of the progressive administrative state, Ted Koppel, Dr. Fauci was exposed.  It’s clear that during all the lead-up to the pandemic crises role-playing that had been done at events like Event 201 in New York during October of 2019, that the American constitution was not discussed as a limiting factor to crises management on a global scale.  No matter what role Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci had in creating the Wuhan virus through gain of function research in partnership with China, it is quite evident that they did not understand how Americans would react to their protocols.  At first, people gave Dr. Fauci the benefit of the doubt.  They allowed lockdowns.  They allowed for masks, social distancing, and all kinds of crazy ideas created by the administrative state Edward Bellamy and Karl Marx had always dreamed of.  One world functioning under the rules and regulations of medical professionals to essentially nationalize all industry under a Covid emergency.  But Americans expect a plan to solve a problem.  They were never going to accept a perpetual change state where the medical industry that we count on to keep us healthy would become some parental government figure telling us what to do all the time, over everything.  And that ultimately is what Dr. Fauci didn’t understand at the beginning, which he is learning about now. 

Do I think Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates are the intentional embodiment of evil?  No, I think they are typical bureaucrats who create evil by injecting themselves into a process as an administrative impediment to innovation, which is typical in all bureaucratic management bodies.  From their perspective, they were doing the right thing.  But see, that’s the problem.  The definition of the “right thing” is always determined based on the limited understanding of the characters involved. The administrative state that manages all that activity, as Edward Bellamy fantasized about, and progressives for the last 150 years have been trying to implement through our education system, was always going to be determined by the weakest links, which is something Americans ran from in Europe.  It was the cause of westward expansion.   Whatever anybody thinks about the destruction of the Indian nations, or the battles to free people from slavery, the revolutions, the piracy in the Caribbean, it all came from people wanting to be free of the administrative state, not chained to it more.  People like Dr. Fauci followed rugged Americans to their homes and now, through the media, were in every part of their lives.  So when there was no plan for getting rid of Covid, it would only be natural that people would grow to hate Dr. Fauci, as they hate all people who constantly intrude on their lives.  It’s clear now that Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates never understood how Americans think or why, among others, in the administrative state. 

To indicate that Americans have a misplaced belief about individual rights over the demands of a public health crisis is not to understand the essence of our country.  Progressives like the billionaires attacking America like Bill Gates, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and many others have shown why we all want freedom from an overarching administrative state.  Whenever a thought process is siloed, as it is in the case of a heavily bureaucratic government where someone like Dr. Fauci sets a policy that everyone else must follow, then you are limited in your life to the limits of such people.  If they are not the smartest in the world or even the best, people will get frustrated and get stuck behind them.  For instance, I say this often, but when people tell you to stay in your lane, what they mean is that they expect you to stay behind some big truck on a highway that is only going 40 mph up a big hill, and they don’t want you to pass them.  They want you to follow the rules and to lower your own speed limit and expectations to the weakest link on the highway.  But Americans like to travel at their own speed, and if they come upon such a slow-moving vehicle, they expect to pass.  When the administrative state says they cannot give them room to pass, there will be angry people.  And Dr. Fauci obviously never planned for that reaction, which he should have considered from the outset. 

Before this debacle of the Biden administration and Dr. Fauci’s massive failures, by sticking himself into all our lives so recklessly, people tended to forget about the slow-moving trucks once they could pass.  By the time they got where they were going, their tempers lowered considerably, and life went on.  But now, because people have been restricted for so long, and there are no plans for a fix, people are getting justifiably angry.  America was founded as a solution to the administrative state.  We left the world to start our own life in North America.  We did it to be free of people like Dr. Fauci.  Not to become more managed by them.  Free people will give them the benefit of the doubt until it goes on too long and they get tired of being stuck behind the slow-moving truck. “They will not stay in their lane forever.” It’s a lesson Dr. Fauci and the rest of them learned too late.  No matter how good the intentions were, the rule in America is that administration state incompetency will not be tolerated, whereas it’s generally accepted in the rest of the world.   They accept it in other countries because they have learned to.  But in America, the nature of the people who make up the country and have a constitution that limits the powers of government on purpose, the concept of yielding to infinite authority isn’t in the cards.  Eventually, people will pass the administrators, and if their goals were to slow down society with their slow-moving truck, they would always end up disappointed.  The hatred of Dr. Fauci and the political division that has erupted over Covid is healthy, and it’s good for people to see it this way instead of through actual violence.  Perhaps this lesson will sink in and make us a better society.  But it won’t change America into an administrative state. Instead, maybe now people will listen better when we warn about it in the future. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Root Cause of Failed Liberalism: ‘Looking Backward’ to where the problem started

The Root Cause of Failed Liberalism

Not to brag, but as a statement of fact, I know many people are wondering why I have not been canceled out of existence.  Many bad people have certainly tried, and the shadow banning of me is just flat-out ridiculous.  But the truth of it is that my phone never stops ringing, even though I don’t make any attempts to broadcast what the political left considers toxic masculinity as a gun-wielding conservative, way to the political right of John Wayne.  I consider him a long-haired hippie compared to the way I think of politics.  But I do work extensively with people of all kinds of political affiliations and religious beliefs.  I get along with everybody until they do me wrong.  Yet if I answered all the calls and emails, I would never have time to do anything else, so I have to be very selective with my time.  It’s such a problem that I spent a whole chapter of my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business explaining why selective management of time is so important.  You might want to spend all kinds of time with people, but spending infinite amounts of time with them has a cost, usually a big one.  That leads to the answer to the question as to why this modern attack vector has not canceled me out by the liberal’s global progressive mindset.  Well, it’s because I have something the world really wants, a unique skill and that people are willing to put up with some conservative eccentricities so they can get some of what I have.  And that skill is a very keen sense of root cause analysis. 

For more than 30 years now, I have been an expert in Lean Manufacturing; I’ve been through all the reiterations and have advised many on it over the years.  I know it backward and forward.  But, I am not at all in love with it.  I see it strictly as an eastern spin to Japan’s lessons from Deming after World War II.  They were smart; they took one of the American manufacturing consultants into their arms after it was American manufacturing that essentially won that war, and they set out to beat us at our own game.  They turned what they learned into Lean and then sold it back to us, which now has much of the world thinking that they can copy Lean into their own cultures, only to find that it doesn’t work so well in the West.  I have never been all that impressed with Deming or the people who worship him as a manufacturing god. Those in the Lean movement with martial art terms that they think sound cool when selling eastern ideas to the West thinking it will help make companies better and more profitable.  If anything, it has only contributed to the spread of communism as we assumed that they knew something in the east that we didn’t know in the West, which essentially started this push toward global communism.  I have a saying that many who know me often hear, “get rid of the Black Belt and embrace the gunbelt.” I wrote my own book about this way of thinking after many years of experience and my root cause analysis of the state of the world, which needs some fresh insight. 

However, I’m not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  One of the Lean tools that are most commonly used in the world to determine root cause analysis is the “five whys.” Now here, my gunfighter analogy would say that I shoot from the hip on those kinds of things because I have great experience and troubleshooting ability.  I can usually arrive at a root cause analysis by walking into a room.  But to use a more traditional tool to bring other people into the knowledge, they need to see a process like the “five whys” to work out the problem.  And that’s precisely what I did when it came to asking the questions about why liberalism so often fails, why the Biden administration sucked so much.  Why do so many people hate Donald Trump?  And essentially, why the state of the world was so bad when liberals did their work in it.  Those weren’t political statements; they were observations based on reality.  I had my shoot from the hip understanding of it, which long-time readers here understand I usually peg things months, years, or decades ahead of when trends hit. That’s why my phone never stops ringing, and it never will.  Much of the time, I’d love the phone to stop ringing.  But there is a cost to everything.  But to prove my thoughts to people, I needed a more traditional root cause analysis.  So I found myself way out West with my family at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which gave me what I had been looking for. I’ve been to museums all over the world, some of the best that there are.  And the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was, and is, something extraordinary. 

It was at that museum that I learned to what extent Edward Bellamy had played a role in shaping socialism in America during that little vacuum of history when the Buffalo Bill Wild West show was the most popular form of entertainment in the world, from around 1880 to 1910. Bellamy’s book Looking Backward came out in 1888. It was a continuation of Karl Marx that essentially started quite a movement in America toward socialism that seamlessly merged with progressivism around 1910, during the Teddy Roosevelt years.  In the Bellamyites, much of modern liberalism was formed, which populates our nightly news cycles. Specifically, the nationalization of all means of production.  It has loomed in the background for the last 150 years, and they have constantly made gains for their movement over that entire time.  But to see the root cause of the problem of liberalism, you must go back to that period before the Progressive Era and at the end of the romantic Gilded Era, what I think of as the age of the gunfighters.  Many believe in gunfighting as a barbarous age of aggression and violence; I see it as much better than the concepts of Bellamy and his followers of the modern-day progressives in the Democrat Party. 

Like any root cause analysis, when trying to solve a problem, it’s not acceptable to put up with something causing you a defect, whether in manufacturing, psychology, or global politics.  If a bad idea is causing trouble, then you have to get rid of it.  And liberalism was a bad idea from the moment it was released with the work of Karl Marx.  What Edward Bellamy did with it was infect America with a disaster of thought that we see fully on the stage today.  But to see it correctly, you have to go back to a time before the problem gained support, which Edward Bellamy did for the work of Karl Marx during the period of massive westward expansion in America.  In my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, the basic premise is designed to help put a business back on track or a country; however the thought exercises are wished to be used by the reader.  But accepting the failure of a thought is not acceptable. That’s not to say that in the past, they had everything right.  There are always ways for “continuous improvement.” But a continuation of a bad idea which liberalism is is not the path to success for anything.  And to deal with it effectively, we must as a culture accept that premise as a fact and not make concessions with failure just to avoid hurting anybody’s feelings.  That frankness is why the phone never stops ringing; there are so many people stuck in the world between a problem and broken feelings on how to have a proper solution.  Usually, the problem is easy to fix, but the people involved make it difficult.  But the fix is the fix, and for America to be right again, we must solve the sickness at its source, to the world before Edward Bellamy and his destructive book Looking Backward.  

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

‘Looking Backward’: Where the liberal snipers have been hiding

Finding the Snipers by Looking Backward

I talk about it all the time, but if you are new to all this and have been getting your news from more mainstream sources, well, maybe you didn’t know about the successive tyrants of the world, the World Economic Forum who recently announced their Great Narrative from Dubai.  That is, of course, the same group behind the Great Reset, which Covid was created to implement across the world to shut down all the world’s economies simultaneously.  Then to have a managed restart under the United Nations using climate change fake science to drive the need.  I was catching up on all the latest climate crises, United Nations propaganda, and Davos Great Narrative updates while playing the new Call of Duty: Vanguard.  I was on a specific mission where you had to cross a vast field with broken-up buildings off in the distance full of snipers.  You had to work with a teammate to draw out the sniper fire, determine which windows the snipers were in, and quickly shoot them to advance.  I couldn’t help but see the parallels to what I was listening to.  The political left has kept themselves concealed in darkness for a long time, forcing us to focus on their specific positions.  As we put our sniper scopes on them, they’d shoot us from a different place.  When we changed our priorities, they’d shoot us yet from somewhere else.  But I like to look at the whole battlefield and pay attention to all the muzzle flashes from the various snipers to see them as one big story.  And that’s what the Great Narrative revealed to me; it was essentially a word-for-word utopian update of the old Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward.  This time, climate change was the driver toward global socialism and communism, taking over government over private enterprise so that the state could justify the power grab.  Since people resisted the first attempt, which took over 100 years to try, the political left has now turned to climate change to drive the justification, and it is evident to anybody who had a mind to look at the big picture. 

Looking Backward was essentially a short evolutionary novel meant to soft-sell Karl Marx to America and was in 1888 the third most popular book behind Ben Hur.  There was a massive following for the socialist utopia that the book describes when the hero wakes up 130 years in the future after being put to sleep with hypnosis only to suffer an accident in the process.  When he finally wakes up, the world has evolved into a socialist utopia, complete with the state taking over ultimately the means of production. There is no crime, everyone is equal, and the government maintains that fairness at the expense of all else. It’s a fluffy sort of fiction that, looking forward, was every bit like science fiction as Star Wars. Still, the premise was intentionally real, and a considerable following erupted from 1888 to 1900.  It only ended because Bellamy had died, and the movement took on a new shape.  But it’s a period of history that hides behind other things like the Civil War, the invention of the airplane, the electric bulb. The Model T. It’s a socialist movement that completely infected our education system at all levels, starting with John Dewey, who designed our public education system around the premise of Bellamy’s book.  So this wasn’t some fringe movement, it was the evolution of Karl Marx right in front of our faces, and it happened at the turn of the century.  What evolved after it became the stuff of nightmares, the creation of the Federal Reserve, the centralized control of money, progressive taxation, the big government politics that would lead to the New Deal.  The attempts at creating the League of Nations, then finally the United Nations.  It all started with that little book that replaced the gunfighters of western expansion and the liberalized easterner’ desire to assimilate the new nation’s success. 

People called these strange new socialist lovers “elite” because, at the time, they were the ones who were in our education system and teaching us.  They were the education system, the professors of our colleges, and they were our intellectual guides in a time when many people still couldn’t read.  Because many who founded America as a new country were suffering from an inferiority complex with Europe, these socialist lovers had the ear of many people we trusted to teach us things we didn’t know due to our lack of culture and history.  We didn’t know that much of what they were teaching were things we didn’t want or need to know.  We just knew they knew something we didn’t, so our society listened to them.  This went on for several decades, getting worse and worse over time.  As communism took over in the Soviet Union in 1917, then socialism moved into the collapsed German government with Hitler in the 1930s. China with a total communist takeover in 1949, Cuba in the 1950s, then Iran in the 1970s, the long march of global domination of communism has been moving along at a predictable pace.  Liberals in America’s own government were always sympathetic. They sought to teach Americans the ways of socialism and communism in our public schools and colleges the entire time, so there is a bit of socialism in just about everyone these days.  And always, the turn toward communism was through financial pressure and forcible military conquest.  That is certainly the case in Germany, where their financial system completely collapsed after World War I, and China after fighting in World War II.   The same playbook was at work on America now in 2020, and if you know how to sniff out the snipers to see where they are shooting from, you can see what’s been happening quickly.  I read the book that they are still following almost verbatim.

Of course, there are flaws to this plan that these losers have never worked out.  They don’t understand where socialism went wrong from its beginning plans, which Bellamy never figured out.  The failure of these so-called elites is that they assumed that if the world’s governments could unite and issue fairness, they could take over all industries and never miss a beat.  But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, all the flaws from the beginning all the socialist academics were in love with were never resolved.  The Bellamy novel was fiction at best when it first was shown to the public.  Because it appealed to the below-the-line people out in the world, they ignored that socialism defied the essence of human need.  It was a fantasy written by the mind of a child, and it had migrated into a governing force that still insists on trying it over and over again, even though it never worked.  These educated elite have shown themselves not to be very smart.  We gave them the benefit of the doubt looking forward, but looking backward, as the book suggests, they had it wrong from the beginning, and they never had a chance ever to get it right.  Yet that is the very premise of the Davos crowd of the World Economic Forum people.  They are as lost as they ever were, and they, in their most profound thoughts, want to rule the world as all tyrants have over the many centuries of warfare.  And they expect America to fall like all the other places in the world have, especially since they’ve spent over a century building the momentum.  But I would argue that we see where they are shooting from now, we know where their snipers are, and we can win this game now that they are exposed.  They may have hidden that book, Looking Backward, from history, but they can’t hide the result.  It’s time to pay, and the evidence points to a bad day for all of them. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business