Tag: England

I Don’t Like England Anymore: Compliant people are dangerous to thoughtful innovation

I’ve decided that I don’t like England anymore. I did like England when Brexit was the rallying cry—a nation reclaiming sovereignty, shaking off the European Union’s bureaucratic grip. Nigel Farage embodied that spirit of independence, and I could respect that. But who they are now, or have really, always been? That’s a different story. Since COVID, my view has shifted dramatically, and not without reason.

The pandemic exposed something deep in the English psyche: a cultural obsession with compliance. During lockdown, police in England enforced rules with a zeal that bordered on authoritarian. They issued over 120,000 Fixed Penalty Notices for breaches of COVID regulations, ranging from meeting a friend outdoors to traveling without a “reasonable excuse.” Officers even had the authority to enter homes and forcibly return individuals to their residences if they were found outside without justification.¹ This wasn’t just about health—it was about control. It revealed a society that values safety over liberty, process over spontaneity, and certainty over courage.

And then came the social media policing. In England today, posting the wrong thing online can land you in handcuffs. Under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988, police made 12,183 arrests in 2023 alone for “offensive” or “grossly offensive” posts—a staggering 58% increase since 2019.² That’s about 30 arrests every single day for speech crimes. Think about that. In a country that once gave the world John Locke and the principles of liberty, people are now being dragged from their homes for tweets.

Consider the case of Graham Linehan, co-creator of Father Ted. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport after returning from the U.S., his crime being posts critical of transgender ideology.³ Or the IT consultant who posted a photo with a shotgun during a Florida trip—police raided his home, seized his devices, and subjected him to 13 weeks of investigation.⁴ Then there’s Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, who faced a six-officer raid over a sarcastic WhatsApp message criticizing a school official.⁵ These aren’t isolated incidents—they’re part of a pattern. The UK now has elite police units dedicated to monitoring online speech for “hate” or “extremism,” often targeting those with anti-migrant views.⁶

This is not freedom. It’s thought control. And the cultural soil that allows this to grow is England’s love of process—its obsession with rules, procedures, and certainty. They plan everything: the route to the gas station, the tea ritual, the itinerary for a simple drive. It’s a society that trades spontaneity for safety, adventure for predictability. That might sound quaint until you realize what it means in practice: a population conditioned to obey.

Even their illusion of free speech is telling. London’s Speaker’s Corner is often romanticized as a bastion of open dialogue, but in reality, it’s a monitored zone—a symbolic gesture that says, “You can speak here, under our watch.” Outside that corner, the state’s grip tightens. Arrests for silent prayer near abortion clinics, for tweets deemed “offensive,” for Facebook posts criticizing politicians—these are not anomalies; they are the norm.⁷ The U.S. State Department has even flagged the UK for “serious restrictions on freedom of expression.”⁸ That should alarm anyone who values liberty.

And while the state clamps down on speech, another force reshapes the cultural landscape: demographic change. The Muslim population in England has grown from 4.9% in 2011 to about 6.5% in 2021—roughly 4 million people—and is projected to reach 13 million by 2050.⁹ This isn’t just a statistic; it’s a transformation. In urban centers, Islamic fundamentalism finds fertile ground in a society already conditioned to compliance. When a culture is beaten into submission by its own government, it becomes vulnerable to ideologies that demand even stricter obedience. That’s not diversity—that’s a recipe for cultural collapse.

Contrast this with America’s founding spirit. The United States exists because people rejected monarchy, hierarchy, and the suffocating weight of tradition. They fled Europe’s kingdoms for the unknown, embracing risk and adventure. That courage—the willingness to live without guarantees—is what built America. England, by contrast, never shed its psychological chains. Even now, with a “token” King Charles, the monarchy persists as a cultural anchor, a reminder that the people are subjects, not sovereigns. That mindset matters. A society that wants to be ruled already has something broken in its DNA.

Brexit was a flicker of rebellion, a moment when England seemed ready to reclaim its independence. Nigel Farage gave voice to that impulse, railing against the EU’s bureaucratic overreach. But where is that spirit now? Drowned in lockdown mandates, speech policing, and a nanny-state mentality that arrests citizens for jokes. Farage’s Reform UK party still fights, but it’s swimming against a cultural tide that prefers process to freedom.¹⁰

I’ve tried to rationalize some affection for England over the years. I admired their bookstores, their literary tradition, and their politeness. My own family ties made it tempting to look the other way. But honesty demands clarity: England today is not a beacon of liberty. It is a cautionary tale—a society that traded freedom for safety, individuality for compliance, and courage for comfort. And the world is watching. When London becomes the attack vector for global liberalism, when its cultural weakness enables ideological invasions, when its police knock on doors for tweets, we should ask: Is this the future we want?

America must never follow that path. Our strength lies in the unknown, in the willingness to risk, in the refusal to bow. England chose differently. And for that reason, I can no longer admire what it has become.  I would say that England has always been this way, and it has only excelled as a culture when it has endeavored to be more like America, as it did with Brexit.  But remember, this is the same culture that literally tortured and killed William Wallace, the Scottish rebel shown so well in the movie Braveheart.  When they killed him, to quell any future rebellions, they gutted him in front of the crowd and burned his intestines while he was still alive.  After they cut off his head after a very torturous death, they cut up his body and sent his arms and legs to the far reaches of the kingdom.  And they put his head on a pike on London Bridge and kept it there for a long time.  To remind people of what would happen to other rebels should they think to take the same path.  And that same behavior is present in their policing of social media posts.  Any culture that is willing to put up with that kind of oppression is not a good culture for the world.  And that is the value system they seem to support most: compliance with authority over freedom of thought.  English culture is built on compliance, and history shows us over an extended period what a disaster that is.  Which is why I no longer like or respect England and its role in the world.

—

Footnotes:

¹ UK lockdown enforcement: Fixed Penalty Notices and home entry powers 123

² Arrest statistics under Section 127 and the Malicious Communications Act 4

³ Graham Linehan case 56

⁴ IT consultant arrested over Florida photo 5

⁵ Maxie Allen & Rosalind Levine WhatsApp raid 4

⁶ Elite units monitoring online speech 7

⁷ Arrests for silent prayer and speech restrictions 89

⁸ U.S. State Department criticism of UK free speech limits 9

⁹ Muslim population growth and projections 1011

¹⁰ Farage and Reform UK political context 1213

Rich Hoffman

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

The World Bet Against America: What Edward Abilene and other socialists never figured out

The World Bet Against America, Bad Decision

Another reason I felt I had to write The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is because many people consider America a great place, but they don’t understand why.  I thought I had always understood its essence, but how its evolution played out on the world stage leading up to some of the monstrosities we see in our current events, people didn’t have the proper context to grasp what was happening.  To write the book, I needed to visit some places to confirm my thoughts, and one of them was the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.  I was after the essence as to what made America tick, and to get there; I needed to step back to before the progressive era and into the end of the reign of Queen Victoria to put my finger on it.  I would say that I discovered what I needed to, not just at the Buffalo Bill Center. Still, I visited along the way in many places, including the area where Wild Bill Hickok was shot in Deadwood and exploring the reasons for the murder, which is compelling.  For me, these events told the story of today, how we got here and what was wrong with it.  These discoveries certainly made it into my book, a unique collection of thoughts about American business and why they so quickly outwork other industries in the world.  And why there is so much global jealousy toward America.  It’s not something we did, but instead, it’s that we left the world behind, and like a jealous lover, they can’t get over it.  Well, I can say that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West gets it, and I honestly think that all youth in America should go there and study.  It would do them a whole lot more good than in going to their first year of college.  The same holds for all Americans and people worldwide who make the pilgrimage to that Center to touch the essence of Americana as Buffalo Bill showed it to the world at the turn of the last century. 

I always warn my kids about Liberal Springs (Yellow Springs, Ohio) because Antioch College is such a liberal institution that attracts all the dope-smoking hippies and other progressive degenerates.  It’s one of the most liberal areas in all of Ohio, made that way by the college that has been there for so long.  Most Americans have been made to feel guilty for passing judgment on a place of higher education, that is until recently.  But in the case of Yellow Springs, they would have saved themselves a lot of pain if they had been willing to call bad, bad from the beginning.  One of my daughters and her husband wanted to go up to Clifton Gorge to hike, and to get there; they stopped by Yellow Springs to get a Coke.  Because my daughter wasn’t wearing a Covid compliance mask, the server there refused to serve her and wanted her to leave.  After some dispute, my daughter went to McDonald’s next door to get her Coke, and they proceeded to hike at the Gorge.  While there, resting on a rock along the trail, a mall cop type of park ranger wanted to give them a citation for getting off the path by a few feet.  After more debate, they were told to leave.  The area of Yellow Springs had heard the Biden dog whistle and was moving toward full authoritarian, the kind of world liberals want for all of us.  Instead, my kids left the area, returned home, and went to a place much more conducive to their personalities, Premier Shooting in West Chester.  They spent the rest of the day there shooting and enjoying themselves with like-minded people who had not become corrupted by liberalism. 

The reason for that little story and the tie back to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is that Edward Abilene had toured America with the daughter of Karl Marx in the late 1800s to measure the temperature the new nation would have for socialism.  Abilene had a strange attraction to Buffalo Bill in trying to understand Americans, which is why that Center was critical to understanding how Europe saw America.  At that time, Americans weren’t considered a threat, so England appeased the Buffalo Bill show the way a parent might indulge a child putting on a magic show for the first time, with a pat on the head and some upper lip encouragement.  But what they saw was a raw example of masculinity and weapons work that had conquered the wild frontier that had a new kind of art and culture to display, industry, endurance, tenacity, and courage.  The men of English society were more than a little threatened when English women were clamoring for these Buffalo Bill types, just as England as an empire was well on the decline.  They thought that America had no art, no history, no culture, and Europe was far superior.  They convinced many Americans to chase after the European standard and copy their religions, their colleges for higher learning, and other aspects of culture.  That is how the liberal was created in America.  Many other Americans like those in the Buffalo Bill show were new and mysterious in the world. They were not just attractive; they might become the most dominant organization of people on the face of the planet.  That was a threat to Europe and the old powers, and they have been anxious about it ever since. 

Liberals in America started creating colleges in the United States, like the one in Yellow Springs, to bring European culture to the new country.  Not so much to help America but to slow down its growth and ambitions.  During his tour of America and his relationship with Buffalo Bill, Abilene realized that Americans were looking for recognition from the old world the way a child seeks the approval of a parent.  So the plan to bring socialism to America was through such a process of shared art and culture.  Since then, America has had a restrictor plate applied to it, slowing it down to Europe’s liking.  It has also created a kind of subclass of European in the American liberal that is all the cause of conflict to this very day.  Such as the waitress in Yellow Springs who refused to serve my daughter a Coke or the overly zealous park officer at Clifton Gorge.  Americans have been made to feel guilty for all their ambitions and lack of culture, which Europe provided in exchange for a limiting relationship that has hindered America’s growth.  Now that all the cards are on the table and true feelings about each other have been revealed since Trump became president, it’s time to review all these relationships and decide how to move forward.  I would propose to leave the world behind and to force them to catch up if they want by adopting capitalism.  That would solve many of the problems in the world.  No government can provide that solution; it has to come from individuals who set the bar high and force the world to live up to it.  It might be a nightmare for Europe and Asia, but it is the way of the future, and for anybody curious about it, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West tells the story in ways that no place else does.   The world has bet on liberalism.  But what America created is what everyone wants, so that bet toward China will fall short because it’s not the best. 

Investors like Ray Dalio and companies like Walt Disney may have invested everything assuming that the world would turn back to the old and that hierarchical power would resume its work globally.  For them, they picked China and have hedged themselves behind that decision.  But, they should have read my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  It would have saved them billions and trillions of dollars in lost revenue, which they will experience over the next decade.  I can understand their anxiety, but it’s their fault for not understanding what America was and thinking they could change it through academic means.  The Buffalo Bill Wild West show led to a yearning for freedom that created the country despite the world’s governments, and those forces are still at play.  Peer pressure isn’t going to return Americans to the grip of the old world. Instead, the entire government of America could be stripped away, including those compliant losers in Yellow Springs, yet Americans would still have an incredibly high GDP.  It was always a mystery to Edward Abilene and other Marxists who wanted to take over America and still do.  But they won’t be successful.  To understand why the Buffalo Bill Center of the West shows it.  Or, you can read my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

John Lennon’s Stupid Song, “Imagine”: Why the political left hates “lone wolves”

 

This line could have been straight out of any classic dystopian novel, whether it be Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Fountainhead, or Atlas Shrugged.  Actually it reminds me of the wry satire of a Terry Gilliam film like Brazil, or George Lucas’ THX-1138.  Yet it was the offered critic of the reasoning behind the killer in England of Jo Cox—the beloved leftist politician who happened to be murdered a week ahead of the critical vote on whether or not to leave the European Union and reclaim their national sovereignty from the gross mismanagement of the socialist bureaucrats in Brussels.

“Many people who suffer from mental illness are socially isolated and disconnected from society, feelings of worthlessness are alleviated by doing voluntary work.

So that is “their” explaination on the matter?  It sounds eerily like the profile of the Orlando shooter.  I couldn’t help but think back to my school days—of which I rebelled heavily—and recall the thoughts I had of the entire public education system, rule through peer pressure and drive the herd toward mass collectivism which makes it easy for a central authority to administer.  That is precisely what we have here just hours after a legitimate tragedy of a young political star.  Despite her politics, Jo Cox seemed like a nice sincere lady who meant well.  But also common mainly caused by long-term unemployment.

“All these problems are

the political class for which she belonged cared much more for what they could get out of her martyrdom than what the individual life lost of her presence accounted for.  Here is the rest of the story in case you missed it. The slant of the report is more telling than the content.

 

Update — Suspected killer may have had “mental health problems”, in receipt of “psychotherapy and medication” 

The suspected killer of MP Jo Cox has been named locally as Thomas Mair, who has featured in a number of local news reports in recent years as a mentally ill man who claimed to be benefitting from local voluntary opportunities.

An archived 2010 article about a country park which welcomed Mr. Mair from the Pathways Day Centre for adults with mental health problems to volunteer in building a “faith garden” reported Mr. Mair as saying: “I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world.

“Many people who suffer from mental illness are socially isolated and disconnected from society, feelings of worthlessness are also common mainly caused by long-term unemployment.

“All these problems are alleviated by doing voluntary work.

“Getting out of the house and meeting new people is a good thing, but more important in my view is doing physically demanding and useful labour.

“When you have finished there is a feeling of achievement which is emotionally rewarding and psychologically fulfilling.

“For people for whom full-time, paid employment is not possible for a variety of reasons, voluntary work offers a socially positive and therapeutic alternative.”

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/06/16/breaking-labour-mp-jo-cox-shot-stabbed-constituency-surgery-yorkshire/

The political left in both the Orlando case of the mass shooting there and the English case of an assassinated political figure is that loners are the problem, not the failures of their open border policies, their economic philosophy or their inability to use legislation to create a utopian existence.  There were gun laws that were extreme in England and yet that didn’t prevent the murder of Jo Cox in city street.  (The Manchurian Candidate in the wake of this tragedy seems less like fiction given the proximity to such an important election) Rather, the political left—particularly the socialist progressives point to those who are outside of their direct control as the culprits—lone wolves who stay to themselves and don’t socially “assimilate” toward group conduct.

From my own grade school days to the present, of nearly five decades, I tend to look down on people who “need” social assimilation.  I see them as incomplete people.  I don’t harbor hatred for them, or seek to “destroy” them in any way.   For instance, people who desire to be in a bar on a Friday night drinking socially with friends I would consider to be less evolved than a person who can sit quietly with a book or just their thoughts for an entire weekend.  When it is first desired to be in the company of others because one does not feel comfortable alone, I would say that people like that are the ones who are suffering from mental deficiency—and they require some evolution.  However, our public schools all over the world are committed to nurturing that weakness in people, and the net result has been the failures we are seeing all over the world at this very moment.  That is the story in both the Orlando shooting and the Jo Cox case.  It’s not lone wolves that are the problem, it is a meddling political class of socialist loving progressives who have forced people next to each other to satisfy their ridiculous love of some Marxist John Lennon song, “Imagine.”  By the way, I think “Imagine” is one of the crappiest songs ever recorded.  I hated it when I was a kid before I even knew what it meant, and I despise it now.   It is the song of the progressive left—Lennon’s wife did have a lesbian affair with Hillary Clinton which makes the thinking of those deranged people very relevant to today—because they are still injecting themselves into our lives four decades later.

And really that’s how all this ties together.  When I was in grade school starting very early kids would ask what your favorite rock group was and if you didn’t have one, you were made to feel bad.  I didn’t care at all for pop music during my grade school years.  I was happiest spending time alone with my thoughts.  Many counselors and teachers tried to twist the arms of my parents and make them feel terrible about my lack of social consideration.  I never went to a school dance until I was a senior in high school and that was only to show everyone that I could bring one of the most attractive girls in Cincinnati—who was much better looking than any girl in my graduating class at the time.  It was an act of rebellion, and once I did it, I didn’t have to do it again.  I never even thought twice about it, until people put the social pressure on me to make me think there was something wrong with me.  It wasn’t me, it was actually a mass psychosis induced by the masses going to the trough to listen to popular music like what John Lennon was making in his private studio with Phil Spector to launch the world into global socialism.  And now that a majority of the world has followed those doomed lyrics, those idiots are looking for someone to blame, and the lone wolves are their most convenient target—because as long as they exist, the failure of their “Imagine” policies will be grossly obvious.

These violent events of recent, and all that follow are responsibilities of the political left and its salesmen–losers like John Lennon.  They obtained their song and now people are rejecting it.  In England, the people there want their country back from the European Union.  In America, we are about to vote for Donald Trump—the ultimate individualist.  John Lennon’s song has lost its appeal because the utopia he sang about has turned out to be a nightmare.  People did “Imagine” through the pot infested smoke they inhaled, and what they saw scared them.  And now they are turning away and the first people they see to follow are the lone wolves who have never been part of the group to begin with—people like me, Donald Trump, and many others.  These killers are not like me; they are not lone wolves who think on their own.  They require some doctrine to think for them—some institutional claim.  They are not lone wolves.

A lone wolf is a higher form of evolutionary living.  In the United States it is something to aspire to, even though many never get there.  It takes a lot more courage to sit alone at home with a book and your thoughts than it does to sit in a bar with five friends on a Friday giving you peer review of your clothing, your jewelry, and your economic status.  But for the political left, they can’t even think of such a thing because the goal of their existence is John Lennon’s stupid song—a path to nowhere and the hard truth that everything they ever believed in has failed our civilization.  Take it from a lone wolf—it is obvious.  That’s why they hate us.

What an idiot, yet she and her former husband are the leaders of the modern progressive movement.  And they call that art……………………………….LOL

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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