Tag: Free Will

I Can’t Wait to Vote for Mark Welch: Sad to hear, Jennifer Gross has been a Never Trumper

After watching the debate performance at the West Chester Tea Party Candidate Forum between my pick for the 52nd House seat in Ohio Mark Welch, and his rival Jennifer Gross I was very impressed with both of their answers on the 2nd Amendment. I have known Mark for many years, before he ever ran for any office, so I know clearly where he stands on things and he has not been a disappointment. He’s had some temptations come his way as the West Chester Trustee who worked with George Lang to bring so much prosperity to the area and I know that I can trust him in Columbus where things get quite a bit more difficult. My comment to Jennifer was that I wish she wasn’t running against Mark because I’d love to vote for her for some other position. For me she was a bright spot of the evening and I enjoyed talking to her. Apparently, our paths have crossed in the past on projects and so talking to her after that event was a real pleasure. However, as an employer getting ready to vote for a new hire for an important House seat that means a great deal to our area, Mark is still my guy without question. And here are the reasons.

There is a lot of talk in this election about the establishment being some kind of maniacal force that must be overthrown, especially from Candice Keller. But I could write several books about all the work that has gone on behind the scenes with great leaders like George Lang, and Ann Becker to push out the RINO Republicans and build an Ohio Republican Party that is firm behind President Trump’s administration. That is why we recently had a big party for Trump in West Chester that drew a large crowd and Lara Trump herself came to Jungle Jim’s in Fairfield recently to help raise money for the Butler County GOP. Todd Hall as Chairman has done a great job in shaping the current GOP along with Sheriff Jones. I have done my fair share to help shape the kind of people we wanted in those positions and I am very proud of the result, of the people who are now office holders that would never have been if we didn’t start working to get real conservatives on the Central Committees. If there is anything really good that came out of the Tea Party movement, it was that, and the result is that we now have options at high office in the Statehouse like George Lang and Mark Welch, who were born out of the Tea Party movement and are now part of the Trump Administration as far as policy at the local level. So the establishment isn’t so bad anymore, I would say its actually quite good and I have no problem naming myself as a proud, Trump Republican.

In fact, I was never anything but a staunch Republican, no matter how much disagreement we may have had within the party, success does unite people in a great way and Mark Welch was there when it wasn’t cool, and he has done all the right things, and learned all the hard lessons to run that 52nd District seat wonderfully. But after checking out Jennifer’s background, I am not so sure about her yet. I’d need to see her vetted a bit before I’d vote for her in a key spot, something like a trustee seat, or even the school board. I really like her, she is a good personality and a sincere person, but her history as a Never Trumper concerns me greatly as indicated by some of her online postings shown within this article. I’m certainly never one to push away a potential friend or partner, even from former rivals. People learn things in their own way, and I am not rigid in accepting people who have seen the light into being part of a solution in the future. There were a lot of people who were Ted Cruz supporters in the last election that had a problem with Trump. There are of course the Ron Paul types whom I never was a blind supporter. I have never called myself a “libertarian.” I am a Republican in the purest form of it and likely always will be. But I don’t expect everyone to have those firm convictions.

That brings up my other issue with Jennifer, with all that said, she has made comments that she doesn’t associate with being a Republican which is a deal killer for me. It’s not just about party, but its about values. She obviously by some of her messages has some strong feelings about Mark Welch who is my friend because he has many of my shared values. Mark will clearly represent my Republican sentiments in Columbus the way I want to see. But since Jennifer doesn’t care much for Mark and obviously has stated that she no longer identifies as a “Republican” it breaks my heart to see that she’s not where I’d like her to be in life so I could give her a vote. Because I think she has the talent, certainly the charisma. But I’m not sure she can hold a note under pressure on the big stage. I’d need to see her support this current Republican Party and survive some pitfalls first. I understand that sentiments change and with success under Trump, things are much clearer than they were for people coming out of 2016. But I’ve always thought the same things and I know Mark Welch has too. He’s never been a different person. My experience with him is that he holds back a lot, he’s more a man of action than of talk so he doesn’t sell himself enough. But he’s relatively new to this political game himself. He started off as a trustee and has worked his way to where he’s now poised for a more complicated office. And its not about just straight up votes, its about team building for bill passage, and that means that you need to know how to work with the party in charge and not be some outcast that screws everything up. It’s a tough business and it takes a very likeable, and charismatic person deeply rooted in their own belief system to navigate the lobbyists, the pressures in the hall outside the chamber and the constant stream of negative emails because you didn’t vote this way or that. It always takes knowing how not to stumble over the media when they are trying to twist every word you say to play the gotcha game. I know Mark can play that game. Jennifer in my thoughts needs some practice.

When the smoke from this primary on March 17th is over, I hope to see more of Jennifer. I’d like to see her work herself into a party endorsement and to start building some bridges which is what a republic style of government requires. It wouldn’t take much to make me vote for her, just consistency and to fit into the team that has been building in Butler County in the GOP. While individualism is the key to representative government the passing of laws and the art of representation requires those extra team building skills, just as every corporate environment demands. Being a solid individual is needed to fend off the wolves who want to turn every politician into a corrupt specimen. But you must be able to win people over to your way of thinking in a republic and that isn’t easy under the best of circumstances. Its wonderful to say we should never have party politics, but in Columbus we have majorities and minorities and that is needed for all kinds of checks and balances, and that is the framework that anybody going for a State seat must navigate to do the good work that needs to be done. I can’t wait to vote for Mark Welch, he has worked hard and deserves it. And I look forward to getting behind Jennifer Gross at some future opportunity if such a chance presents itself.

Rich Hoffman

The Misleading Candice Keller: There is no stronger politician on the 2nd Amendment than George Lang

I kept wondering all during this campaign in Ohio for the 4th Senate District seat why disgraced Candice Keller would say so emphatically, and so often, that George Lang, her political rival was such a liar. I’ve known George Lang for a very long time, and through all kinds of times, good and bad, and I’ve never known him to be any kind of liar. So I was happy to hear Candice on stage at a debate with George at the Tea Party Candidate Forum that was held at the Life Church just outside of Mason, Ohio to get context to her thought process and she spilled it during a questioning session over support of the Second Amendment. Its hard to imagine a stronger pro Second Amendment candidate anywhere in the world than George Lang, even the cowboy hat wearing politicians from the northern plain states. Lang is very pro-gun, especially for what people like Crazy Candice Keller calls, “establishment types.” I was pretty surprised that Keller tried to sell in a church of all places that George Lang had supported red flag laws in Ohio, and that it was those kinds of statements she had been trying to paint on him to punch holes in his credibility and call him “Lyin’ Lang.” I was curious how she could even suggest such a thing and I received my answer during the clip shown below.

What Crazy Keller does with information that is long in the wake of a big time politician like George Lang who is involved in all types of discussions with literally hundreds if not thousands of people every week is take things out of context and try to shape them into something supportive to her world view. In the case of the red flag laws support that she says George had written down, she’s talking about a Toledo reporter who knew Lang was as pro-gun as anybody in the Ohio Statehouse and she tried to paint him in a corner shortly after the Dayton mass shooting, the way many in the media were trying to play “gotcha” with pro Second Amendment supporters as an act of liberal activism on their part. George first gave her a blow off scenario which she took and ran with, which was completely fake news, in the same way that the media treats the Trump Administration. George Lang would never support red flag laws, so I knew as soon as Crazy Candice Keller said what she did, she was manipulating information to try to cast doubt in voter’s minds about George. But taking that same assumption, Candice should know all about how the media plays that game because they essentially destroyed her with her response to the Dayton shooting. What she said has destroyed her within the Republican Party. It is literally “crazy” that she would expect people to understand her situation, but wants to use fake news media reports as the voice of record when it comes to George Lang. The liar certainly wasn’t Lang, it was Candice Keller and it shocked me that as she has sold herself as the “church lady” that she would from a stage in a church openly lie about Lang and expect it to stick.

When I bought my .50 Desert Eagle carry gun a few years ago George was the first person I called to go shoot it with me. As I have said, I’ve known George Lang for a very long time, well before he was running for senate. I called him because I knew he would appreciate the gun for the work of art that it is, and he understood why that was an exciting moment for me to have, so it was he whom I called. We went to Premier Shooting in West Chester which is a place we both enjoy and spent a lunch hour shooting the new gun and just enjoying the atmosphere. He is as pure of a Second Amendment supporter at a political level that anybody will ever find and as he shot that big gun he was as at home with it as any seasoned veteran. So, it was quite insulting to me to hear Candice Keller try to paint George Lang as some greasy politician in bed with lobbyists and was wishy washy on red flag laws. To suggest Lang was anything close was an open lie stated consciously which was reprehensible.

In fact, it pissed me off so much that I had to ask George about it after the debate. I was wondering if maybe he floated supporting red flag laws to the Governor in order to strengthen the stand your ground bill floating around Columbus and that maybe having such a conversation might lead to a misinterpretation. As it turned out, it was just fake news from another liberal reporter/activist trying to put media pressure on politicians to take a stand against gun ownership. When you talk to as many people as George does, its easy for a reporter to take pot shots and be forgotten, which was clearly the case in Toledo. Candice Keller during that same debate was proud to announce that she didn’t know the name of a single lobbyist which is to say that she really hasn’t put in enough time into her job as a congresswoman to really know anybody. She should know the names of lobbyists, not to get money from them, but to actually know who to look out for. What she has done was demonize everyone, so anybody actually doing work in Columbus is some kind of devil up to no good, at least that’s how she presents herself. But she should know the difference about what a radicalized reporter might do to a pro-gun politician, or even how negotiations over bills can be taken out of context. Anybody who really does political work at any level knows that negotiations are not beliefs. They are positions you take to get something you want in a strategic fashion. President Trump does it all the time, throws out a position he may not want or believe in at all to learn what the other side values so he can whittle away at that to bring the negotiations to where he wants them.

The good thing is that I was at least able to get context into how Crazy Candice thinks. When this whole senate race started, I thought I might like some of Keller’s positions, as a conservative. But I’m not so sure she’s a conservative after other things she said at that debate, which I’ll get into with more articles. Sure, she says she’s pro Second Amendment, she seems pretty pro-life, but she is strangely pro big government especially when it comes to what role the EMS and firefighters in general play in budgets. And the way she distorted the Toledo reporter who was obviously an anti-gun activist trying to paint George Lang in a corner to force red flag laws on weak Republicans in Columbus, Keller should be ashamed of herself. She should have joined George in that fight if she was really a pro Second Amendment supporter. But I think she is using it as a mask to hide some deep closet liberalism she is afraid of getting out to the public. That doesn’t give her a right to lie about people then to attempt to paint them as the liars when it was she all along doing the deed.

Rich Hoffman

The Radicalism of Candice Keller: What she has in common with streakers and other rule breakers

You can learn a lot about people by watching how they deal with pressure, so for that very reason I am a big fan of conflict. I think it’s the only way to really vet an idea, or a person beholding an idea. So when it comes to elections, debates are important ways to determine the right candidates from those who voters should pass on. With that said, there was a good debate hosted by the West Chester Tea Party on March 3rd at the Life Church at the corner of Butler Warren road and Rt 42 just south of Mason, Ohio that involved many of the candidates for the upcoming primary election that will be on March 17th so the timing of it was critical for voters to make their decisions and learn what they could while there was still time. And in the clip below a summary of the debate evolved into a tense exchange between George Lang who is running for the 4th District Senate seat in Ohio and his challenger, the disgraced fallen angel from the Statehouse Candice Keller. To George’s right was Lee Wong who couldn’t hold his excitement for Keller’s attacks on George while on George’s left was Keller who broke the rules of the evening by refusing to keep her comments within the time limit as she patronized the obvious front-runner like a mother scolding a baby, part of her strategy of attacking the establishment structure of the GOP itself as if she was ordained by God himself to step over the rules of mankind just to get her way. It is an interesting psychological performance that says a lot about all three candidates.

Now when it comes to rules, it is people who are on flimsy ground who need to break them. For instance, if I wanted to get rid of all the bad guys in the world, I would just take my guns out on the streets and shoot down everyone I thought was bad, and from my perspective, that may be a heroic thing to do. But its against the laws we have created as a society. Obviously to prevent that kind of violence from happening I instead elect representatives to create laws that we all somewhat agree to so we can have a stable society where rules prevent that kind of violence. So while people were clapping in the audience that Candice Keller broke the rules of the debate by going well over her time limit, she essentially stated that she was willing to break any rules thrown her way if it meant she could make her point. What she does as a legislator or as a potential legislator in the senate is not relevant if she feels God gives her some permission to break the laws of mankind to serve some master that is over the governing bodies of elections. And like the Ding Dong that Lee Wong is, he was there clapping with the other radicals in the audience who applauded Candice Keller’s attack on George Lang and the GOP establishment in general as a symbolic gesture that went far beyond acceptability. What if God said to me to hit the streets and shoot all the drug dealers, all the abortion practitioners, and all the people of corruption whom I might meet that day? That kind of testimony doesn’t hold up in any court of law, but it would certainly label such a person as a deranged lunatic.

The strategy that is clearly unsaid between Lee Wong and Candice Keller was on stage that evening and their attack, their beef with the world is that they are not part of the establishment, and if given a choice would like to be. George Lang is the front runner, the clear establishment figure in this election for senate so any shots that they can take at that formidable wall they consider a success. Lee Wong has very little shot at winning this election but his history with George Lang goes way back to over a decade so he and Candice hope to peel away enough votes between them to bring down not only an establishment candidate, but to bring harm to the GOP itself. However, their placement on the outside as opposed to the inside were results of their own decisions. They chose to be where they are in life, and now they find themselves looking in from the outside where politics is clearly a collaborative sport. You must be able to build teams, not just vote up or down. You must live within the rules you vote on; you can’t just do whatever you want and not give the mic to the next person when your time limit is up. Of course Crazy Candice received an applause for her actions, just as a nude streaker gets cheers at a ball game for breaking the rules, stripping off all their clothes, jumping the fence and running around for as long as they can until they are captured by security. That was essentially what Keller did at the debate as George, who was clearly playing by the rules, was clearly at a disadvantage within that audience to the spectacle.

You can’t call yourself good if you can’t be successful within the ground rules of the game, and in a debate where people are making decisions about you based on your skills to make rules and follow the rules, when you can’t follow the simple format you are announcing to the world that you will do what you want when you want no matter what it costs. It might look like a little thing to just a casual observer but Candice Keller and Lee Wong are both on the outside clapping for the downfall of the establishment because they have not shown themselves skilled at being politicians within the rules of the game, so they want to bring the game down because they can’t be successful within the established rules. Its also healthy to challenge the rules but that’s not what Candice was doing, it was in breaking the rules that she hopes to appeal to voters who just want to bring down the established politics of our times, and this is a person who wants to go to Columbus to make rules. The problem is obvious and watching that clip, you can see the normally mild mannered Ding Dong Lee Wong show his true colors by gesturing to Candice’s disrespect for the format structure and attack at that wall which divides insiders from outsiders with the same enthusiasm as an ANTIFA anarchist.

George Lang has been very successful at following the rules and creating them. All he could really do even under pressure was sit there and listen to Keller go on and on because she was obviously outside the format of the event which he wasn’t willing to follow. He could have broke a whole bunch of rules and taken action against her to shut her up, but Candice knew that as the established candidate to beat, George had everything to lose, while she had nothing, so it was no skin off her back to go on some radical rampage using her pro-life work as a mask of civility to justify her breaking of the rules that evening. If George had done the same, he would have shown himself to be as desperate as Lee and Candice were, so he sat there and took it the best he could even though it was wrong at so many levels. He held his composure well and people saw what was going on and that was why the event was a good one. Pressure certainly showed the good from the bad and voters had a clear view of who could live within the rules and who could be trusted to make new ones. But more than that, the reason that Candice Keller is being thought of as crazy is becoming clear for people. People may clap and cheer at the streaker showing their rear, but in the minds of everyone, they think they are crazy. Everyone who has to step outside the rules of society to make their point will be thought in this way, and that is particularly destructive to those running for an office that actually makes rules.

Rich Hoffman

Yes, Videogames like Call of Duty can Inspire Violance: But they are wonderful to play and a big part of our future

As we watch the results that will shape up the 2020 presidential race from the Democrat perspective it’s a good time to talk about gun control and the latest Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare. I recently bought the game which came out last November, which I didn’t have time for then due to other projects and a much-needed long vacation. But over the winter months and with one of my grandsons showing an interest in the game I went ahead and bought it so I could learn what all the fuss was about. I’m not new to Call of Duty, in fact my particular PlayStation 4 was a Call of Duty: Black Ops bundle so I’m familiar with the franchise and the game play. But WOW, what a cool game and for anybody who is worried about gun control fanatics taking over and outlawing guns, I think quite the opposite will be happening. For a society that is penalizing children for every time a kid pretends to make a gun with their finger, or with a comb and gets detention during recess, these games are the exact opposite. Kids after playing games like Modern Warfare and Fortnite are much more likely to grow up to be supportive of guns, not less so. After playing Modern Warfare online for a few weekends now I have to say, it’s a lot of fun, and no wonder so many people enjoy those games. But there will be a political impact that must be navigated.

I love violent video games, just as I was as a kid, I would play war with anybody with two legs and was willing. The primordial nature of it is essential to the human experience. But make no mistake about it, I have no doubt that video games can inspire violent behavior, especially among the mentally ill or perpetually hopeless. I can easily see young people, or old people wanting to mimic the killing sprees on a game like Modern Warfare in real life because the experiences in the game are so lifelike. Yet, I am not one who thinks that there should be additional regulations on the video game industry, quite the opposite. I want to be able to play games like Modern Warfare and play shoot people at all hours of the night and day in any amounts that I desire, and I want video game companies to be freer to provide even more content. However, saying that, there is a greater need today for an adult population to coach young people on real firearm handling and to develop the healthy respect that is needed when using them to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

The promotion of guns in Modern Warfare even down to modifying each weapon with a gunsmith is intense and is a great way for people to learn more about guns. I would say that for an entry point into the shooting sports, a game like Modern Warfare has tremendous potential to expand gun rights as people are more familiar with guns than ever before. When I was young, we had BB gun wars where we’d try to shoot at each other. We also would throw dirt clots out of the garden because they exploded in a cloud of dust upon impact. At every break in school we had battles with each other on the playground and up and down the hallways. Its something humans need to do with one another like kittens play fighting with each other harmlessly, but to build up the muscle memory of action when needed for some future time when it might matter to defend their families from harm. But it was never so easy than to just turn on a video game console and go into a battle like that with players all around the world on a whim and engage in such an activity without any fear at all of being hurt. This is brand new territory relatively speaking, and it is building in our society whether or not the political forces of government like it or not, a real love for firearms that goes far beyond anything that I experienced as a young person.

I would go as far to say that I found my experiences online with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare heavenlike, it is some of the best fun I can say I’ve experienced in a long time and I can’t believe I’m so late to the party. Call of Duty has been around for a while, but I have been way too busy to play in that world because I thought of it as only being for young people. But it was through my grandson that I have been learning about Fortnite and now Call of Duty in a serious way and I get the fun. I would say I’m a bit more savvy about these kinds of video game things than other people my age, but even for me, its like a whole world that has been out there that I didn’t have any knowledge of. And those people are all potential voters and they will be interested in learning to shoot for real because of their video game experiences, and it is up to those of us who support Second Amendment activities to help guide them through the experience, safely. Yet there is no question about it, these modern video game players love guns and playing around with them, it won’t take much to gain their support for a society that relishes the Second Amendment.

With all the concern that American society might slide into a socialist state, or even embrace communism by those same young people, my thoughts on the matter is that they are confused. Their educations have taught them to embrace socialism and from their point of view, if they have free health care, free college tuition, free housing—free, free, free from government, they would have more time to do something they really enjoy, like play Call of Duty. But in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, or even Fortnite, the rewards for a job well done come fast and often and are the real incentive to continue playing. I found it personally very rewarding to go on a kill streak where gold rewards pop up on the screen with great dramatic effect. To get those rewards it really encourages you to keep playing and is deeply satisfying and a people responding to those neurological conditions are not going to embrace Karl Marx. Those two things just don’t go together. However, some deranged lunatic smoking way too much pot, or any at all, might want to get those same responses in real life while shooting real people, and once they have done so as a mass shooter are depressed that the thrill wasn’t nearly so rewarding and the consequences were life ending. There is a lot going on in our modern society and much of that is quite evident in the new Call of Duty game Modern Warfare. I’m a big fan now and will likely spend some time and effort on that fast-moving video game, because it’s cool, and relatively cheap when compared to shooting in real life. And for anybody who even likes guns a little bit, I can’t think of a better way to spend your free time than in playing those types of games.

Rich Hoffman

‘Edison’: The biography by Edmund Morris is a fantastic story on the powers of Home Schooling

It doesn’t happen often but when it does, I do a review on great books that I read and one of the best that I’ve read in a while is Edison by Edmund Morris. Sadly, Edmund Morris died in the spring of 2019, just ahead of the publication of one of his great biographies of people who were above and beyond the norm. He is known for his trilogy biography on Teddy Roosevelt which I have adored over the years, and his very controversial book on Ronald Reagan called Dutch. So, it goes without saying that I was looking forward to reading his latest Edison biography with the kind of eagerness that someone might look forward to a new Star Wars movie or a major sporting event. It was something I couldn’t wait to read, and I had an open window to handle the 700 plus page book just after New Years of 2020, and it didn’t disappoint. I read the book a few times just to make sure it was as excellent as I thought it was. Edison, the book, is one of those rare treats where the contents of a great person in Thomas A. Edison matched the wit and wisdom of one of the world’s greatest biographers in carving out an excellent narrative that was bizarrely articulate. I have always loved Edison, but this biography solved a riddle for me that I had been asking about the man all of my life and to unlock it, Morris told the story in reverse.

The book starts with the death of Thomas Edison in 1931 and it actually ends with a baby Edison contemplating space and matter in his first 9 months of life. The purpose of telling the story in reverse which has caused much consternation among critics and the reading public in general was to reveal why Edison was such a passionate inventor working his 20-hour days and sleeping on his work bench most of his life. He was like most people do throughout their lives trying to get back to those wonders of childhood and for him, he never stopped thinking like a child, always inventing and behaving as if answering the questions hidden by nature were the most rewarding thing in the world to do. Morris had to tell the answer of how Edison became who he was by putting the beginning literally at the end so that everything that had been studied throughout Edison’s long life and many thousands of inventions including the lightbulb, the phonograph and extended batteries for use in submarines, were climaxed by a point in his past that could only be articulated in reviewing a life in reverse, the way a dying person may have their life flash before their eyes. Reviewing history in this way took an almost God-like perspective in the context of universal history that was significant and enchanting.

For me it answered a question I have long suspected, and this is common in great thinkers such as Edison, Walt Disney, even great minds of today like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, a little love from a good mother and some independent input from parents in the early phases of a life where other social elements of standardization are removed from a child’s mind, can ignite in a human being great potential. In the case of Edison, he wasn’t made a genius inventor by any school or upper level academic institution which is a point I make often about society in general, but by a mother who worked closely with him to ignite a spectacular man who literally had never been taught to think in a limited fashion. The reason the childhood of Edison was kept to the end of the book was because that was the key to the making of the man to begin with—where he was in his lifetime the most popular man in the world at his death where every world power took a moment to honor him for all that he had done to advance mankind to a new level.

I was even surprised at how much academia was against Thomas Edison through his early years, until he simply outworked his critics and invented so many new things that nobody could even hope to compete with him. I was also surprised to learn that the famous rivalry with Tesla was not so much true but was more a product of a media that wanted to chronical some sort of horse race to sell newspapers. It was remarkably like the way we call Fake News today in covering the Trump administration. Edison did not have much formal schooling, even through grade school, so he had never learned what couldn’t be done, which is a continued plague among most of our fellow human beings. Edison was remarkable because he had never learned not to be.

Even though Edmund Morris the writer was considered, and still is even in his death, one of the great academics of our times by way of writers, his books have this common theme that he has managed to uncover about people of exceptional ability, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. When reading Dutch, which Morris was invited into the White House to study Reagan for that book, you can see through his writing that Morris was almost disappointed in the man because he was not Teddy Roosevelt, but simply an actor who had learned to take on the character of America and play it in the 1980s to unite the country to defeat communism and unleash the power of our capitalist economy. The man himself was not one of these special people and Morris had to invent a narrative character controversially to give himself emotional distance to the subject to get through the project. That certainly wasn’t the case with Edison. It was obvious that after spending thousands of hours studying Edison to even write this book, that Morris loved the man, and for good reason. After finishing that book, I did too.

I was at a bookstore in Disney World holding this book in my hand thinking of buying it, but we were on vacation and I didn’t have the time for it then, so I held off a few weeks longer. But I was thinking of Edison while at Disney Springs where they have a restaurant there dedicated to Thomas Edison that I was very enchanted with. I knew of Edison all the usual things, that he was in fact the founder of General Electric, and that he had done great things for the war efforts. But I didn’t know he was such a good person, not so much with his wives and his kids, but as an individual who really had just never grown up. Even though he was practically deaf and lacked a lot of compassion for others the way that people measure it, he was authentic and did not waste his time looking in the rear-view mirror at anybody. I appreciated that restaurant while visiting Disney Springs, but I think now I have a lot more reverence for it, and deservedly so. Thomas Edison was a great man, not necessarily because of any other reason but because his mother taught him the love of life and the boundless rewards that can come from a thinking mind, and thus, we are all the better for it. Just imagine if our society produced hundreds of Thomas Edison’s every year instead of every other century.

Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman

What George Lang has in common with George Washington: Leadership is a thankless job that only the toughest can handle

For anyone who watched the very good Washington three-part series on The History Channel they were treated with a great reminder of several great elements that made that America’s first president so great. I have read several books on Washington and heard the story told many times in various documentaries, but this recent one was a bit different, perhaps because of the reflections of our own modern politics. As I write this the world is literally stunned that Bernie Sanders is the frontrunner in the Democrat primary and President Trump is in India attracting 110,000 people to the largest cricket stadium in the world. For many who only casually pay attention to politics, it would appear to them that the world is on fire and they are baffled as to the fuel that is burning it. But one thing that The History Channel show on Washington really drove home was how much famous figures like Thomas Paine despised George Washington at the end of his term and wished him well to leave politics forever, the guy who was the driving general who had won the war against Great Briton. In a lot of ways it reminded me of a domestic election in my state of Ohio where George Lang has several primary rivals and have targeted him as the established “federalist” and are nurturing the idea of “if only” someone new and fresh were elected, then everything would be great.

While my personal sentiments in politics are very anti-federalist, much more like Thomas Paine’s original writings and those of Thomas Jefferson, I admire the way that George Washington handled his first terms in office, especially how he quelled the tempers of Alexander Hamilton during the Whiskey Rebellion. Of course a country must enforce the laws it comes up with, but it should never lose sight of who they work for and so one of the thinnest lines in the history of the world started in America and was navigated by General George Washington in those early days of forging the country and there were many who hated him for it. George Lang of Butler County Ohio has had a similar experience, although not similar in the moments of war, but there were many political battles that George had to survive to enter into the 52nd House seat with a foot in the world of the old Republican Party and being one of the first Trump supporters to come out of the mainstream to support him. There were many political costs to that effort and George Lang managed to work through them with great effort, and a lot of hurt feelings.

But that’s the way it goes, and George Washington understood that contention came with the territory even if in the end he just wanted to be a farmer. To free mankind from the burdens of servitude in government with self-rule, was to unleash all their tempers and freedoms to express it. And that would of course lead to many contentious battles in American politics that has not eased up at all in the following centuries. Most people around the world feel the need for freedom, but few can express it as they can in America so by nature, there will always be discontent. Thomas Paine obviously sung the praises of Washington when Yorktown was won, or at Trenton. But once Washington had management power, like all members of management, the knives come out and everyone in the world thinks they can do a better job. The question is, do they have the guts and the skill, and I would argue that few other than Washington did. And regarding modern politicians like George Lang, they were forged in the furnace, and most people would melt away under such pressure. Their ambitions are always positive while they are on a yard sign, but once they get into office and those knives come out, they are easily overtaken, and the regrets happen fast.

And that was true on the national stage just as it is on the local level, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson had their own ideas about how the presidency should have been and were very critical of George Washington while the old general was president, but when they had their own turn, they of course had their own critics and in the hindsight of history, many could agree that George Washington did a great job, even fending off the militaristic efforts of his young friend Alexander Hamilton. We should all be so lucky that it was never Hamilton who became president but was in fact Washington. I see this as applicable to our Butler County region where George Lang is running for the senate because all these towns and cities in the county are named after those founding fathers, specifically Hamilton, Ohio which was so named as a direct consequence to Washington’s relationship to the Southwest Ohio area. History does repeat and the conditions of merit don’t change. And neither do the pressures. They are the same as they were in Washington’s time as they are now in the Ohio Statehouse. But the circumstances are modern as opposed to siloed into the past concerns where it took a lot longer to communicate from town to town, or country to country.

Anybody in any management position, whether its in government or in private enterprise will find it a lonely place to function from, and people by their very nature find control over their lives reprehensible, and will work to limit your management of them at every turn. The answer to the Bernie Sanders types who want to solve the problem with communism and just take away everyone’s freedoms so that everyone is equally miserable and hopeless is just another extreme way of dealing with the fundamental problem that anybody in management of any kind will be hated. They are loved during elections, but once the pressure is on to perform, the factions of hatred will increase essentially because people don’t like to be controlled, so anybody in that role will be heavily scrutinized. However, the trick is for the manager, or in this case, politician is to see how well they can function under scrutiny and do right when opposition is strongest.

That is what George Lang has that others simply do not and would take several decades of experience to develop. And yes, it’s a thankless job that only has benefit in knowing deep down inside that the world was made better by their work. Because the benefits do not come from the immediate gains of everyday life where literally everyone has a different vision for how things should be done and as a representative of many people, which any position as senator does, somebody is always going to hate you. What George Washington always had in mind was the big picture as it was evolved by Thomas Paine and other revolutionaries, even if those people couldn’t see it in practice themselves. Washington the leader could and held true to give our nation the jump start it needed where most everyone else would have failed. And that is how I see the efforts of George Lang of Ohio, it’s a thankless battle in the day to day world of politics, but he makes everything so much better with the big view of solutions that last into the coming decades. And that is ultimately how greatness is defined by history.

Rich Hoffman

China is Responsible for the Coronavirus: Alan Keyes, and Tom Cotton join the many stepping beyond a conspiracy theory of blame that is justified

I have always liked Alan Keyes, I have been supportive of his past roles to run for president and always thought he would be good. He’s a smart guy and he knows his stuff. I was a bit surprised to see that he has been thinking much the same way as I have on the whole China coronavirus which I caught on the Alex Jones Show on Infowars over the weekend. Before I go into the deep end of the pool on this just a word of caution to those who think that saying anything about something that does not have proof is a conspiracy theory. It’s not. When governments destroy evidence, or even when a common criminal does the same to keep from seeing the effects of justice thrown their way, it is not a conspiracy theory to say we know they are guilty. They may be guilty as hell, even though they have burnt the body, erased all the fingerprints, and deleted all their phone messages. The competency of a court easily manipulated does not decide guilt or innocence—only punishment and freedom. Guilt is something that happens whether or not society sees the action happening or not. And in the case of China and the coronavirus I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the virus is certainly their fault, likely coming out of a super lab they have just outside of Wuhan. And that China needed a story to blame their declining economy on, a distraction after the trade war with Trump didn’t go their way. So suddenly this virus outbreak has soaked up the world’s attention and the cover-up is fully underway within that communist government. Its just a matter of time before the world realizes what really happened.

I was surprised to see that Tom Cotton has joined Alan Keyes in saying they believe that China made the virus as a chemical warfare program, and that they think it escaped the lab on accident. I would go further and claim that they wanted it to get out, not only to thin their population of burdens of the state, especially since it is the elderly and less healthy who are targeted by the virus. If you know China, you have to understand that they do not see people as individual assets, they are as Glenn Beck was trying to say recently, they see all people as serving the state, so when the state needs less pressure, there is nothing wrong with relieving that pressure with the death of some of their citizens. Its how they view the world and should be a lesson to all those who have been pushing in America a similar mindset—which is much more common than you might think dear reader.

China had to show some reason why their economy has been tanking, and the way to blame something other than their own communist government, they have caused corporations to shut down out of concern over quarantine and limited passage of travel in many quarters of the economy. China was greatly embarrassed by the trade deal with America so it is not beyond their scope to kill their own people to hide their faults as a communist government. In the fourth quarter of 2019 their GDP growth was down to 6% and slowing even more. I would say that I wouldn’t trust that 6% number, but it’s the number they report, and likely the situation is much, much worse for them. So to maintain their own lie, they needed this coronavirus to become their excuse for why their economy is slowing. For many years, the artificial propping up of their economy by a world that wanted a lot more socialism and communism allowed them to thrive. But with Trump in the White House and true competition hitting the global stage, China can’t compete and so they needed an excuse that did two things for them, reduced the liability of their elderly on their society, and gave them a cover story for their failing economy.

The articles are already being published giving China the coverage they need. No longer is the talk about how the trade war with Trump cost them so many jobs and opportunities. Now its all about the coronavirus outbreak and the terror that the world feels in its wake. Alan Keys and Tom Cotton were willing to at least talk about the possibility that the coronavirus accidently escaped that big lab that is building secret biological weapons. I would go a step further and say the release was on purpose hoping to contaminate the world with the virus even if it sacrificed their own people. Ultimately, with such a tragedy it not only explains their economic losses, but also causes weak people to clamor for a savior in government and strengthens the position of the communist way of viewing the world. When there is danger, cause the weak to seek the protection of mother government, globally. The conspiracy theory that would create doubt in the matter is that nobody could be that evil. But I would offer that history will tell this story the way I have, that yes, China is that evil, and yes, they would kill anybody needed to protect their control of the state and maintain their grip on the world through fear.

China has lost their leverage as a world power of communist backing with the highest population of any country. They used their growing economic status to launch thoughts of communism through corporate socialism to all quarters of the world, so the trade deal with America, and specifically through the art of the deal with Trump and losing in the exchange cost them much more than a few quarters of declining GDP. If they already were padding their numbers, the real story is likely much worse and they see real fears of sustainability going into the future. The coronavirus has also taken away the protests in Hong Kong for Trump like freedom off the front pages and made the fear of this virus the lead story of nearly every outlet. Given China’s position, what else were they going to do? What other card did they have to play? They had a super lab in Wuhan, all it took was for someone to get the virus out of the lab and into the general population to attack the targets within their own people and spread it to the rest of the world to soak up the news cycle.

Sure there will be plenty who doubt this account, but with enough understanding on the matter, they will gradually come to realize that the Level 4 Super Lab outside of Wuhan was always meant to build biological weapons, and that the weapons were meant to protect communist control of the world economy, not the freedom and personal lives of individual citizens. When a communist government is struggling to hide their true economic status of course they will not mind if they lose a few hundred thousand old and sick people of their state burden and cause the world to look the other way as they try to fix their real economic problems. It’s a coverup that is so big that most people can’t fathom it, yet it’s happening right in front of our faces. And that is what people find so hard to believe, because they can’t imagine anything so evil. Yet, there it is.

Rich Hoffman

Bernie Sanders is the Democrat Frontrunner: Socialism, communism and the ‘Call of the Wild’

It is ironic that as Bernie Sanders won the Las Vegas caucus over the weekend that critics of Donald Trump—largely Democrats are trying to start the rumor that the Russians are helping to get the president re-elected. Now logically, why would the Russians ever want Donald Trump re-elected, he has not been good for them, that’s for sure. But Bernie Sanders is one of their own, a devout communist who chose out of all destinations in the world the Soviet Union to vacation on his honeymoon because he was so love with communism and obviously still is. There is no evidence to even support the accusation yet there it is, the Democrats have stated it because they see where the road is going and they have no control of their car going over the cliff. It is as I have said from the beginning, Democrats as a party affiliate with socialism and communism. When we spoke about Barack Obama being a socialist and that was so scandalous, just a few years later the Democrats are forced to reveal it about themselves, and now Bernie Sanders is well on his way to the nomination from the Democrats to be the person to run against Trump for the White House.

I was in the green room at WLW a long time ago, not that long ago it seems, but its been a few years and I was talking to some of the talent there and their producers about my opinions on public education being a gateway drug for socialism. As I said to them, which they were clearly uncomfortable with, was that government schools, and our government in general had quite a love for socialism and that was what they wanted to see implemented in the United States. And that my writing about it took away the fine points of my funding arguments about public schools because it was too far outside the mainstream. I of course replied that what I was saying was the truth and that people just weren’t ready to admit it to themselves—so we agreed to disagree and stay off that topic while on air at WLW. They of course love the high school sports programming, especially in the fall when they read the football scores and talk about the various games around the city late into Friday nights of broadcasting.

Actually, I took grief from just about everybody for my position on schools. There were some really violent discussions when my children were getting ready to be college age from family members who thought my opinions on our education system in general was going to destroy their lives. My kids are in almost in their 30s now and we always had a close relationship and they are glad they listened to dad on the warnings. Everyone they know who has gone through the meat grinder of public education and the liberalized college experience we provide are lost and confused as young people. Granted, all those kids had parents feeding them literally into the system like trees into a woodchipper grinding them into dust completely and leaving nothing behind. It wasn’t easy to go against the trends of the time, but without question I was the most voracious reader of anybody, and I did know better. The truth is that I have always loved education, just not the kind that government schools were offering. Its not just teaching that matters, its what is being taught, and I will argue all day long that its better not to teach things if the only option is a bunch of communist and socialist garbage.

What brings this position to mind is the new movie Call of the Wild that I remember well was required reading in school and looking at the way that climate change is being paraded around now the communist activism of government schools couldn’t be clearer. Even way back then, several decades ago public schools were pushing climate change in mandatory reading like Call of the Wild which effectively puts the reader in the mind of the dog as he realizes how small he really is in the scheme of things and surrenders himself to the “Call of the Wild.” We are all disposable after all yet the earth continues on long after we are gone just as is was before we ever came to be. Its kind of a hopeless view of the world that is designed to put the people receiving the education into the mindset that all is hopeless, and all thought is perishable, so why bother. The state is there to protect the environment and of course the people are there to protect their government—first by surrendering their identities to the Call of the Wild. Listen to that call and become one with nature. Isn’t that the message of the Woodstock Festival, or any rock concert?

I always had those thoughts about rock concerts, and nigh clubs in general. When I was a late teenager I had been reading a lot of Joseph Campbell and was very interested in tribal rights, where individuals sacrifice their integrity to the needs of the group. Every rock concert was a kind of mass sacrifice where people surrendered their values to the band on stage and danced to their impulses, not to their own thoughts. It was a kind of Call of the Wild to listen to the pulsations of the rock group KISS talk about sex on stage and cause very nice girls to lift up their shirts and show their breasts to 20,000 people. I was often the guy who drove to these things because I didn’t like to drink much and was always the one with the best car. Some of the girls who would go with us to rock concerts were so nice and respectable daddy’s girls. They would give no sign of being loose sexually and kept their short skirts pushed down when you looked into the back seat to check on their comfort. But once in the rock concert dancing to their favorite songs, those panties came off and were being thrown up to the stage where the performers were. And their breasts were unleashed to the world. Afterwards, they would blame it on the alcohol, on losing their minds to drugs and the pulsations of the environment as if that would explain it all. I knew different, it was a mindset that was given to them in public school when leftists teachers made them read Call of the Wild and to write a report on its merits. So when given decisions in life as adults for the first time, they ripped off their clothes and shamed themselves for all their future families by getting into a mosh pit and surrendering their individual selves to the chaos of mass ownership.

So why is anybody surprised that the guy who calls himself a socialist, and has even supported openly Soviet style communism is leading the Democrat primary? Why did WLW not want to talk about the role that public schools play in programming young people to vote for such people? And why do nice young ladies go to night clubs and rock concerts and do things in public that they would never do while on a date with a nice young man? Its because of the belief patterns that create socialism and how it is taught, not realized through natural selection. Most people when given a choice once more wisdom comes to them later in life turn toward Republican ideas. But by then most people are so compromised with embarrassment that they spend the rest of their lives trying to continue their scandal with some form of consensus building. The Friday night football scores are always a welcome distraction, not just because sports is fun and interesting, but it reminds the consumer of the information that they weren’t the only ones who embarrassed themselves, so the actions don’t seem so bad. As adults, they don’t feel they have the authority to tell their kids that Bernie as a socialist is bad for their lives, so they keep their mouths shut. But for the next generation in the dance clubs and at rock concerts, those disgraces are happening almost every day, and to cover their behavior, they are voting for Bernie Sanders when given a choice. And that is who the Democrats are.

Rich Hoffman

George Lang Was Always a Leader in the Tea Party: When education and book exchanges were important

It is odd, and obviously full of politics to be a part of discussions defending George Lang’s Tea Party support during the height of the movement and for myself to be associated with the establishment because of it. But then again, so be it. As I have been saying a lot this year with President Trump going into his fourth year in office, and a much different, and better world as a result especially on the investment side, at some point those on the outside get on the inside and what they do with that opportunity will define future history. To get feedback from old friends from those times suggesting that I was never a Tea Party supporter is laughable, as I was clearly one of the leaders of the movement, and did so at a great cost to myself, which I’d do again over and over. But for me there always needs to be an end to a project, and the Tea Party movement was a project needing a resolution. And George Lang along with his wife Debbie were of the same mind. They enjoyed going to the meetings and talking to people and learning things about how our government should work. But at some point you have to evolve past the rock chucking phase, and become part of the management team that takes over, and does things right.

As much as people attempted to demonize the Tea Party movement it was never a bunch of crazy radicals and far right ideologues. Mostly they were older people who knew something was wrong and they wanted to educate themselves to learn what it was. The Tea Party in the pre-Trump days had a few rallies here and there to show they were a force to be reckoned with, and they tipped the scales in some elections toward a more Republican party more representative of their values, but what I enjoyed about it was that it was more intellectual than anything, as book sharing and discussions were the centerpiece of the movement. Books like the Thousand Year Leap, Atlas Shrugged, Common Sense and even reading the Constitution and understanding it were the focus of activity that was largely leaderless. The Tea Party didn’t need a leader, because it was really books that was guiding everyone’s interest and at Tea Party events it was a chance to get together with other like minded people and to talk about these things.

That was actually how I met George Lang and his wife, we liked the same books and enjoyed getting away from the rigors of the world to talk about smart stuff at Tea Party meetings. There was always the elements of the Tea Party meetings that had people very concerned about some big brother control of their lives who protested back then the smart meters that were being put on everyone’s homes to regulate their use of power, and those people have evolved into protestors of 5G wireless service. I was never one of those types so much, I figure the Second Amendment trumps over concerns of little bureaucrats trying to impose on my family how much laundry we can do in a day, so I don’t worry about those things much. And as to 5G, I never really got involved in that debate because I like technology. Sure all these communication waves are flying around and through our bodies at all kinds of rates blasting our atoms with constant intruders, but I expect most human beings will evolve to match the challenges of technology. And to me technology means business, and business means economic prosperity for regional need. Again, with the Second Amendment, I’m not too worried about some evesdropper using 5G to spy on me. If I catch them, I’ll deal with them in my own way. But I like the technology options that come with the changing world.

After Trump was elected there wasn’t much in the Tea Party left for people like George and me. It was actually during the Republican primaries where people were pretty upset with me for supporting Donald Trump over Ted Cruz and other Tea Party picks for president that I lost touch with all those old friends. It was a clear situation where we had all become bitter rivals during 2016 and the Tea Party pretty much dissolved in disagreement over who anybody should support for president. I have been to a few Tea Party meetings since Trump was elected, and clearly once Trump won, people united on the issue, but the educational effort wasn’t the same. The Tea Party had fallen into a status of victimhood, of below the line behavior that isn’t attractive to me, and really couldn’t justify my time any longer. The same thing looks to have happened with George Lang and many other politicians like him who used to come as long as the meetings were places where they could justify the time. But just to sit around complaining about things wasn’t why the Tea Party was good, so the effort fell apart once a lot of the things that we had wanted to see was now happening in the White House, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and an optimistic look toward the future.

However for some in the Tea Party, it was their chance to point at every boogieman on the horizon and to isolate themselves from a solution, and largely that is what it has become to my eyes, which of course happens everywhere that leadership is absent. George Lang was a member of leadership within the Tea Party movement and once he found other things to put his mind on, and many others like him across the country, the movement weakened and dissolved into what it is today. I view it as something nice that I was a part of for a while, but now its time to do all the things we talked about, and that’s what’s going on. George is part of that puzzle along with other great people who came out of the West Chester Tea Party like Mark Welch, Ann Becker and T.C. Rogers who as a commissioner for Butler County came to most every meeting from 2010 until 2015. The meetings changed from book exchanges to complaint sessions and at that point the political leaders stopped going to the meetings and now there are clear divisions which is normal in any organization that loses its focus. In the beginning, the Tea Party was about education, not activism. Now it’s about activism which is much less conducive to people’s time, especially when they are part of the solution as elected officials. People like George Lang, and myself included, are turning our eyes to fixing the problems we had been concerned about, while what’s left of the Tea Party is still looking for that rally cry to continue with. Some people find comfort in spending time with people of like mind, so the Tea Party gives them something to rally behind, even though the pendulum has swung to our side and management is now up to us. But to say that we were never Tea Party supporters, George Lang and I, is like saying there was never a sun in the sky or clouds during a rainstorm. Its just not a proper statement. It might be a wish, but its certainly not a fact. What has changed is that some coming out of the Tea Party want to actually do something about everything we learned while in it, and now is the time for that action. Complaining about everything was never what the Tea Party was, but it is what it has evolved in to.

Rich Hoffman

The World Didn’t Suddenly Go Nuts: Its always been the way it is, what’s different is that people have choices

There are many who are confused by the politics of our times, who are looking at what’s going on and thinking that the world has come unglued and is about to fly apart. I would argue that these elements were always there, but that the freedoms of modern life have brought forth the truth thoughts of people and now that the froth has boiled a bit, the scum that has risen to the top is purifying our society for the better. It was clear to me that for the Republicans that it was the Tea Party movement that was starting that process, which would have happened whether or not Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck had ever been on the radio. Rather, it was the need of a public seeking answers that gave them the platform to do their thing, they didn’t make the thing themselves. The result was that true definitions of conservative values were challenged, and the party evolved into what has become Donald Trump. As the evolution of politics was boiling off all the definitions into clarity the Democrat Party was attempting to do the same only they interfered with the process and suppressed the Bernie Sanders surge in favor of Hillary Clinton, the Party pick for president for all kinds of artificial reasons. Because of that interference, that is why they are having troubles now.

As I have said for many years, socialism and communism have been at the heart of not just the labor movement, but of the entire Democrat Party going well back into the 1960s—even back to the 1930s, even the 20s. The concept of public ownership of resources seemed smart to a world that didn’t know better, but after a century of looking at the situation clearly, we can now all say that Karl Marx was smoking crack when he wrote The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital with Friedrich Engels. The idea of communism was doomed from the start because it ignores the motivations of the human race and instead imposes on it some mystical hope that assumes that intellect is subservient to nature, and its not. Intellect is born of nature, not a threat to it. So communism and all its various ideas were tried, and failed, however the Democrat Party built its entire platform around various forms of its definitions without ever saying the word to themselves openly. They hoped that by the time regular people figured out what the Democrat Party was, after years of public education, after years of union membership, after all the pushes for equal rights which were not meant to bring fairness to all, but to establish in the minds of normal people the idea that all individuals would serve the state, not their own needs, then maybe their ideas of communism would stick.

But since Republicans had that honest debate, as many sat on the fence between those two worlds, politicians like Mitt Romney, John McCain, and even known moderates like the old Ohio governor John Kasich, the never-Trumper Bill Kristol and many, many others, they had to reposition themselves on the political spectrum, many discovering about themselves that they were Democrats and not Republicans, the Democrats themselves now find their party fractured without a modern definition as to what they are, and they are clearly lost. That brings us to the present problem which was obvious on the debate stage in Las Vegas at the Democrat debate for president, especially between Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg, Mayor Pete and Elizabeth Warren. Bloomberg the billionaire trying to buy his way into their good graces could not answer the sheer hatred that the socialist minded on that stage have for money and wealth. Bernie Sanders just as he was in the last election is the preferred candidate of the Democrats and its time they have that honest answer about their true identity otherwise they will be utterly destroyed.

When Bernie Sanders had the rally the other day where the topless women stormed on his stage there really wasn’t anything unusual about it. Those people have always been there, the radicals, the crazies, the far left communist loving advocates of a society of equals where they eat anybody who might be a threat to the status quo, and who hope to live under the radar living and dying for causes greater than the needs of individual lives. The difference between now and a time prior is that Trump’s election has separated away the good, normal people of a healthy society into a unified fashion of hopes and dreams leaving all the crazies literally naked and afraid. For many years they had been hiding in the masses, disguised as emos at the corner of a New York City street waiting in a crowd for a light to change. Or they were gathered in a booth in the corner of a Waffle House popping zits on their greasy shoulders because they haven’t bathed in days and their body oils were looking for some place to escape under their Matrix like trench coats and hair that hadn’t been washed in over a week. They were hidden from view because the message everyone received in their public educations stated that we don’t judge anybody and that everyone had a right to live anyway they wanted no matter what it was. No individual was greater than any other, everyone was equally at fault and deficient.

Well, that press is what split our nation because not everyone has been willing to accept that premise. When Donald Trump stepped into the race many who had been hoping that Paul Ryan would bring Ayn Rand’s wisdom to the Republican Party had found a true representative of their needs and that is when the cover for the communists was ripped away and they were left exposed without a proper philosophical position to disguise their true intent. For many of the crazed radicals, life taught them as they got older that they needed to be more conservative in their personal policies, that they needed to get mortgages, buy cars and pay their bills to advance in life, and that they couldn’t just rip off their shirts and parade around naked in protest of dairy products. But so long as the saner elements of our society were not passing judgment, there was some cover for the lunatics. However, Donald Trump’s election was a value judgement vote, people voted to have a good economy, they voted for the super model who lived in a gold penthouse, and they voted for a television celebrity who was actually proud to be a billionaire, because many would like to have a chance at making a lot of money themselves, and into living the good life that comes from it. They didn’t want Das Kapital to run their lives, they wanted Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

So its not hard to see what is happening and to predict the future. Michael Bloomberg isn’t going to go anywhere. He can pay off the media, but he can’t make himself likeable. And I don’t think people will ever be ready for a gay guy or a gay woman in visible leadership roles. Nobody wants to see gay behavior in public let alone on a stage running for president. Sex in itself is gross, but people put up with public affections because they assume that children will be the bi-product, and everyone loves kids, the hope of the future. But sex in itself is pretty gross, and sex that doesn’t produce children is not something people will ever be willing to publicly accept, so Mayor Pete isn’t going anywhere. Joe Biden is one of those lost in the shuffle, he’s had the covers ripped away and now he’s exposed to a dark world he has been ignoring his entire life. Elizabeth Warren is much the same, as a New England academic, she is forever lost to the campus antics of academia and its love of Karl Marx, and nothing else. That leaves essentially only Bernie Sanders who represents what the true Democrat Party has always been about because like Trump, he has at least been honest from the very beginning as to who he was. And that has allowed the political spectrum to pick clear sides which is where the nation is, for that great debate that has been poised to happen for decades. And this election year we will have it, and there will be clear losers and winners. Everyone isn’t equal, and that is what is being learned much to the distress of the topless protestors and trenchcoated wearing communists who had hoped to hide for a while longer, but no longer can.

Rich Hoffman