Tag: Free Will

A Great CBS Interview with Cody Wilson: The heart of the entire problem of gun control

There is so much going on in this really good interview between Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson and CBS News correspondent Tony Dokoupil. At one point during this tense interview for which on the surface is about whether or not individuals have a right to manufacture their own guns free of a federal system of control, Dokoupil asked Wilson to put away the philosophy books and consider how you’d feel is someone used the information and technology you provide for a mass killing, and it was there that the real issue of our day was discussed. CBS just as is very typical of all modern media and politics expects society and the direction of our evolution as a species to yield to the whims of sentiment instead of the foundations of logic and reason which cuts to everything that is wrong at this particular juncture of epistemological evolution. This problem is not only at the center of the gun debate in America but on essentially everything—is society better with a central government regulating everything or with individuals functioning freely and by their own impulses. The hypothetical proposal introduced by Tony Dokoupil obviously believes that a centralized government is needed for an advanced society to evolve, and to keep the bad guys from getting their hands on a weapon so to create mass murder. Yet where Cody Wilson is, is where I am and many, many others on the Second Amendment side. If you keep the guns out of the hands of bad guys, who is not to say that the bad guys do not then evolve out of the strengthening of the “state.” Obviously, we have our answer with how the FBI aligned itself with a political campaign in American elections and showed why they can’t be trusted to perform background checks and centralized gun control, because they will use that power against the people they are supposed to protect, and that makes this interview and especially important one because it articulates this essential dilemma quite nicely.

There were a few moments where the CBS reporter just didn’t have the next layer of contemplation ready. From his side of the thought process the real feat that was being exhibited was in the proposal established by Wilson, that the intentions of mankind cannot be legislated out of existence. That the desires of people cannot be regulated by taking away information. This is the hard truth that China is learning in its communist society. People desire opportunities and limiting their access to a potential activity through censorship doesn’t take away the yearning for information. If someone wants to make a gun, if it’s not Cody Wilson giving the information to that person, it will be someone else. There will never be an all-knowing centralized authority controlling all information. That was essentially the point of what Wilson was making. As human beings, people deserve to have access to information that has the potential to make them freer.

To retreat from this obvious stalemate that was when the option of non-thinking was introduced. The proposal of how Cody Wilson might feel if someone took his work and used it for malice, so that guilt might rule logic. That is currently how our entire political system has been functioning, and there is no civilization on earth that has survived well when such a thing has penetrated its culture. Yet there it was at the foundation of the CBS interview. We all knew that was the position of the political left, and at the heart of all gun confiscation, but the position has never been more grossly revealed with such nudity to conceal its ugliness. That is where the genius of Cody Wilson’s challenges to the modern court system has done such great work.

The question was never about whether gun restriction was about keeping weapons out of the hands of mass murderers. The desire was always to assume that more power given to a centralized state would make for a better world. CBS is perfectly willing to deal with the occasional bad cops in the FBI who will turn their head the other way and let off a political candidate they support, like Hillary Clinton so long as they are there to crush a political rival like Paul Manafort because just as the Nazis did in Germany during the 1930s a political party that CBS happened to support had taken control of the powers of the “state.” If that “state” sometimes got things wrong and put the wrong person in jail, or killed the wrong people in a raid, or even destroyed the liberty of thousands or millions of people, that such collateral damage were acceptable for the greater good. But if one lone gunman like the one who shot up innocent people in Las Vegas recently during a music concert buys a gun and uses it to kill people, then the individual rights of people to defend themselves must be yielded for the safety of all. At that point life and death has new meanings so long as individual rights are surrendered for the greater good of all. The hypocrisy of that fundamental idea is what we are talking about in any discussion of gun control.

When there was no satisfactory answer to the quandary the CBS reporter did what all people do who advocate for more gun control, they asked for a non-thinking answer, forget about philosophy, how would you “feel.” The obvious suggestion is that our American society is supposed to be ruled by feelings and not logic, because that is the only way that such a sycophantic position can be accepted, by feeling and not thinking. What do your thoughts tell you to do? Where do those thoughts come from? Is it from God? Then you should listen to them and give up your rights and surrender yourself to the wisdom of the “state.” You should give up your guns so that the “state” can take care of you. Yet at the heart of that proposal is the fantasy of the weak to rule over the strong by way of bureaucracy, which is always the desire of the “state.” They can’t do that if the people they want to control have weapons equal to their military and police for which are employed by the state to mandate justice as it is defined by the courts—also controlled by the “state.”

I’ll tell you what, I like this guy Cody Wilson. He’s smart enough to point out the hypocrisy of the court system on the issue of the Second Amendment and he has the bureaucratic nature of the power the “state” locked in paralyzing self-analysis. The “state” always seeks to have philosophy always stuck in limbo because their fundamental epistemology is flawed within the proposal on gun control to begin with. The only way that anybody could justify such a rationalization is to not think, but to feel. How would you feel if someone took something you provided and killed people with it? The proposal is that you then shouldn’t do it. Cody Wilson under such a premise should not provide milling machines and blueprints for making guns because someone might use that information to kill mass groups of people. But then that same logic shouldn’t be applied to a government that we’ve instead given all that power to who then goes and kills innocent people and rules over individuals in an unjust way. And there lies the problem, the threat is there whether or not guns exist or not, because the desire to abuse power is part of the human experience. In our social evolution we have discovered that if individuals can protect themselves from such aggression that civilization can advance. But if that protection is then yielded to a state government, then the mass murders aren’t crazed lunatics who should be in an insane asylum, but are government workers protecting their pensions and their liberal ideology from the realities of the world, and they can and often are far more dangerous.

Rich Hoffman

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The Myth of American Racism: Why Lebron James is an idiot

 

There is a reason that liberals are so upset about Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie Death of a Nation. Not that I think of it when I see Dinesh, but the last time I checked, he’s not a white guy, yet his movie and books of recent describe exactly why blacks have been used by identity politics as a kind of modern slave for the socialist Democrats as a last hook into the power of manipulation that persisted in the United States essentially up until the election of Donald Trump. Under Trump all the excuses have been removed, black unemployment is at record lows as black pastors gathered at the White House this week to advance black causes and empower individuals to achieve anything they want under the American flag. No president has done more to make all individuals equal than Donald Trump yet people like CNN’s Don Lemon and NBA star LeBron James see the gas leaving their stronghold on the black population and they are rushing at every opportunity to continue the myth that being black in America is a negative thing. Of course, Donald Trump took a shot at Lebron James after this pathetic interview on CNN. The kind of world that Lebron James is talking about doesn’t exist. Racism is an excuse for blacks to not achieve. It’s not real in America. There is no country on earth that has more tolerance between the races than the United States of America and James should know better. But maybe he’s not very smart, after all he did vote for Hillary Clinton. But to use his platform to perpetuate that racism is one of the number one problems in America only speaks to the Democratic platform that Dinesh D’Souza addressed in his recent film—Democrats need blacks to believe in racism and victimization so that they can have a unified political party, and that’s all they essentially care about.

The ”N Word” is an excuse that Democrats use to not perform at life. It was always Democrats who were the racists, who lynched black people and lobbied to make them slaves, which is well told in Dinesh’s new movie. Trump has every right to call Don Lemon and LeBron James “dumb” because they continue to insist that white Republicans are their enemy and are the cause of all racism in the world when in fact it was and always has been their own political party of Democrats that have advocated racism and victimization as a reason to reach continuously for bigger and bigger government to seek protection from those made up bandits that are always after them. LeBron in his interview with CNN’s Lemon used skin color as an excuse to perpetuate victimhood as a political platform, and they do it by essentially saying that all white people can never know what its like to be black, so we are never supposed to criticize them or question them in any way. And sports are supposed to be left alone to continue advancing progressive ideas to our nation’s children without any kind of debate, and when it does occur these Democrats cry racism in an attempt to shut down the conversation so that the truth can never be found. That truth is shown in blistering detail in the movie Death of a Nation.

It was never Donald Trump and the Republicans who were racist. I’m certainly not racist, and I’m as Republican as Republicans get. I can say that I have never in my life done a racist thing. I’ve probably in fact been close friends with people of color than I have of whites, not out of any kind of identity politics but only because I had more in common with the hard workers and striving intellects of those trying to make the most out of America as opposed to the mailbox money people who fill out job applications only to fulfil a government criterion to get money from a welfare check because they are too lazy to work. Some of the best people who I have known over the years are people like Dinesh D’Souza, who came to America and used the freedom of our Constitution to do great things in life.

LeBron James should be grateful to the United States, he gets paid a lot of money to throw a ball in a hoop. He’s obviously not very smart otherwise he would know that it has been his party of Democrats that still to this very day seek to hold down the black population through victimization. That’s why some blacks who want to be the leaders of modern black victimhood were so mad that Donald Trump held a meeting of black pastors at the White House, because it undermines the myth that the president is a racist that wants to hold down minority groups. It is the Democrats that are trying to do that, including Lebron James. By using his platform to declare that racism is alive and well, and that it is coming from Republicans is to lie to millions of children who look up to him for the pure political purpose of trying to prop up Democrats as the answer to the “N Word.” But it has only been them who have used that word to hold blacks down socially and intellectually.

The Nazis were socialists, not Republicans. Why is Lebron James and Don Lemon considered dumb by the president, because they either don’t know that, or they do know it yet they are trying to sell the “N Word” victimization anyway as a way to corral more dumb people into their Democratic party. Democrats are the political party that Adolf Hitler followed to create his own Third Reich. Hitler copied his party off of Woodrow Wilson, and how Franklin Roosevelt ran America as president. Of course, film critics of Death of a Nation were aghast to learn these things in the new Dinesh movie and they let everyone know it in their film reviews. But that was the truth, and LeBron James is trying to corral more blacks into the party of politics that committed all these crimes to begin with, and that is dumb. We all know he didn’t take school too seriously, and that he used his natural talents to throw a basketball into a net as a platform to success. But if he’s going to open his mouth and talk politics and try to use his celebrity to advance a party over another one, then he should know his history. But he doesn’t, and it’s obvious.

Generally, most people who supported Hillary Clinton and the continued Democratic Party are lazy intellectually, and they don’t want to know or admit that it was Democrats who were always the racists and have tried to separate that truth by shoving their history onto Republicans who ironically were responsible for freeing the slaves and giving blacks equal rights. Donald Trump in the modern age is doing just as Lincoln has done and Teddy Roosevelt did in his first term, he is treating blacks as equals and giving them a shot at the American dream, acquired through their ambitions, not a mailbox check. The only people guilty of using the “N Word” are Democrats trying to put a different kind of chain on the black population, not one of literal chains but intellectual ones. And more often than not, those are the worst kind.

Rich Hoffman

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The Lying, Cheating, Wife and the man who just wanted to Buy New Shoes: Why Trump should shut down the entire Russian investigation

Anyone who has been married to a dysfunctional spouse understands why President Trump has every right to call for the end of the Mueller investigation. People in such relationships, which is nearly everyone at some point in a marriage must navigate the balance of powers that go on between spouses and when a weaker minded of the party feels they are losing leverage in the relationship ultimately go for the “you’re cheating on me bomb.” That’s where one spouse accuses the other of cheating when there is no evidence of it other than the fact that the other spouse doesn’t seem to enjoy their time with their married partner. There is of course no way to prove such an accusation, it’s an undefendable position that forces the other party into a defensive position by default and it completely sucks the life out of the relationship. Psychologists understand that such a tactic is purely manipulative and is the prime motivation of a destructive trend. And such is the case of the Democrats who have nothing to campaign against Donald Trump but a scandal they entirely made up by an investigator protecting the reputation of his friend James Comey, who was fired by the president for doing a bad job and leaking classified information to the press.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a Paul Manafort supporter. But if he’s going to be charged and run through the political torture chamber just for working with Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, then Hillary Clinton should be subject to much, much worse. The only reason Paul Manafort is being scrutinized in a trial for which he may spend the rest of his life in jail is because he worked for a short time on Trump’s campaign and the message from the Deep State to everyone is that if anyone helps Trump in the next election, they may face the same trouble. This isn’t a trial about tax evasion, it’s about busting people close to President Trump and scaring away people in the future who may join his campaign. Trump’s legal team have every right to be upset, and Trump himself is completely justified in calling for an end to the entire Russian investigation. He knows he didn’t do anything wrong, yet he is being forced to defend himself from a negative which has an impact on what he wants to do from the Executive Branch.

The purpose of a spouse to use such an accusation is obviously to obtain leverage over the other person. So by accusing a spouse of cheating it implies not only the hurt of mistrust, but the additional burden of trying to overcome a very negative position. There is almost no good way to answer such a thing, which is why the question is asked to begin with. Cheating may or may not be going on, but that is not why the question was asked. If there is cheating going on there are deeper problems in the relationship that often spawn from a degrading effort on one of the married parties. But the question is usually all about obtaining emotional leverage over the other person so that the guilt whether or not the other party is guilty will have to react in a predictable way to prove their innocence, which is just another form of emotional control.

That is what the Mueller investigation has been attempting to do, and why the media has been complicit in facilitating the assumption of guilt from the outset. The effort was always about trying to control the President of the United States by forcing him into a defensive position. For instance, the pressure from the investigation, which was completely made up has essentially taken President Trump’s Attorney General out of the fight from the start. Trump does not have an AG like Obama had with Loretta Lynch or Eric Holder, he has someone who was forced to recuse himself from day one, which took away an important weapon from the president at the start of his administration. If the goal of the Democrats is obstruction, then of course they have won that fight by using this form of control to keep some weapons out of the President’s column. After all, that is exactly what the Robert Mueller investigation was all about from the start, to disrupt the President’s administration with chaos and a fragmented team. If the Mueller investigation were over it would reopen communication with Trump’s AG. But as it stands now, any communication with Jeff Sessions is viewed by the media as obstruction of justice so Trump can’t speak to him.

This is similar to a guy being accused of cheating on his wife but needing to go down to the store to buy new shoes for work the next day, but his wife doesn’t want him to buy them because she wants to buy new shoes and they can’t afford to do both. So the wife might accuse the husband of cheating to keep him home so that he won’t buy the shoes. By having the Mueller investigation always going on, it keeps Trump’s Department of Justice separated from him, which is the point. The accusations force a change in behavior within the Executive Branch and anything they do puts them into a position to only look guiltier. If the married guy tells his wife that he has to go buy shoes tonight because the ones he has now has holes in them and won’t make it another day, and he leaves, he risks his wife to make a bigger incident that just might be grounds for divorce. The man may buy his shoes but find out that the wife is filing for divorce and that she is taking the house and his kids. Being the man, likely the judge in the divorce will side with her and he’ll lose everything so he’s better off to stay home and not buy the shoes. Little does he know that the wife is not only buying shoes of her own but she’s meeting her new boyfriend across town and they are having illustrious sex and have created fake accounts on numerous dating websites so that they could flirt with each other undetected all the time. After all, that’s why she is ultimately accusing the husband of cheating because she is, and she needs to throw anybody off the trail by putting all the focus on him.

Anybody with a brain knows that Paul Manafort’s court case is a shakedown, and the entire Russian investigation is a hoax to cover the crimes that the Democrats and the FBI have actually committed, just like the poor husband who couldn’t buy new shoes because his cheating wife promised to divorce him if he even thought about leaving the house. Trump has been in the same situation—anything he might do such as firing Robert Mueller, sending a pardon to Paul Manafort or General Flynn, or even pushing Jeff Sessions to shut down everything so that the FBI and DOJ could resume normal activity under their proper boss in the Executive Branch would draw suspicion of obstruction of justice, as if “justice” were the mandate defined by the real criminals. And that is not how things are supposed to be. The entire Russian investigation and everything surrounding it is about trying to control Donald Trump. And that is just not acceptable. We didn’t vote for Trump to go through this. We voted Trump to get rid of all this. I would 100% support Trump if he fired the entire DOJ right now. I think it’s the only right thing to do, just like the man who wants only to buy some new shoes and stay in the same house with his kids should really divorce his lying, cheating wife.

Rich Hoffman

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The Ghost Gunner 2: Everything you need to know about the moral, and legal need to manufacture guns in your home

The Ghost Gunner 2 is a wonderful mini milling machine that can produce gun parts without a lot of machining expertise. It is the device that senatorial candidate for the GOP Austin Peterson of Missouri is giving away to a lucky recipient to make a point on Second Amendment protections. Since gunpowder was first contemplated in around 142 AD in China society has evolved along its advancements. While many think of guns and gunpowder as a destructive device, its widespread use and development has greatly decentralized civilization allowing the concept of an “America” to evolve. Prior to the invention of gunpowder empires largely controlled the lives of mass civilizations through emperors and kings. It took about a thousand years but with the invention of gunpowder and guns slavery was ended in the civilized world, nations were born, and scientific development has flourished. So, guns are not bad, and neither is gunpowder. But to put it mildly to the lefty politicians who clamor for more gun control and stricter background checks, it is not the job of the federal government to regulate firearms. It is the mandate of private citizens to use firearms to keep government in check. So, it only makes sense to have the ability for every household to manufacture their own firearms any time they want and in whatever quantities they desire. The Ghost Gunner 2 makes that home manufacturing of firearms very practical.

In the United States I think the major gun companies are real treasures. I love Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Henry Repeating Arms, Magnum Research—I love every one of them. The people who work in these places are genuinely good people making a great American product and I personally think every American should add one gun to their collection every year to support these fine businesses. But we need to get something straight about all this sudden concern about “ghost guns,” firearms made off 3D printers from plans downloaded from the Internet, the Genie is not going back into the bottle. We can’t “uninvent” guns without destroying society itself. Because honestly, it is the gun and gun powder that has brought about our advanced society. Without the invention of firearms, common people would have never have gained the opportunity to overthrow their kings and emperors and our society would be a much different one today. It’s highly likely mankind would have never gone to space if not for the invention of the gun and the emergence of America as a direct result of personal firearm ownership.

The political concern isn’t so much over the 3D printed guns which produces a kind of hard plastic AR lower that isn’t very reliable, it’s the technical ability of something like the Ghost Gunner 2 that brings very advanced milling machine ability to private homes. That realization destroyed what many left leaning anti-gun advocates had long been fantasizing about. They thought that if they lobbied congress to change some gun laws, or put pressure on Dick’s Sporting Goods and Field & Stream to take guns out of their stores, or that liberal politicians might even shut down gun manufacturers by taxing them and regulating them out of existence, that they might rid the world of guns. What they learned is that as regulations and the threat of them have increased, the ability to manufacture guns at home which have also increased as a direct response and the threat of having millions and millions of guns in society that don’t even have traceable serial numbers on them is even scarier.

I personally have no problem with my guns being registered. But given what we’ve seen out of our own FBI during the Trump presidency and the massive laws that were broken in an attempt to overthrow him through impeachment, it doesn’t take much of an imagination to see why registering guns with the federal government would be problematic. If they were to ever gain the ability to confiscate guns through the legislature they would simply read off their directory and go home to home in a confiscation raid which gives an emerging enemy an unfair advantage. I say an emerging enemy because obviously if a government is seeking to protect its power and wishes to take more from the people who fuel it through taxation, then their ability to disarm the population to protect their advances gives them a terrible advantage. But for the gun owner, the power of their firearm ownership keeps such governments from gaining too much power. It’s not that we should go around shooting everyone, but the threat of having it keeps potential dictators from getting any crazy thoughts. Naturally, being part of a thoughtful civilization as the Obama years made the threat of gun confiscation a very real possibility, companies like those who manufacture Ghost Gunner 2 have found a way to overcome that threat. Personally, I think produced firearms that nobody needs to know that you have so that they aren’t on a target list from some future government is the key to a continued free society.

Of course, political lefty radicals want more laws to legislate these types of personal gun making machines but I’d say to them, who thinks anybody is going to follow the law? Laws will not put the Genie back in the bottle and I would say they will be vastly ignored if they do create such legislation. After all, marijuana is illegal and political leftists have been ignoring those laws for decades. Why should gun owners obey laws just because some politician makes them up to protect their own power? By following the Constitution of our nation, the Second Amendment, and the First Amendment which protects the ability to exchange the knowledge of gun building from one person to another are critical to the continued success of the United States of America. Having a gun that has a serial number on it that the federal government can trace is not important to the right to own a gun to protect civilization from an out of control government. In a gun free world, history shows that governments often spin out of control and we’ve seen it in American culture as well as anywhere, so taking guns out of society and legislating them out of existence just isn’t a possibility. The more laws there are, the more innovation will arise to step around those laws. If there are more gun control laws centered around serial number registration than naturally the human thing to do would be to invent some way to step around the law. It’s that simple.

All my guns are registered, and I don’t worry about any federal government trouble at this time. My kind of president is in the White House and I feel good about where the nation is going. But I personally do have the ability to build every part of a gun from the ammunition to the most complex part of a gun and if society fails for sustained periods of time, I can see a real need to be able to manufacture my own guns from my home. Liberals want the American population to trust their government completely, but Austin Peterson has the right idea, gun ownership is the heart of our Constitution, it is at the heart of all civilized society. Guns aren’t defined by whether or not they have a serial number that shows they are officially recognized by the federal government, they just need to shoot straight, and not blow up in our hands. They need to be reliable, and we need to have them, that is all that is required. That is why the Ghost Gunner 2 is a wonderful invention and I am very inclined to get one just in case someday I may need it.

One of the most satisfying things I’ve done in a while was purchase my new Desert Eagle from Magnum Research. The gun wasn’t in stock, I had to wait for them to make a run through their shop to get the style that I selected. And they were very good to let me know the status along the way which I appreciated. I personally know well over 100 people who could machine a gun from a block of aluminum without even breaking a sweat. That’s why I was able to appreciate all the fine craftsmanship that went into my Desert Eagle. But if Magnum Research were to be regulated out of existence by politicians hell-bent on power, I would still get my gun. No law from some modern politicians trying to manipulate the Constitution is going to stop me from that. They can’t have it both ways, they can’t advocate law breaking (marijuana, and illegal immigration) then expect gun owners to follow the laws liberals like. Respect for the law is just what it is, and liberals have shown that they don’t respect the law, and that is a situation they made for themselves. And that is why we will make guns in our homes whether or not it is legal. So long as the Constitution says we have the right to bear arms, we will have them whether or not there are serial numbers to go with them, because it is that very government that we have an obligation to keep in check. And that is the ultimate law of the land. Without that we have nothing anyway.

Rich Hoffman

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Welcome to the Long Lost American Demographic of Right Leaning Fly Overs: Where guns and Donald Trump are not dirty words

I remember all too well when the Koch brothers were considered the radical fringe of the Republican Party—the more libertarian wing. That was sad, because they were our only option as conservatives because they had an open check book and were funding the campaigns of several politicians who they felt embodied their view of the world. Harry Reid thought of them as Satan himself incarnate in politics. Nobody ever mentioned that George Soros on the other side spent a lot more money on liberal politicians, or that the labor unions provided a much less fair exchange of funds going into progressive political candidates—it was the Koch brothers who got all the attention and were thought to be such crazy extremists that the entire political spectrum had been pulled so far over to the left that nobody knew literally what was right anymore. Yet I always knew what was right and that’s why I was an early supporter of Donald Trump and now the differences between then couldn’t be more extreme. The political spectrum had shifted in great ways to the right and it looks like its going to stay there for a long time. The Koch brothers are now nearly considered to be as left leaning as George Soros in comparison and that’s good to see because that reflects the world we live in.

There are reasons that communist and socialist countries have closed societies full of censorship and extreme methods of keeping their people contained behind their borders. North Korea, East Berlin even modern-day China are very closed societies that do anything they can to keep their people suppressed and in place within their borders so not to lose them to another competitive nation. That reason is that socialists and communists cannot compete with open markets and that is why the Koch brothers and their paid off politicians like open borders in the United States and unbalanced trade tariffs because they are all about keeping markets closed to protect their own investments. In the Koch situation over half of their business assets are on foreign soil and the ones they do have in the United States are reminiscent of third world countries.

For over 15 years I’ve been going every year to the Annie Oakley festival in Darke County, Ohio during the last weekend of every July and I have watched carefully how the politics of the outside world influenced this yearly event. This past year I was at the Ohio Fast Draw competition tent explaining how the shooting worked to some spectators. I had my .45 on my hip along with my bullwhips that I had just used in a show across from my location and the subject of politics came up for the first time in that entire 15-year period. The week prior there had been some considerable buzz on talk radio that the leftists control of the entertainment industry and the press had not converted people in places like Wichita, Kansas into rabid progressives they were supposed to become and that was certainly true in Greenville, Ohio. The people I was talking to around the Ohio Fast Draw tent were never going to be members of the political left. They were never going to adopt left leaning political philosophies. The only reason they were suddenly interested in politics was because for the first time in their lives they liked the president in the White House. Ask them who the Koch brothers were, and they’d think they were the founders of Coca Cola. Ask them who Donald Trump was and they’d say, “He’s that New York billionaire who f**ks Playboy models and lowered our taxes. I love that guy!” Welcome to the long lost American demographic of right leaning fly overs.

There are millions upon millions of these types of people who I described from the Greenville event spread all across the United States, and Trump has reached them directly. There is a reason Fox News is so popular and that Rush Limbaugh has such big numbers. It’s not because they did anything special, only to fulfill a market niche that evolved out of necessity. Since America is a free society, there is always competition for attention and it is the people of the flyover states who live between the big cities who really make up the character of the United States. Those people don’t like government, they want it as small and unobtrusive as possible. Political leftists in order to sell their view of the world must have a society like East Berlin and North Korea where censorship from the state keeps voices from expressing themselves. Given a choice most people will side with the small government conservatives, such as the type of farmers and hard-working people who find events like the Annie Oakley Festival a nice vacation in the summer months of God’s Country.

During the height of the Obama years there was talk of pushing guns out of the Annie Oakley Festival all together as big city progressivism had seeped into Greenville, unwelcomed I might add. How could you have an event that celebrated one of America’s first female celebrities without admitting that she gained her fame through trick shooting with guns? To celebrate Annie Oakley’s life without celebrating the gun was like celebrating a fine dinner without the food. It just didn’t make sense and the rumor had an impact on attendance at the event. But now that Trump was in the White House everything had shifted in the other direction and now guns were everywhere, as they should have been all along. Even the mounted shooters were strutting their horses down the aisles crammed with people like cowboys fresh off the range packing their guns at their sides for the next show at 3 PM. People came to events like this because they reflected their desires, just as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh gave them something to listen to in the media. If Fox News for instance were to swing liberal to the extent of CNN, these people would just stop watching and something new would emerge to fulfil that market need.

That was the talk of course as Disney acquired 20th Century Fox this past week, that Disney would now be the parent company of Fox News. That was what the guy asking me about Ohio Fast Draw wanted to know. He was worried that Fox News would go away. That’s when I told him that something else would come along and take its place. I told him not to worry about it. Fox News didn’t make people like us who we are. We made Fox News. Just as Donald Trump didn’t make the political climate we are all in presently. We made Donald Trump. It was the Koch brothers who gave us little option, they wanted open borders and high tariffs, so they could justify their foreign investments and they pretended to be hard-line conservatives—and most of us knew it all along. People in Greenville, Ohio and Wichita, Kansas always thought the politicians were phonies, that is until Donald Trump was in the White House. Then we had an option, but prior to that most people just tuned out of politics because they didn’t have a representative. In Washington D.C. leftist thought that meant that they had control of the public sentiment, just as East Berlin thought they could keep capitalism out of that part of the city with a silly wall. By limiting what people saw and felt, the political left always thought they could control society. In the cities, that works to some degree because people must comply with welfare check criteria and close quarter living, but if you give human beings a choice, they usually end up at the Ohio Fast Draw tent asking questions about how to shoot fast, and to express their feelings about what a raw deal Donald Trump gets from the national press.

Guns represent choice and protecting that option from the menacing figures who enter politics and fund that activity only to protect their own financial interests, which is exactly what the Koch brothers have been doing all along is what elections are all about. It is sad that the Koch’s have represented what little resistance conservatives had to the aggressive liberals who truly want to shut down choices in America so that people will have to listen to them. What people really hate about Donald Trump is that he has brought choice back into politics and that has suddenly ignited interest in people who usually pay no attention to these kinds of things. Suddenly they have a guy in the White House and they are ready to protect him, and that is a big difference from the years past. The Koch brothers have been exposed for what they always were, and that just goes to show how bad it was before. And that is how wearing a gun on your hip in public can change a lot of perspectives for the better.

Rich Hoffman

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The Best Article on Socialism that you will Ever Read: Trump will never experience a recesssion while he is president

When economists said that Trump was out of his mind to propose that the United States would ever have a GDP of over 3% again, they were speaking from the failed perspective of a socialist philosophy. Just because a majority of economists were all trained in the same places by the same socialist radicals it doesn’t mean that reality is shaped by a majority opinion that may want to promote socialism from the halls of academia, or network television. The same economists and promotional efforts to insist that they have intellectual knowledge worth listening to are the same as those who are putting the 28-year old girl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on every media outlet that they can find hoping to promote democratic socialism before Donald Trump’s economy puts that fantasy out of reach forever. Donald Trump is a man from a real background in understanding how economies work. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just another young radical stuck on the Marxist theories she learned in her education, like a lot of kids. But here’s the reality, Trump’s economy will continue to boom, there will not be a recession on the horizon, there will not be a slowdown of growth. So long as government is kept from tampering with the economy human enterprise will unleash tremendous economic growth and that is the reality of the 2018 election, for which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t even elected yet. All she did was win a primary, but the media knowing that Trump’s economy is pulling ahead of their broadcasted fears are in a panic to put a young lady that they think is pretty in front of the cameras to promote their global intentions, and it’s not going to work.

I met the type of economists that have been declaring that Trump’s economy would fail or that even the good numbers of today are bound to have a major downturn while I was in college. I thought from day one that the economists in college were idiots. I had read several books on my own before getting to college so I had a reference point, but I also had a lot of real life experience. Prior to going to college, I did many fundraisers for the Boy Scouts of America, I worked for mobsters, I chauffeured celebrities, I was a repo man, a gunsmith, and a car salesman, a male model and I did all that before I was 19. So I had a lot of experience with money and commerce and at that time I started to read serious books on economic matters, so the ridiculous cycles that economists at the University of Cincinnati tried to teach were ridiculous. I knew it then, and I am even more sure of it now.

As a basic lesson of economic reality, I speak often about how much I enjoy the yearly Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Darke County, Ohio every year where we conduct bullwhip competitions for the public with the host Gery Deer. This example could apply to anything, but it speaks to the nature of human beings no matter what race, sex, or age—it is the way that humans are wired which obviously Karl Marx never understood. That’s why he died dirt poor and broke in London with just a few people attending his funeral. Because Karl Marx was an idiot, but the governments of the world thought that socialism and communism might be a good way to give themselves lots of power, they started promoting it, and whenever someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be used as a spokesman, they have tried. But all those efforts will fail because of the basic realities of the human experience. In our bullwhip competitions there used to be cash prizes and big trophies. That brought competitors from all over the world to our event to try to win something that they could put on their mantle at home and be proud of. After all, we all practiced very hard to get good with bullwhips so winning a prize, and or money was a vindication of those efforts. Not that I’m bragging, but I won most of the time, and so did Gery Deer. A handful of us tended to always be in the top rankings so people who didn’t win would get angry. Since Gery was always organizing these events the losers of the competitions would call him a “money grubbing charlatan” because they accused him of hosting these events just to make money. Sound familiar?

So to silence the critics my friend Gery Deer took away the prize money and the trophies and made it so that we would just compete out of the goodness of our hearts for the fun of it. Well, guess what happened, over the next five years attendance dropped from both the spectators but also the competitors. Most of those professional bullwhip artists who practiced so hard just had no ambition to attend a competition just for the fun of it. If there wasn’t money or a trophy involved, they decided to stay home, save the plane fare and do something else. But I still came and so did a few other people. I enjoyed the event for what it was and I really didn’t care if I won a trophy or not. That is what makes me in all things I do in life one of the 1% to 5% who always do things for the right reasons. I would say Donald Trump is a similar personality. He plays golf for many of the reasons I do bullwhip work, because he just enjoys the endeavor, and he likes playing and competing whether or not there is a trophy involved, because of the spirit of doing the task. But when you take away the personal recognition for a lot of people, they just aren’t interested in doing something, and that is why socialism will never work, as it has never worked.

The reason Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can’t tell anybody how her democratic socialism would be paid for, how socialism could give people free college educations, how there could be free healthcare, how we could have a $15-dollar minimum raise is because socialism ignores the values of a task performed. The work of doing something is what generates value, just as resistance can generate electricity in a generator as magnets pass over coils. But if the reward for work is not individualized then the desire to put forth effort is lost. If everyone is going to get $15 dollars an hour, or everyone is going to get a trophy, or nobody is going to get a trophy, then people will do only what they have to, and that means that all the ambition for work is lost to the participants. Socialism under any form assumes that people will work hard and be productive just out of the goodness of their hearts, and that isn’t how people are wired. Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or some hippie college professors might think that humans should behave differently, but reality doesn’t indicate that such a thing will ever happen. Just as we took trophies and cash out of the Annie Oakley competitions the best whip artists in the world stopped coming and the sport itself has nearly gone extinct again. A few of us do the event still, but where we used to have 25 to 30 artists from as far away as Australia come to Ohio for the competitions, now there are only five or six a year. The same could be said about any professional endeavor from the medical industry to building cars. If you take away profit and a reward for achievement, you stop the economy. If you reward such things, then people will invent and work their asses off just for a little recognition—even if its minor in nature.

Trump clearly understands how economics works, better than most economists. The people who speak against him and his new economy want to ignore reality and assume that the socialism of Karl Marx might still happen if they could only plaster the young face of a girl voters might like on the front of it. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just a kid. She’s a nice kid but she has a lot to learn and a lot of experience to gain. I was lucky to have had a lot of experience before I was 19, and it was easy for me to call bullshit on the professors I met in college. Now as a person with a lot of experience in many endeavors, I know the Trump economy is only going to increase. There will not be a recession during Trump’s years in office. The cause of recessions is government tampering and taking away incentives for excellence among a society’s participants. I am one of those people who will do the right thing whether or not there is money or a trophy involved, but I am also one of those 1% people. Karl Marx might have known people like me when he came up with his communism idea, but he didn’t apply it to reality. Most people, 99% of all people, will only do something if they get some opportunity at a personal reward, whether it’s a big wage increase, a new car, or an opportunity for sex. If those potentials are taken away, people stop trying and that is how recessions come about. If you open up the rewards, then there will never be a shortage of people who want a chance at those rewards. And that is what drives economies. More rewards, the bigger the economy. Less rewards the smaller the economy. And that is precisely why China is so worried, because as a communist country, they can only look like a global superpower so long as all other economies were artificially restricted, as the United States was. But under Trump and a new rewards system for innovation and effort, China doesn’t stand a chance.

Rich Hoffman
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Annie Oakely Western Showcase 2018: Adjusting to the heat in the kitchen

As I do every year I look forward to the Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Greenville, Ohio which took place over this past weekend. Most of the footage from this Gery Deer segment on Living Dayton came from me, which gives context to what a cool event it is.

The event was moved back to the Darke County fairgrounds this year and was set up a bit differently than it had been in the past, which was an improvement over previous years. As my time is usually very short due to a very full schedule I usually show up for the bullwhip competitions at 1 PM on Saturday afternoon and stay for a few hours than get back to my regular life. But most of the performers there stay for the entire weekend and it’s always good to see everyone even if it’s just for a little while. Gery Deer puts on this event every year and he’s about as busy as I am much of the time, but these kinds of things are his business so he’s usually there through the entire weekend. Whenever I arrive in Greenville I can’t help but think of it as the gateway to the west as history remembers it, the Treaty of Greenville after the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the efforts of western expansion that took place immediately after. It’s big sky country in that part of the world and its one of the few times I can walk around and eat funnel cakes with bullwhips and guns strapped to my hip and nobody thinks anything of it.

I felt very fast this year in the competitions which was good. Professionally I had just come off a really tough week. I had been thinking that even the biggest high stakes poker games broadcast on television did not have the pressure I was under. But I wouldn’t have it any other way, I like it in the kitchen with the heat turned up. The more pressure, the better I do. But to manage all that professional stress I rely on the Annie Oakley Western Showcase every year to recalibrate myself. The Ohio Fast Draw Association had their shooting range set up right across from our Showcase area and I spent time with them as well which has been my new thing of late, shooting Cowboy Fast draw which I practice nearly every day. Because of that everything was faster for me and I felt it in the bullwhip competitions.

We mostly do the competitions for the crowd because it gives a good narrative to the greater show that Gery Deer puts on each year. We keep things pretty loose and fun. But for me it’s a step out of a very intense business and political world that I normally live in where I get to wear my cowboy hat and be around genuinely good people who do things for all the right reasons. That for me is very refreshing and that one event satisfies me for the entire upcoming year. If I could make a good career living life in the manner that we do during that western showcase, I would. However, for me the drawback is that it would require being on the road all the time and with the size of my family, that just wouldn’t work.

Gery and I always talk about ideas for the future and how to expand on our experience, but with both of us being so busy the next year usually comes faster than we can call each other to make arrangements, but all that freezes for just a few hours on the last Saturday of the month of July when Darke County celebrates the life of Annie Oakley’s birthday in her home town. As Gery reported to me, every hotel and motel room was booked for the weekend, and under the new location, there was a very large crowd attending to watch us have a little fun with our bullwhips. As I’ve said, I use those competitions every year as a kind of gauge for myself to manage stress. I practice a lot in private but its good to get out in front of people and to perform because the added pressure provides context to all the hours of practicing.

One of the reasons I joined up with the Cowboy Fast Draw Association is to have more of these kinds of weekends in the future. The more intense my private life gets professionally the more I seek these Annie Oakley type of events to balance out all that pressure. I always like to strip things away to the most essential ingredients and nothing does it quite as well as eating a funnel cake under a clear blue sky after sweating profusely performing in front of a crowd with a gun strapped to your hip. I solve more problems under those conditions than I could under any other circumstance. When everything is going well in my head it shows in my performance which is why I enjoy the event so much. Among my bullwhip friends they really can be broken down into two categories, performers and competitors. Performers do the same show over and over again making minor changes, and they travel all over the country making their money off that raw talent. I am of the competitor orientation, because that’s the life I live. There is always someone competitive and pushing, so the pressure to always be the best is a daily thing, and to apply that to a unique skill such as bullwhip work, gives me a chance to work through the process of refining basic skills that carry over into everything.

This past year I had practiced cowboy fast draw nearly every day and that had improved my reaction times with the bullwhips. When your body and intellect is working well, it feels good, especially when you get up over 50 like I am now. You tend to take those things for granted when you’re younger, but life has a way of chipping away at you, so knocking off all that buildup so that your body and mind is functioning efficiently and in an optimal fashion is very satisfying. In that way I think it would be good if everyone found something like that to do, where they pushed themselves to perform better and carried over the results into their private and business life. What’s encouraging to me is that even after all this time, I’ve been going to the Annie Oakley Western Showcase for the past 15 years, there is still room to get better, faster, and to learn new things. Learning the cowboy fast draw had improved everything for me, and it felt good. And that’s why we do those events, to push ourselves and spend time with people who are doing their best to live the best life possible within the framework of traditional western arts. I am proud to know knife throwers, bullwhip artists, and gunslingers as some of my closest confidants. That was the way it was in the early days of Ohio as a state which was the gateway to western expansion and it still is. Sure technology and modernization add layers of complication to the modern life of business, but if you strip it all way to the basic essentials, those elements are always present at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase and I always leave there feeling recharged for more heat in the hot kitchen.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump Wins Re-election on November 4th 2020: An admission from The New York Times

I recently wrote about the EU deal with Trump to move in the direction of a no tariff world—a free trade relationship with Europe. Trump had won his hand and forced the EU to fold making it all happen. But as the print was still drying a remarkable opinion piece showed up in The New York Times of all places announcing a future Trump re-election victory as a post-election day analysis. I thought it was a stunning admission from the perspective of November 4th 2020 from a newspaper that had made itself the number one enemy of President Trump from the very beginning. In the article linked below, Bret Stephens put down a very likely case scenario of how the future election night would transpire and the events that led up to it. All the conditions mentioned within the article were obvious to Trump supporters but to hear it from the editorial scrutiny of The New York Times was something spectacular.

If I were to write that article myself I don’t think I would change anything, except for Elizabeth Warren’s running mate of Sherrod Brown. I think Brown will be defeated by Jim Renacci in the election of 2018 so he likely won’t be up for contention, but every thing else will be. Trump’s victory is nearly as clear at this point in 2018 as it will be then because as the article pointed out, the economy is great and that is credited to Trump—for good reason. And it’s that simple. People aren’t going to change their lifestyle and income for some social justice crusade for which the political left bet everything on. It’s not the way people work. Such things can be made to happen in a society that isn’t free, but if given a choice, people chose their own pocketbooks over everything else.

Trump is winning on every frontier and The New York Times article shows that even on the other side of the political ledger that people understand why. That begs to question why they are still committed to trying every day through every possible scandal to stop the Trump presidency. Ideologically they on the political left are in the minority and they are moving even further to the left—so what could they be thinking when it is well-known that people will vote in favor of the economic conditions we are presently experiencing? The only answer there is that they are hell-bent on self-destruction, which is fine with me. I think that there is only room in America for a right of center political philosophy and that the leftists have to be eradicated. They as people don’t necessarily have to be destroyed, but their minds must be changed toward reality. Reality is not a left of center position politically—reality is well right of center. The political scale for which we speak was invented by human beings. Reality is what it is, the political left can’t ignore reality to fulfil their illusions of social justice.

While most people have compassions, which is what the political left counts on, people will not choose to put their own self-interest ahead of public needs. Trump understands that people are very giving to charities and people of misfortune so long as they have money in their pockets. So the economy is king and people’s personal ability to acquire property is the determining factor as to how “giving” a society is. By securing the economy with growth pushing up against 4.1% GDP Trump essentially secured an election in 2020 and that is good for everyone, even liberals. They want a fairer world, the best way to achieve it is through the powers of capitalism. So everyone wins.

It is this fact that seems to be slowly settling on the leftists. The New York Times really doomed themselves by going to war with Donald Trump, and for them to essentially admit as much by printing that article on Trump’s 2020 re-election they are conceding to a reality they have been working against. As the article mentioned the Mueller investigation and how many Russian sympathizers were to be found in the Trump Organization prior to the 2016 election it should have been obvious that the Trump brand was an international feature in business, and it still is. Of course, they will know Russians and many other people from countries all over the world, that is the nature of international business. It was the Democrats who chose to frame Russia as a conspirator as a way to hopefully create doubt about those relationships to fuel old Cold War fantasies, which only a few years they themselves had dismissed. But they did so because it’s all they could attempt to muster against Trump, who was a global overachiever. Trump ran a beauty pageant in Moscow for a major network. Setting up such events in Russia was supposed to show great international relations and that we had achieved so much since the Cold War. Liberals attempted to redefine that effort in the context of their modern political problems and it just never stuck because people understood the situation.

Of course, there was nothing corrupt about Donald Trump and nothing that the millions of dollars of investigations could find on him. As a real playboy prior to running for office, none of the various scandals that the political left tried to pin on him mattered because it was all well-known prior. The leftists tried to redefine sexual values with Trump which they were guilty of destroying and found themselves at a loss to do anything about it. Melania Trump knew what kind of playboy Donald Trump was and understood the challenge of domesticating him. It looks as if she has done that to some degree, but likely turning 70 had far more to do with it. Trump’s playboy days are behind him finally making him free to throw his efforts fully into being a great president. Unlike Clinton or Kennedy, Trump doesn’t have to waste time chasing girls. He’s an old man now while those other presidents were in their 40s and at the height of their mid-life crises period. Trump was driving around a Lamborghini and was sleeping with hundreds of women in New York—and he was very rich when he was in his mid-life crises period. Voters understand, which is why ten-year-old stories about Trump’s sex life have gone nowhere.

Unlike other articles from The New York Times, this one I think we can all believe. It is a quiet admission that all the efforts to stop Trump were to no avail. The left had forced President Clinton and Barack Obama down our throats and had destroyed civil discourse in the meantime. So it should come as no surprise that conservatives learned from those years and put up our own candidate that would pull everything back into reality—and Trump was our president to do so. With great GDP numbers and a roaring economic forecast, Trump will win 2020 easily with more people than voted for him in 2016. And that should set up the next decade to be a roaring one. The roaring twenties will be back, and hopefully this time we can keep all the communists and socialists out of government so that they don’t cause a depression at the end of it. With Trump’s strong performance it may be possible to have members of his administration in the White House for the next 32 years, and that would go a long way to solving a lot of problems. And out of all sources, it was The New York Times to first admit it.

Rich Hoffman

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The Great Game of Poker: Lucky for us, President Trump knows how to make other countries fold

I am not what I’d consider to be a gambler. I’ve never lost once cent in a casino and I don’t put any faith in “fate” to provide any financial enrichment. But I have of late had quite an obsession with the card game of poker, for a lot of reasons. I suppose you could say that I’m at a juncture in my life that is inevitably linked with the popular gambler’s game that originated out of New Orleans just prior to westward expansion and became the modified representation of American capitalism. Poker is essentially a game of playing the cards you are dealt and making the most of them while forcing those around you to do things to your advantage. Poker is not about the cards, it’s about controlling the people who are playing the game. The chips that are bet in poker are currency which often become representative of actual cash, so the emergence of the game in America is a unique attribute that I have found myself studying of late because it fits my present lifestyle. We all play poker to some degree or another. The game just represents a frame of reference for casual play. Some are better at the game than others and it is to my great relief that we finally have a president who knows how to play it to win it all, when all the chips are on the table—he knows how to play the cards.

If you are in business of any kind the game of poker is being played, you have to use whatever cards you have to manage value against the marketplace. You are either getting played by the system or you play the system, and that’s the reality of capitalism. The by-product is worth it, but the process can be brutal. Wimpy soft minded people obviously are drawn to socialism because they don’t have the heart for that kind of game and those were the types of critics that were angry at President Trump for invoking his trade tariffs against the world markets. Yet when it came time to go all in with Europe Trump did it without blinking and the European Union blinked, and now we are suddenly talking about working toward zero tariffs in our trade with Europe starting with pharmaceuticals, medical products and soybeans—as announced by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. This was enormous news and it shows that Trump knows what he’s doing in regard to trade.

I think if more people in America understood the great game of poker they’d understand why President Trump is poised to win all these trade wars. The economics of the situation declares that all trade between nations be free and open, which is what conservatives have always wanted. The tariffs as they have been established through other administrations has been to leverage favoritism toward China, the EU and many other oversea markets to give them a shot at global dominance. But only free trade can truly do that when the value of the product traded sets the competitive circumstances of the exchange. The game between nations really isn’t any different from the game of poker, the values and strategies are the same, and Trump knows how to play it. So it is quite a relief that we finally have an American president who knows how to not only play the game, but to win it.

The aim of these tariff negotiations is to achieve a tariff free world where products can flow globally without modified value trying to shift favoritism to one country or another. If the value of the product is good, then the country trading it will benefit, naturally. Just as in poker, the values on the chips are universal throughout the game. But a $10,000 chip from one player can’t become a $100,000 chip when it comes in possession of another player and that is essentially what is happening under the present tariff system. Trump has been essentially calling the bets from the other players who clearly don’t have a hand better than what the President has, and the entire game is being reset.

What I find interesting about any game that human beings invent I find that most of them were created to fulfill a psychological relationship that the players have with the world they are living in. Such as poker emerged to play with the basic concept of capitalism as inherited from the Europeans during the 13th century where kings, queens and jokers were part of that Dark Ages world. On the river boats of the Mississippi in 1840 through 1950 the old European game evolved to incorporate American ideas about private property and having the ability to generate value and to use that value to push competitors into situations that the winner of the game desires. The trading of values through betting one value against another is what poker is all about and it’s the backbone of American business.

Politicians play poker all the time, and while they know the rules of the game, they don’t seem to be able to connect the game to real life largely because as government employees they don’t have to work very hard to generate value in their lives. When they bet something, they didn’t have to work very hard to earn it, so they don’t apply much risk to the game. For them smoking cigars and sipping on mixed drinks and talking with friends is what the game of poker is. They really don’t care who wins or loses because they are not personally invested in any of the values represented in the chips. That is essentially why traditional politicians are not good at doing what America needs done on the world stage and why we’ve been getting played more than we’ve played. Our presidents just didn’t understand the game that was being played against them so we ended up with all these terrible tariffs that other countries had placed on us and we’ve been getting short-changed when all along we have had the best cards at the table.

It took someone like Trump to know how to play our good cards, which is why Jean-Claude Juncker from the European Union is now leveraging toward a no tariff system. China isn’t far behind this decision and to understand the why and how, reporters and political commentators really need to understand the game of poker. My obsession with it is in recognizing the patterns and history of the game and how it applies to current events. That’s the reason we have games like this so that we can use leisure activity to inform us of the truly important things in the world. But when it comes to a high stakes game, whether it is for millions of dollars in a casino or a big business deal with even more value at stake, or its international political negotiations that Trump is conducting, the efforts and motions are all the same. And knowing how to win those engagements is more important than just the fun of casual play. If you are going to play, you should always play to win, and it is such a relief to find that Donald Trump is finally an American president who gets it and knows how to play poker. When the European Union folded yesterday, China is right behind them. Trump knows he has the cards to win, it’s just a matter of time before China has to reveal that they’ve been bluffing and will have to fold as well. It’s really that simple.

Rich Hoffman

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Join the NRA Today: Guns are the only hope for a civilized, and fair society

It’s always good to get a new American Rifleman from the NRA in the mailbox. More than the articles on various guns and their industry counterparts I enjoy the awareness of legislative activity regarding the Second Amendment. In the August 2018 magazine there were some really good columns once again by Wayne LaPierre, Oliver North, and Chris Cox which brought to my mind some very urgent reflections about defending the Second Amendment which has been lost behind the incredible news events of our current news cycle. I mean it should be noted that socialists are now defining the Democratic Party, which is good, because it is peeling back the false layers of civility which has hidden the Marxist roots of that political affiliation and their ultimate aims of repealing the Second Amendment and essentially destroying all the Constitutional amendments. With the media love of discovering the socialist from the Bronx Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this Tweet below shows how shallow her political philosophy truly is, yet she’s really all the political left has, and its good to see the cracks forming. She’s just another young kid that is nice and speaks well that liberals hope will be a recruiter of more socialists to gain them a youth vote. But the same thing that makes socialists accept the Karl Marx concept of collective ownership of production means is the same thing that is destroying them as a party, they are lazy and unambitious. But to conceal their faith repealing the Second Amendment is their rally cry that none of us should ignore.

I have never thought that there was a difference between socialists and Democrats. People say that Democrats are more of a “centralist” vantage point along the political spectrum just as many of those same interpreters would say that I am a member of the hard right. I can say that my position has never moved, nor should it have. I have always been very conservative. It was the world that moved to the left including most Republicans. So call it whatever you want, it was socialists who injected their ideas into both political parties and pulled the entire spectrum of political philosophy to the left making the center where Americans a hundred years ago would consider the ultra, ultra-left. I grew up on Davy Crockett from the famous Walt Disney television show and westerns like Gunsmoke. Even at eight years old my mom said I reminded her of John Wayne because of my moral outlook on life, and back then that was quite common. What has changed was everyone else, and just because the masses moved to the left, that doesn’t mean it’s the correct thing to do. It just means that socialist radicals have gotten their way—at least up until this point.

And that is largely how the gun debate has also evolved, the political left has taken an aspect of American culture and moved the vantage point of analysis far to the political left to the point that the Second Amendment has been under serious threat. Even though many of those same socialist supporters who have been suddenly supporting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the new spokeswoman for the modern socialist movement support gun confiscation by the government they spend most of their time playing video games that feature guns, so the contradiction couldn’t be more pronounced. Yet the premise of what socialists are asking of the world states emphatically that guns will need to be more a part of the world’s future than ever before because there is a major flaw in the thinking on the left that nobody has been talking about.

In all our lives there has likely been a time and there will be again where we lose power for a sustained period. I recently wrote about the Yellowstone volcano that is bound to erupt with a major cataclysmic event, as it has in the past, and when it does, much of the United States will be without power and food for weeks if not months on end. Just as hurricanes and other disasters come and wipe away a lifetime of work occasionally, bad things do happen and when they do, the government cannot protect people. The looting that takes place after major tragedies is heartbreaking, and nothing makes it worse than not being able to protect what you do have after such tragedies—even it it’s just your life that you have left. The Second Amendment is not there to protect your rights and liberties only if there is sustainable power grids and times of peace. It’s there to keep civility for when things aren’t so good, such as when the entire infrastructure of civility breaks away leaving us all to fend for ourselves. When there is a major power disruption even to the point where phones don’t work, there are no police to keep the bad guys away. There is only you and your gun, and that is what makes America the best place to live in the world even when there are major snowstorms, flooding, and power outages. Most of the time civility is restored within a few days or weeks on the North American continent. In the case of the Yellowstone eruption when something like that does occur, it might be months, but without question America has the wealth and resources to get back on its feet, and it will. But the transition time will require individuals to maintain order while the government regains its footing.

What socialist are asking when they demand gun confiscation and restrictions is that we place our entire trust into a centralized government, which is the first thing that falls apart when tragedies do happen. There is nothing worse than losing power for several days and running your refrigerator on a generator than to have people less prepared walking down the road outside looking for food and seeing that you have lights on in your home. The only thing that keeps them from taking over your house so they can get access to food and water is your guns. The promise of death ends their fantasies of stealing your supplies is usually a good deterrent and peace is maintained. Just as the presence of police tend to keep people from killing each other from arguments, humans need a deterrent to keep them from acting in a hostile way toward other members of the human race. Socialists desire to ignore that human trait and to just put blind faith into government which has proven to have major flaws.

We’ve seen just in the debacle of the FBI in regards to their picking one political party over another and attempting to bend the law to manipulate elections that we can never truly depend on centralized government to do everything that we need as a society. They are prone to corruptions clearly and we can never trust them completely. They are not much different from the bandits hitting the streets during an extended power outage looking for food and water and they will attack their neighbors once civility is stripped away during tragic events. In those times only, the gun can protect individual rights from the desires of the mob.

While the current trend is to demand trust the implied aspect of that thought process is all the alarm bells we need to consider to protect the Second Amendment and it is good to see that the NRA is doing such a good job of keeping the pressure on. But it shouldn’t be viewed as an extreme right winged position. It is now only because the socialists have contaminated thought through the efforts of the lazy, who clearly outnumber the rest of the population in America these days that gun control through legislation and confiscation is even proposed. But like everything from the political left and the socialists who are driving their philosophy, they are missing the point and have not thought things through to their natural conclusions. They don’t have a plan when centralized government fails. But as we know, centralized government barely works in the most optimal conditions, and that is why guns must always be a part of any successful society, because it can and often truly is the only way to maintain civility. And without civility, no nation has any hope of building into the future.

Rich Hoffman

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