Tag: freedom

Why We Love Freedom: It’s the key to economic viability and production in any culture

It’s one of the things I like most this particular time of year, the spring months ahead of summer, when stores like Cabela’s put out their Holiday attire. With Memorial Day and the Fourth of July coming on the horizon, there are a lot of patriotic garments that they offer to satisfy the sentiments of their customer base, which, to say the least, are not Karl Marx fans. It’s always a reminder to me of where people are generally, away from the news and in reality. When I travel around the country, it’s pretty easy to see where people are politically. And Cabela’s understands that, as does Bass Pro. The same company essentially owns them, but they know their customers, and I enjoy going there to see what’s the latest in outdoor trends. These stores, dedicated to adventure and patriotism, are such wonderful assets, and I have never gotten tired of the Cabela’s in my neighborhood of Cabela’s West Chester, Ohio, since it opened. Let’s just say I spend a lot of time there. On this particular visit, I found a really nice Under Armor camouflage shirt that would be perfect for the summer season and all the outdoor activities I have planned. And it had a nice logo on it that said “Freedom.” It was a whole marketing line of t-shirts they have in all kinds of colors and styles, and they were selling like hotcakes at a maple syrup festival. I bought the shirt and other related items and immensely enjoyed the experience. But I had to ask myself as I watched others doing the same thing, what does everyone think that “Freedom” means? Why do we say it? Why was it such a powerful marketing tool? Under Armor is trying to appeal to those sentiments, so why was it such a powerful statement that might provoke someone to buy it, as opposed to a statement that might say, “Compliance?”

What do we mean when we say we want and expect “freedom?” Freedom from what? Freedom from government, Freedom from our parents? Freedom from work? Freedom from corporate influence, hostile governments, greedy financial institutions, politics, taking our kids to soccer practice, public schools that can’t spend our money correctly and waste it trying to indoctrinate our children into a Marxist ideology? We have a lot of hooks in us by the nature of living life. But if we had to put our finger on the specificity of the meaning of Freedom from an American perspective, the way Cabela’s is marketing it is the Freedom to live your own life the way you want to. It’s undoubtedly not Freedom from responsibility. And the more successful you are in life, obviously the pressure of responsibility increases. But what is specific about American Freedom is the notion that the value of a developed individual life is recognized as significant, and the results of that development and uniqueness benefit our national culture. In America, you can be a slug, barely rubbing two pennies together and living out of a van, nearly homeless, or you could work hard and become an executive for a major company. In America, you can literally have access to anybody at any level. A woman can date a multimillionaire if she is attractive and can get their attention, as opposed to a more controlled society that works within a caste system, as it is throughout India, Nepal, and into China. In Iran or Pakistan, a woman might be the most beautiful person in the world, but nobody would know because of their regimented society. And the hope to date or even marry someone outside of that rigid system is an impossible concept. 

In America, we have an expectation of choice. We can choose to be successful or not, to spend time with people of any level of input. Of course, you would have to work hard to move through social circles, but if you choose to work toward those goals, the doors are open to the hard worker, and we have that Freedom of choice. And you see that when you travel and go to summer activities where people have RVs and boats, earned assets that represent their hard work or lack thereof. I am always amazed by the variety when I go to campsites with our RV and my children. Some people have multimillion-dollar rigs decked out with all the luxury one could imagine. Many times, those rigs are more elaborate than their homes. And they might be parked next to some scrappy dude who hasn’t washed in a week living out of a tent in the bed of his truck with an American flag stuck out of the hood with a crude drill hole applied to stand it proudly upright. And they will talk and kid around with each other without any pretense of snobbery. They subconsciously appreciate each other’s choice to live a free life. And the results of those decisions provide different toys in life to enjoy. But they celebrate their ability to make that choice and not have a government or social construct make it for them.

This is why China must steal nearly a trillion dollars a year in intellectual property theft because even with the rigged financial system that has put them on the front burner for corporate communism, their culture is dying regarding creativity. They might have a lot of hard workers and an obedient society ready to do whatever they are told. But they aren’t very creative, which is common in communist cultures. Yet invention comes from Freedom. Good ideas are born when people are free to think outside the box. I have had several occasions in my life where I’ve had to deal with the United States Patent Office, and let me tell you, it’s always very busy. There are a lot of good ideas in America born every day, and those ideas come to those who are free to have ideas and are bold enough to act on them. And boldness comes from Freedom of choice. When people are free to express themselves either boldly or rigidly, there are consequences to that behavior that have predicted results. But when people are not free to think for themselves and act accordingly with some sort of market incentive, a society quickly shows the results in stagnant behavior. So in that regard, which is why Cabela’s markets “Freedom” the way they do, Freedom is an essential ingredient to the potential for a vibrant and inventive society. And that’s what we celebrate in America, the Freedom of choice. And from those choices, we have seen proof that society flourishes without a complicated caste system driven by religion or politics in limiting options for the human experience. And that’s what we celebrate on our patriotic holidays, the ability to have a choice. And perhaps to show off our new boats, campers, fishing poles, guns, the things we could buy because we chose to take a risk and hit it big, or work hard all our lives and treat ourselves to a new toy. Or just to spend time outdoors with family and friends because we have the leisure time to do so. Freedom is important to the American lifestyle, and it’s more than a tagline that refers to the period of the Founding Fathers. It’s an important attribute of our economic viability and our culture’s purpose. And it’s always under threat by oppressive forces that are jealous of it, and it’s something we must defend diligently. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Law to Live or Die: It’s time to punish those who used Covid to go to war with America

There is a reason that in America, we have a tradition of swearing on a Bible, an oath of office, or courtroom testimony. And there is a reason that the attackers against America have been trying to swipe away the Ten Commandments in our courtrooms and schools and even shut down churches on Sundays during Covid lockdowns. They were trying to rip away from you the ability to know right from wrong and to have a sense of justice because they knew what they had planned to do. Many Americans are guilty of sedition and treason, like Larry Fink, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and many in the political classes, the globalists who sold out our country for stock tips that have made them very rich. There is a lot of guilt to go around, and from the Americans who see what has been done to them, I would suggest turning to the Bible to resurface your resolve. People are pretty broken up, and after the elections that we have all been waiting for to occur on November 8th, 2022, they need to be restored. Because the evil that has been cast our way has been tremendous and ominous, I have been thinking a lot about the Ten Commandments lately, and what Moses said upon finding his people worshipping false ideas, the law to live, or to die by, in many cases we must enforce our law now that we have caught so many malicious characters who deliberately broke our American laws and intended great harm on us. 

The tough admission that we all must come to is that a group of powerful people, powerful because they acquired a great deal of wealth and formed a group called the World Economic Forum, whom I call the Desecrators of Davos, to purposely use their influence over corporations and the governments of the world to attack all of us, and to put us under the rule of their hidden army, the Administrative State. Through this Administrative State, which was funded by people like Bill Gates, Larry Fink, and Mark Zuckerberg and patrolled by government bureaucrats such as Anthony Fauci, they engineered, through gain of function research, the Covid virus in the Wuhan lab in China as a bioweapon to remove President Trump from office, rig our 2020 elections, destroy our economy, and enslave us all to the intentions of the World Economic Forum, which intended to use the United Nations to rule the world. China is a creation of these people; without the Desecrators of Davos, there would not be a China to act as an enemy against America today, just as Ukraine is another propped-up country by the same villainous people for the same purposeful schemes of destruction and mayhem. But they were caught, the American Constitution was always designed to give us freedom from these people, and it worked. The American Bill of Rights, which I carry with me every day, everywhere I go, stopped these plans, and now revenge is upon us as a result of this 2022 election. And the day after that election, we must then enforce our law for the freedom of mankind around the world. 

But it was war they wanted, those Desecrators of Davos. Their Covid bioweapon was an act of terrorism meant to kill people, rob us of our republic, and enslave us into the tyranny of the technocrats, who openly plotted their menace without fear of punishment. They did not respect our laws, didn’t respect us, and went to work to destroy us utterly and enslave us to their pagan worship of mother earth and its failed religions of the past. Their desire to remove us from our Bible and our guns has been to their thirst for power and need to control every aspect of human life with their new weapons of technology meant to give them power they never deserved. They went for our throats and had no care who survived or lived, only that they intended to rob us of our freedoms, thoughts, and sense of any honor. It was a war by a different method. If they had attacked us with planes as they did at Pearl Harbor, then we would have a face for the enemy, and we’d go and fight them. Or when 9/11 happened, we had a face, and we moved to attack them, and in many ways, those wars are still being fought in the Middle East and in Afghanistan. But this fight, it was an invisible enemy, hidden in the condos of Davos behind trillions of dollars of fake, printed money made by the Federal Reserve, distributed through BlackRock and used against us through all our jobs, all our means to a good life, and confiscated all ability to reason by sabotaging capitalism through crony arrangements and tricking us into attacking our very means of survival, hoping that we would all jump ship and run to Chinese style communism. 

What they did to America and the world has been the worst human rights violations known to planet earth during any development phase. And it was so big and so bad that people couldn’t even grapple with the concept of such a vast evil. Yet there it is; it’s before us now. And we must inflict justice upon those who attacked us. They must pay for what they did and for as many years as it takes. After this election, and the Republicans are in the House and Senate and in many governor positions across the country, the fight doesn’t stop. It will just be beginning. The lowly Democrats will attempt to blame their terrible economy on the newcomers because the poison is already in the body. And they will attempt to appear as the victim as impeachment trials will have to commence. And congressional hearings on Covid will have to transpire.   Senator Rand Paul will just be the start of it. There will be a lot of crying for mercy from the Democrats. But don’t listen to them. Don’t unlock the cage and let them go free. They will try to appeal for mercy, but don’t give it to them, just as you would not provide a murderer your mercy. If the enemy breaks our laws, they must pay. Don’t let them think that our Bibles say to turn the other cheek to inspire injustice. Reread the Bible for yourself and harden your resolve to punish those wrongdoers and all their evil intentions. And send them a message that the rule of law is back in fashion in America. And the war that was cast upon us will be a victory for America and inspire new songs and folk heroes far into the future. This is one of the evillest times in the history of mankind, and it is on our watch to rectify the crimes, and recollection will judge our resolve. Thousands of years from now, we will be considered, so I suggest we set a good example and deal with the criminals in our lives with steel and hearts inspired by justice, a love of law, and order. Then to set the example to evil everywhere that their mechanisms have failed, and to punish them so thoroughly, that they will never try such an act again. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Media Doesn’t Like that Rednecks are Hanging Out With Trump: The ultimate failure of the Liberal World Order

It is very interesting to see how the Liberal World Order has been reacting to the fact that President Trump still has a lot of support, perhaps more than he did in 2020 and 2016. Many media outlets are stating under their breath that a lot of rednecks are hanging out with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home and that somehow that was meant to be derogatory. Very interesting. Now I don’t like to call anybody an “elite.” It was a term invented to conger up sentiments of aristocracy and social order that clearly outlined the elements of hierarchy that the Liberal World Order desires with every essence of their being. And when you deal with liberals, in most all cases, that is undoubtedly their perspective. Then those who do not travel a lot and rely on the media content that comes out of the New York, Washington D.C., or Los Angeles outlets would have the illusion that the Liberal World Order was always in charge and would remain that way. But for those who travel a lot, especially in the middle of the country, the kind of people they meet are Trump supporters, the type of people who travel many miles to hear the President speak the same speech repeatedly. Trump gave two speeches over the middle of October in 2022, one in Nevada and one in Arizona, and both were filled with people who had driven many miles to get there and stood in line for hours and, in some cases, days to attend the venue. Additionally, there were people watching from home and choosing to do so over all the other entertainment options they had. 

In my own way, the things I do are purposely intended to stick a blunt object in the eye of the Liberal World Order, which always starts with my choice to wear cowboy hats in public. Years ago, when I first came out against Lakota issues, I received a barrage of hate mails from snot-nosed spoiled brat 30-somethings who thought the world revolved around them and their desire for free babysitting in the public schools because I appeared on the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer complete with my hat and bullwhip. The things they said only solidified my intent, and it was ironic. They would declare that they were embarrassed to have moved to Liberty Township; they didn’t know there were “rednecks” like me around when they bought their house. And I would respond, of course, that I had lived in Liberty Township before many of them were a twinkle in the eye of a dog. And they intruded on me, not the other way around. But what they said was essentially the same thing we see nationally with Trump. They thought they had him destroyed. The Liberal World Order thought it was in charge and had everything under control. Then they realized, apparently just a few weeks ago, that they were never in charge and that their Liberal World Order was only an illusion to themselves. Nobody was following them over the cliff they were leading us all to, and there was quite a hatred for them that they ignored and hoped would go away when people realized that they didn’t have any other options. When I wear my hat in public, as I have since I was a little kid in the first grade, it’s to tell those types of people that I’m not like them. That I reject their premise of liberalism and am happy with traditional American values. And I have a lot of experience with liberal people losing their lunch over such a visual reference, and I thrive off it. Their opinions have never made me want to change my approach. It has only solidified that resolve. 

You could hear the pride in their voices at the January 6th committee that declared they would go to subpoena Trump to their sham trial because they had the power to do so, or so they thought. Trump could just claim executive privilege, which he would be suitable to utilize. I would do it; differently. I would show up and make fools of them in front of their disastrous circus to show the contrast and beat them at their own game. And Trump could do that to get a chance to talk about the mass election fraud and examples on a big stage and beat them with their own tools of corruption. But Trump is a former president, and presidents don’t answer to the mob, especially when it was that same mob that stole an election, killed people with Covid by inventing the mess, working with China to release it, then denying medicine to people so that the virus could spread all so they could steal an election and destroy the economy of America. So Trump isn’t going to speak at the January 6th garbage. We’ll have an election that forces all those people out of office, and they will lose power that they never really had because they will be forced to deal with the reality that people do not like them. The Liberal World Order has failed to breed more like them in our public schools and colleges, as they had planned to. And after a century of work, people still want someone like Trump rather than some “elite” snot-nosed loser who thinks of America as an aristocratic nation, which it never was. America was meant to function without the Liberal World Order in charge of people’s lives, which is evident after all the effort put forth that clearly, those are still the priorities of the vast majority in American politics. 

Shortly after the last election, I was so angry at Joe Biden and the Liberal World Order that I left in my RV and headed out into the deserts of New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, and many places in between. I found myself at the World’s Largest Truckstop in Iowa, and I stood in the middle of that giant store and just took a deep breath. That was America. I saw people there who are the same people who flock to the Trump rallies. Who are the rednecks the media is complaining about hanging out at Trump’s home? The people that the Liberal World Order hates, yet there they were gathered all in one place, and they were flag-waving patriots who, in most cases, just wanted to be left alone by their government and to eat a hot dog on a bright and sunny day with the American flag flying overhead. A few days later, I found myself at Wall Drug in South Dakota, and that pro-American sentiment was even stronger. That was  America, and the Liberal World Order couldn’t touch it. They certainly didn’t understand it. And that is why they are losing, and are losing power during the upcoming elections. They grew up thinking that the world was theirs, and only now do they realize that they weren’t more intelligent than the rednecks and flag-waving patriots who shop at Walmart, wear cowboy hats and want to pull their homes with them on vacation when they only get 8 miles per gallon while doing it. They’ll pay the price so they can have their own stove, refrigerator, and a bed that they don’t have to share with the losers from the Liberal World Order, the spoiled brats and malcontents of aristocracy that died in Europe several centuries earlier. Only liberals didn’t get the memo and thought they could hide the information from the world with stolen elections. But obviously, they couldn’t. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Want to be Free: Learn to wear a hat

The problem is that people talk about fighting for freedom, but often by the time they are voting age adults, they are so beat down with compromise that they no longer know what freedom is or why they should be fighting for it. We talk about it all the time, fighting for freedom. Yet very few people are remotely free in their lives; they have bosses at their jobs, spouses often working at odds with them, and peer pressures in their neighborhoods. Medical professionals always tell us what to do, which was common before Covid became a government policy disaster. Then there are the various governments in our lives, the local zoning board as to whether or not a water garden can be built on our private property, whether a state governor can ruin our lives with lockdowns and other fears of economy, or an executive branch at the federal level who will sign a piece of paper that could actually destroy our physical bodies with a vaccine mandate. Most people are so burdened with obedience to many other people in their lives that they have no idea what freedom is or what they should be doing with it. So it’s hard for them to know why they should be fighting for it or even why they should value it at all. Oddly enough, as I was thinking about all these things, I have grandchildren who are at that magical age of deciding who they will be for the rest of their lives. They were asking about these matters, for which I gave them their first hats and told them why I have always worn a hat of some kind and what benefits it can provide them in the quest for personal freedom and benefit their lives in magnificent ways. 

One of my favorite hat stores in America, at Jackson Hole, Wyoming

It was a pretty good moment to explain why I have always worn a variation of a cowboy hat all my life to my grandchildren because they wanted to know. But the message has value well beyond family advice on how to live a better life, which is worth sharing. I learned early in my life that being unique was a freedom that had value in it, and to protect that freedom when you are too young to fight it off physically and mentally, is to shake off your attackers with audacity. So, I wore hats to declare my own unique look. Being young or old and having hair or not are conditions of nature, but wearing a hat was a proclamation of controlling your own appearance by choice, by invention. Even in the third and fourth grade, I started this process, and I wore my hats even to bed at night, and I found that within that simple measure, I was teaching myself to love personal freedom and making decisions that showed I had control over my appearance and was not a victim to public opinion. Of course, whenever you make such a declaration, people will make fun of you for it. And sometimes, those opinions can be brutal. It is amazing how threatening to people a kid wearing a hat can be, but I heard some of the worst and most violent talk when I was age 10 through 15 that you can imagine, just because I showed up in public places always wearing a hat. But those were some very valuable years because I learned not to care. And as I learned not to be shaped by the opinions of others, I learned to have real independence in my life, which has dramatically frustrated a significant number of people. 

We all wear hats in my family, always have

We were indeed a better society during periods where people wore hats, even though the social stigma favored them, such as during the Revolutionary period with the tri-cornered hats that were common to the day. Or the cowboy hats of western expansion. Then there were the fedoras of the roaring twenties up until the socialist incursions of the 60s. Hats were a statement of independence and control over nature. If it started raining, you could use your hat to shield your head from the elements of chaos coming in the form of weather. If you were balding, you could fashion your own style of cosmetic appearance with a good hat. Hats showed individual taste, they could be whatever color you wanted, and they projected your values to the world. But to those who wanted to reject those values, hats were dangerous because they showed individual expression, which was a real threat to the collectivist intentions of Marxism. Some of the cruelest comments that came in my direction about my hats as a kid came from the drug user class of long-haired hippies and dope smokers. When I wore a hat, it threatened them and their desires for social conformity. That safe place where a stoned mind and social camouflage could insulate them from the opinions of others. They certainly didn’t want to stand out in a crowd; they wanted to blend in. And when they saw someone who didn’t feel those social fears, it truly scared them. 

At that Jackson Hole hat shop, getting my latest one steamed to shape

I told my grandchildren that people would ridicule them for wearing their hats in public. Anything they show to the world that they valued would be ridiculed to no end, and if people could steal their hats and destroy them, they would do it to punish them for even wearing them in public. I explained that people are cruel because they don’t want to live up to the expectations of personal independence and crave to hide in the shadows where it’s safe. Wearing a hat publicly was a declaration of independence and a real threat to their existence. So be ready for anything and everything. But the benefit would be that by the time you are an adult, which will be most of your life, you will have been well practiced in being your own person. Nobody really cares what you look like after age 30, so don’t waste your lives trying to look like a teenager.

Enjoy your life no matter how old you are. Wear a hat that reflects who you are and how much you like it. Don’t let them make you feel bad for self-expression. And by the time you are 40, 50, and 60 years old, nobody will care if you wear a hat in public. They’ll avoid you most of the time, but making fun of you will stop. So the task of being young and out of control of your social circumstances because so many other factors are still governing your lives is to learn not to care what the opinions of others are. And when you do that, you will gain valuable freedom that will spill over into other parts of your life and enrich yourself. To have real freedom in life is to be free of the opinions of others. Once you do that, you can understand freedom’s basic premise and why it’s worth fighting for. A society of people who have worn hats to express that freedom had a better ability to maintain that freedom. But a society of people who care too much about what other people think are not going to understand why freedom is worth fighting for. Because essentially, they aren’t free anywhere in their lives if they constantly fear what the opinions of others are. So as I told my grandchildren, wear your hats. Don’t listen to what people say to you, and learn to love the controversy. Because when people’s opinions no longer control your actions, you can start to see yourself as a free person.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Liberty Township Trustees Pass Resolution NO 2022-062: Taking leadership to preserve constitutional guidance based on what we learned from Covid

It’s good to talk about positive stories and the excellent work by the Liberty Township Trustees, Tom Ferrell, Steve Schramm, and Todd Minniear, to pass Resolution NO. 2022-062 (the Reaffirming Our Commitment to Constitutional Principles) on June 7th, 2022. It was something unique and memorable. It was good to see government on the local level taking proactive action that was meaningful. And as I pointed out in speaking in favor of it, after Covid and the many government failures in reaction to it, the investment world needed something to reassure everyone that should something as disastrous as Covid ever happen again, there was a plan to deal with it. We, at this point, have to plan for some form of that eventuality in the political world we live in, that at the very least, local government will work on behalf of the people of their community to at least ask constitutionally based questions on the merits and legality. It was a horrible circumstance that all our laws and regulations were turned away from our systems of elections and were turned entirely over to health officials in Ohio and Butler County, which were unconstitutional in many tragic ways. So it took a considerable amount of leadership from the Liberty Township Trustees to take a proactive measure to reassure the public that local government was still in charge and would be in the future.

https://gettr.com/vision/p1dcmfd6b99

At first, when this idea of talking about making Liberty Township something of a Constitutional Zone it sounded to me like a redundant message. After all, all public officials take an oath to the Constitution, both federal and state, so by saying that they were a Constitutional Township was like saying the sun was out on a sunny day at the beach. That is until I went to Liberty Center to have lunch and noticed that the playground there was still shut down after two years of Covid protocols. Many of those protocols look ridiculous in hindsight. Still, when the playground was shut down, there had been movies about pandemics and various zombie apocalypses that had satisfactorily terrified the public, which health officials exploited for global gains of political power, which is a subject that we could write books on. Those books are emerging to tell those stories of deceit and corruption. But as to kids and the playground at Liberty Center, it’s a nice place in what I consider one of the best shopping destinations in America. Parents have enjoyed taking their kids there to let them play indoors and in air conditioning. The food court is right there, so it is a nice place for the community to come and interact with each other. But after two years of Covid, it was still shut down, even as most of the rest of society had gone back to normal. As I ate my food, the lights were mostly out, many of the upstairs portions of the mall were vacant of store activity, and it looked like a pretty sad situation. 

So I called up Todd Minniear, who is one of the newest Liberty Township Trustees, and asked him what was going on with the mall. Were Covid protocols still keeping these guys from opening up their play area? As it turned out, mall management wasn’t sure how to proceed. They were waiting on someone from the government to come and tell them that it was alright to reopen. But of course, nobody was ever going to come from the government to do so, so the poor playground was left in limbo, leaving that whole upstairs portion of the mall to have very little social activity.   I couldn’t help but add up in my head how many potential investors who might want to open a store in the mall saw this sad sight and moved on. If they had seen kids playing and parents enjoying talking and eating from the food court, they might have made a few million dollars of investment into a new store at Liberty Center, which it needs. Brick and mortar stores are a challenge under great economic conditions. So under a Biden economy, that only gets trickier. After some telephone tag that went on for a few weeks, Liberty Center found it was able to reopen its play area to the public, so it’s open now. Shortly before attending the Constitutional Resolution for the next Liberty Township meeting, I had lunch there again. This time it looked like I remembered it: kids playing, parents enjoying watching them, and having a nice place to sit and have some food. The lights were on, and things looked alive again. There was some exciting new construction on the second floor, somebody had made some investments, so it was a good story. One that should have never been bad in the first place, but it would be good to see something good happening that people could now enjoy. 

For many, it is a terrifying prospect to have to go through something like Covid again. I have several copies of the state and federal constitutions that I refer to often, and by reading them, there is no reason to be concerned. I felt that way during the entire Covid shutdowns in Ohio and across the nation; every case that was put before the courts challenging the health directives was losing. We should never have done half the things that were done in reaction to Covid. The real science shows that there were medicines available at the time that could have easily contained it as a public menace. The problem was in the new way that we allowed health experts to gain control through an emergency, the management of our country. We had never seen something like that happen before, and it certainly wasn’t the fault of Liberty Center in following the orders that flowed down to them from the state.   But in the aftermath, no leadership from those same experts came out in public and said, “it’s safe again.” Or, “sorry, there was never really a danger; we overreacted. Sorry if we destroyed lives and cost everyone billions of dollars, trillions of dollars nationally. We’re sorry.” No, they just stayed in their offices and left everything to the rest of the world to figure out. So Liberty Center was in limbo until Todd Minniear started making phone calls and asking questions. From the mall management side of things, they would expect someone from leadership in the community to ask those questions and get the answers, which is how the playground reopened. And the story ended up being a good one. 

Resolution No. 2022-062 passed with a surprisingly large crowd clapping, and all the Trustees seemed to enjoy a positive thing for a change. After the meeting, I was able to talk to Steve Schramm and Tom Farrell, who were eager to tell me about all the things that go on behind the scenes where they fight for the Constitution and the protection of Liberty Township all the time. The trouble is that the public doesn’t see all those phone calls and questions. All they know is that Covid shut down the world once, and they needed to know that someone who represented them would be able to ask questions and challenge health directives in the future should something like that happen again. Because without that guidance, those investment dollars might just stay someplace safe and not flow into some new project. As we saw with Covid, the uncertainty of medical tyranny might just return. Only this time, the Trustees had proclaimed that they were there to help and would ensure that the rules of the Constitution would prevail in Liberty Township. Which, for many people, was a reassurance they desperately sought from somebody offering leadership after two years of scary indecision and protocols that were abruptly un-American.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Thank Goodness for the 1st and 2nd Amendments: As long as the bad guys follow the rules of our Constitution, they don’t have to worry

I am very grateful for two things that have obviously been tested these last couple of years; the 1st Amendment and the 2nd. If not for free speech, the Dr. Fauci/Bill Gates’s plan to take over the world with vaccines and government-mandated medicine would have had nothing to stop it. People were able to get information and make decisions based on free speech. Then, of course, what stopped a complete takeover of our legal systems in the world, especially in the United States, was our 2nd Amendment. We have so many guns in America that people personally own. At no time was a tyrannical government able to go door to door to harass us as they did in New Zealand and Australia during the made-up Covid pandemic. Made-up because the world’s governments conspired for Bill Gates funding to deny hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to the public to stop Covid. Because of free speech, we learned that the governments and their sponsors were lying to us, and if they could have used force to shut us up, they would have. In America, because of our guns, that was never an option. Instead, it has scared people for a good reason, but our attackers have had to come at us differently by attacking us through finance, medicine, and stolen elections. But they could not attack us door to door, so I am very thankful to be where we are in the spring of 2022. It’s not that the danger of these attacks has been averted. But I feel we have a fighting chance to fix these problems now that the bad guys have been exposed, and if not for the 1st and 2nd Amendments, that never would have happened. 

The number one question I get asked all the time is “what’s under my leather vests,” which I wear everywhere I go. I show my .50 caliber Desert Eagle in the video, which I don’t do often. They call it “concealed” for a reason. But the questions come because many people also want to start carrying, which I highly recommend. We have a safer world when more people carry weapons. I never plan to shoot anybody, but knowing that I can handle whatever anybody throws at me with ill intent gives me the peace of mind to think better about the world I’m living in. The bad guys always want to rule through fear, and a gun-carrying public takes that fear away, which allows us all to have an entirely different conversation. Of course, I wear the big leather vests to allow me to conceal that big gun that holsters comfortably under my arm. The weapon is too big to fit in a waistband or other hidden part of the body. So I have adjusted my attire to accommodate the large-caliber semi-automatic gun. One of the rules of carrying a personal gun is that you should carry the biggest one you can handle. I have found that 9mm and other regular caliber guns are just too small for my liking.   Bad guys can purchase armor for their bodies off Amazon and reinforce their windshields these days easily to be bulletproof. It’s a lot easier now than when I was younger to get access to armor. So I carry my guns to be able to deal with anything that might be thrown in my direction. I don’t just carry that Desert Eagle, of course. I am always prepared for a small army to engage with me out in public, and I have good reason to feel that way. But having the guns makes it so that I don’t have to worry about it. The fear comes from not knowing what you would do or could do if such a thing were to come up. With my method, I don’t have to worry about it. 

For years theories were bouncing around from the political left that wanted to believe that a large centralized government, if it was strong, could keep people safe, so there would be no need for guns. Well, that argument is long gone now, which I think is much better off than we were a few years ago. Back then, it was theory. Now we’ve seen them make their move with all the force we feared. We’ve seen the administrative state spiral out of control, as they did over Covid. So never again do we have to debate about the right to carry a gun in public or to have them in our homes. The reaction that the states have had overall this trauma has been healthy. Instead of going to more restrictive gun laws, they have loosened, and this has been with the NRA pretty much on their heels due to Soros-backed prosecutors trying to destroy them.   I have had a concealed carry permit for years, but now half of the states in America have “constitutional carry,” which is even better. It recognizes that people don’t even need a permit to carry their guns on their bodies or in their cars, and this has been a direct response to the encroachments of government during Covid. We will never be able to trust a centrally planned government. The public reaction has been to de-centralize that government and give it far less power to rule over our lives. The world’s governments showed their cards, and nobody wants to be in the situation that we just saw the Ukrainians go through. Those poor people have been stuck between one bad government and an attacking one. Without guns, they were helpless to stop the mess. At least we have been able to stop the mess with personal gun ownership in America. 

I will always live in a society that can carry a gun. I’ve always felt that way, and now I feel quite vindicated. Even in the scariest parts of the Covid lockdowns, when the streets were almost completely vacant to traffic due to the ridiculous Mike DeWine stay-at-home orders, I felt in control of my own life because of my concealed carry options. I was ready for anything, so I could afford to think about whatever else I wanted, which allowed me to see things for what was going on and to use the 1st Amendment to its full effect, which defeated the evil intentions cast upon us. As long as the bad guys follow the rules of our society, which are established clearly in our state and federal constitutions, there won’t be a need for any fighting. And there is no reason to have any gunfights. But if they don’t follow our nation’s laws, they have lots of reasons to worry, and that’s how it needs to be. I am proud of that ability to carry because we have been tested, and it worked to keep us safe. Carrying guns was the thin blue line that kept our society lawful as attackers had shown their cards to molest it. We’ve talked about it all my life, about the possibility of giving up guns and moving as a culture to a more trusting population of centralized government. Well, that’s over now. I will never live in a gunless society. I will never facilitate talk of gun control. And I am proud that so many states have responded to these last few years with constitutional carry expansion instead of more restrictive laws. Ohio even has “Stand Your Ground” now, which just a few years ago would have been unfathomable. The Zimmer case in Florida was meant to erode that trend, but under Covid, those arguments have been completely thrown out the window. And we are a much better society because of it. Because of personal carry with guns, we are a much more lawful society. It is the primary condition for preserving our constitutional republic and to keep it standing.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Truth about Truth Social: Worth the wait and the first step in Making America Great Again

I remember it extremely well; it was just over a year ago, relative to the time of this writing, and my wife and I were in Lincoln County, New Mexico. I was exploring the courthouse where Billy the Kid had made his famous escape, and I felt very reflective. I was so angry over the Biden theft of the American presidency. I was even more furious at how the media and liberals had treated Trump over the last four years. In the past, when their people were in the White House, “they” being the Desecrators of America, those who fight to destroy it instead of preserve it, we always treated them with fairness. We always lived by the concept of rule of law and Constitutional limits on behavior. But at that moment, I was thinking very seriously about going Billy the Kid on society in general, so the famous escape from that courthouse was on my mind. Trump had recently been kicked off his Twitter account, and we could see the plot of what many had planned for a long time. We were being hunted as conservatives, and the message was clear. We did not control our own election. We did not control our country. We were going to get Joe Biden, and we were going to like it. And if we resisted, we were going to be banned from all public life and hunted down for the rest of our days. To say I was angry at the world was an understatement. So my wife and I left to live in the deserts of New Mexico for a bit, to get our wits about us once again. I found some sanity in the idea that Trump might start his own social media company and that from there, we would strike back at these dark forces and turn the tables on them for good.

I am incredibly pleased to say that Truth Social is now a reality. I’ve been on it since the first day, and I absolutely love it. It is great to see daily postings from Melania Trump, Dan Scavino, and many other Trump insiders again. I stopped looking at Twitter when they kicked Trump off. Still, now that President Trump has started Truth Social, I can see the path to restoring our country back to greatness because it puts communication and entertainment back under our control.   At that moment in New Mexico that I described, I wondered if things would ever feel good in America again. But now, I’m sure of it. What happened to Trump and many of us who were shadowbanned, or even literally banned from Twitter, Facebook, and from Google in general, are options. We now have the best kind of thing in the world, a choice. A choice in America will defeat every evil intention the world tries to place upon us. When you choose, it forces all the bad stuff to hide in the shadows, which has happened since that year. Revenge has been served through choice.

First, Jason Miller from the Trump campaign started his own social media platform, Gettr, which I think is fantastic. I have been using it almost exclusively.   With all the betrayals of Fox News and even Newsmax, it has been Steve Bannon’s the Warroom that has filled the void for the MAGA movement. And Gettr has been the place to interact with them and other conservative media outlets like Real America’s Voice and OANN. When the Desecrators formed the plan to take down America, they planned for all the media companies to be in the bag with the Davos guys. They had it all set up, making it so that Fox News would be the last to fall, which was evident on election night when they called Arizona right at 8 PM, as there were still voters in line voting. The gig was up, and the other side was spiking the football, thinking the game was over for good. But Trump and the rest of us are not passivists. We turned to our own abilities, which is always the thing to do. If we don’t like what the progressives want to give us, we should just go off and make our own thing. And in doing that, it destroys the plans the other side has. They have no plan B. 

I really like Truth Social, now that it came open at the beginning of March of 2022. I know the line is long, and it’s taking people a long time to get into it. There are millions of people trying to get in, so they are seeping new users in slowly to maintain system stabilization. It took Twitter years to handle its users, and the demand for Truth Social is much more robust. But by the time we have the next election cycle in 2022, there will be millions of people there who are very active in the MAGA movement. There will be plenty of social media alternatives to use, which will keep everyone connected. And that is a relief. A much better situation than what I spoke about from Lincoln County, New Mexico: at that time, something like a Truth Social media platform seemed like a remote fantasy. But I’m happy to report that it is very much a reality. I’ve only been on it for a few days, and I’m already at 2K with followers. I have always been shadowbanned by the big tech companies, and instantly, on Truth Social, you can see that it genuinely is a free-speech platform. It’s a huge difference for me. 

And what’s best, it’s classy. It reminds me of what a Trump property feels like when you visit one. It has a Trump quality that extends beyond the hate and vitriol of the hostile leftist media culture. I think I do a pretty good job dealing with people of all kinds of backgrounds. I can talk to anybody professionally, even the bluest bleeding liberal. But I don’t want to hear from them in my personal time; I don’t want to see them. I want to be away from them as much as possible, and the wimpy little “Tweets” from Twitter were always no fun for me. Places where the entire platform felt like the Santa Monica Pier in L.A. filled with liberalism and a lack of wisdom, were always uncomfortable. It is good to have a quality place like Truth Social that feels slicker, smarter, and bigger. It feels more American than any of the other social media platforms ever have, and that is refreshing and well worth the wait. I’ve been through this process several times, most notably with Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.

I used to be friends with some of the people who started that, and I always had high hopes. But creating a big social media platform seemed on a prohibitive scale. But obviously, it’s not. It only took a year, and now Trump has a place where he can communicate with his supporters, and they can healthily bypass the media. The media and the Desecrators always planned to stick themselves in the middle of that process; now, we have a means of communicating and thinking that steps around those hostile agents. And I can’t say enough good about it. It’s nice to see how far we’ve all come in such a short time. That effort will only grow in the months and years to come. And I’m glad I held it together and kept my temper in check that day in Lincoln County. I think Truth Social is a much more productive way to make things right than what I was thinking. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What Freedom Means to Me: ‘The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline’

What Freedom Means

Another treasure that has come out of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is yet another wonderful book called The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline. I would say that my visit to that excellent museum in Cody, Wyoming was equivalent to discovering a massive chunk of gold and igniting a gold rush in California or South Dakota. It was a rich experience that has produced treasures that kept on giving. I saw many very wonderful things in America during 2021, but so far, my visit to that Center of the West and the books I found there have been life-changing, given the state of the world we are all experiencing. I went there looking for answers, and I found plenty. And within that book about Ned Buntline, which was an alias for the real person E. Z. C. Judson, was a passage that I thought was particularly potent. You see, Ned Buntline was at his time one of the most prolific writers in America, in the world for that matter. He influenced people like Mark Twain and later would give birth to the Republic serials, the movie career of John Wayne, create Buffalo Bill, and essentially launch modern entertainment as we know it now. But I found a passage particularly relevant to me which said by Judson, “I found that to make a living I must write trash for the masses, for he endeavors to write for the critical few, and do his genius justice, will go hungry if he has no other means of support.” I have never read a more accurate statement. 

Obviously, I write a tremendous amount of material. I always have, and it is the most frequent question I get asked. “Why do you do it,” they say. Well, I would say I do it because I love it. And also cherish my freedom to such an extent that I do not want other people involved in my doing it. When you sell writing, you bring others into the process, and I have found that I hate giving up those freedoms. In my early years, I wrote in newspapers and online periodicals, such as American Thinker and such things. I had frequent contact with Wilshire Blvd. agents in Hollywood as I was in the mode to sell screenplays to get into the movie business. I didn’t think that I was very attached to those bodies of work, but I discovered that I wouldn’t say I liked to work within the confines of editors who all had a liberal slant compared to my positions. I remember sitting in an office with an agent who wanted to represent me and listening to them tell me that I needed to tone down the violence of an award-winning screenplay that I had called The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia because it would turn people off. I thought that was nonsense, and later that year, Kill Bill came out, which was along the same lines as what I was writing, and it was very successful. It wasn’t the violence that the agent had a problem with. Instead, it was just their way of sticking their nose into my work and shaping it into something they could relate to, which happens all the time.

I’ve written books, short stories and been in contact with just about every publishing house that exists, and they all left the same bad taste in my mouth. I learned over time that the only way to write for a living was to do as Ned Buntline did, to listen to the editorial critics and focus on the masses. But to me, that felt cheap, and it made me not love the writing process. So I decided to make a living in different ways; I had many other talents, after all. Did I really need to sell my writing? Of course not, life is what you make it, and if you love what you do and don’t really care who sees it, then there is a certain freedom to it that has much more value. In these modern times where newspapers are irrelevant, there are plenty of options for the self-publisher who can write for themselves, and if a critical few enjoy the work, good for them. So that is how I came to write so much in the way that I do. That is also why there aren’t more writers out there unveiling the truth about things, because they always have editors who reel them in from the touchy stuff, like talking about Covid, election fraud, or whatever company policy the publisher has. To be free in life, you have to function without the restrictions of other people’s opinions.   They may not like what you are doing; you may find that you write for only that critical, vital few. But it’s better work, it’s more important because of its authenticity, and it feels better as a person to produce it. 

I thought this was all particularly important, at least to me, in defining freedom. We talk about it all the time. But when we say it, what do we want freedom from? In a free market system, we should all be free within reason to pursue our own way in life without some centralized government pointing us in the direction of their deficiencies. And just because you are free, there is no promise that people will like what you do. But with Ned Buntline, would he have traded authenticity for all his fame and fortune? In life, he was a crazy person with all kinds of deficiencies, many of which I would attribute to a genius that had to be snuffed out to write material for those masses to make a living. The contrast in that life was too much for him, and he lived a reckless and uninhibited, sometimes lawless life. We often see it in such people who know better than to live the confines of a life controlled by others. They turn to the bottle or reckless relationships with other people and find themselves damaged as people as a result all too often. That is the cost of a lack of freedom in people’s lives. Everyone has to figure out what freedom means to them. For me, it’s being able to do what I love without other people sticking their noses into the process. Writing is not a collaborative process where movie making is. I prefer to write what I want, let people think what they want, and do whatever happens as a result.

Meanwhile, I’m on to the next dozen topics, which is how it is with me. And I love it that way. Freedom for me is not being stuck in the mud of other people’s lives, especially the government. And I love it so much that I prefer not to sell my work to the masses but to produce it for myself and share it with whomever. But never to be stuck or shaped by the opinions of others. And in that way, I am one of the freest people on earth, and I will continue that way. So when we talk about freedom, we have to define what that is for ourselves. When I am asked why I write so much, that passage in The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline says it all. And it says much more about the freedoms we all expect as Americans when we point at a government and call it tyranny. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Intellectual Capital: What Ray Dalio and other billionaires miss in financial portfolios and quests for freedom

Intellectual Currency

There are many kinds of currency in our society.  We tend to focus on financial currency, and our governments emphasize that measurable standard because it’s easy and obvious.  But many currencies are instigated to measure value.  So when I criticize people like Ray Dalio for all his Chinese investments, or George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerbucks, and many others, it’s because I don’t have a lot of value for the way they measure currency.  Most of the people I know, people I associate with, are millionaires or more.  I know what they did to get the money, I don’t think of making money as being hard, and it’s easy to see the faults of their life from my perspective because I value a different kind of currency in life.  Because they think of finance as their most important measure of wealth, most people believe that a billionaire is at the top of our pecking order in society.  But I don’t think that way at all.  I think money is easy to make, and I make what I need to get through a day or a year.  I see those types of people as an evolving group, and they are not as free as I need to be in life because with all their financial entanglements come claims on their time and energy, which I find objectionable.  Making a million dollars is not hard.  Just do something that people want to pay a million dollars for, and you’ll have it.  No, there is a lot more to currency than just financial, and for me, the most significant measure of value in human scale is what I call “intellectual capital.” 

My oldest grandson has a currency that he invented that lets me know that he had a good time visiting with me.  He allows me to buckle him up in his mom’s car when he leaves. That’s his way of showing value for our visit without getting all mushy about wordy exchanges.  When a wife grants sex to a husband even though she may not feel like being poked and prodded due to the stresses of life, it’s usually to express appreciation for a nice lawn mowed, a car fixed, or a paycheck deposited into the bank account, one less thing to be stressed out about.  Sex is a kind of currency in a marriage that has value and promotes a healthy economy under the roof of a house.  Humans have many ways of generating currency and showing that they are willing to pay something to get something that everyone agrees is of value.  In the video above, I tell a little story about a very beautiful woman I know who is married, but she’s always on the lookout for male attention. She’s not really interested in men for men’s sake, but she does have a love of exotic cars.  She loves Lamborghinis.  And she has traded her womanly traits with other men who have bought her a few of them.  What her husband thinks of these cars in her driveway is a good question.  But people work the currencies of their lives in their own unique ways depending on their values.  So when it comes to politics, we must deal with all the kinds of currencies there are, not just the financial ones.  And if we could point to one thing that is the source of all corruption in politics, our value for politics is not the same as our politicians have.  They measure things in financial capital, looking for more intellectual capital from elected officials. 

So, when its said, “well, you’re not a billionaire.  Who are you to criticize Ray Dalio?  He does a lot of good in the world, gives his money to lots of charities, makes a lot of people wealthy with their stock portfolios, and is a generous man who writes books to share the wealth with others.” I say, yes, he makes a lot of money and shares it with others like some global grandparent.  But there’s more to the story, he has invested in China at the expense of America and is perpetuating a global system of government that erodes American sovereignty.  The values of that American sovereignty are not measured using financial capital but of intellectual capital.  Our right to think, do, and say what we want in our lives and to produce GDP based on our vast imaginations and intellect is what is harmed by people like Ray Dalio.  Those types of investments don’t show up well on a stock portfolio.  But they show up in mysterious ways to financial planners blind to those measures when they count the product that is made, money.  People like Ray who work strictly with financial capital often miss the ingredients that make money.  They know how to measure money once it is made.  But they don’t really understand what makes money to start with, which is intellectual capital. 

Most of my life has not been built around financial portfolios or banking relationships.  I view the making of money as a secondary thing.  What is valuable to me, and what people often are willing to pay for in regards to me, is my intellectual capital, my portfolio of ideas that have been built by a lifetime of experience in thinking outside the box.  There are talks of boycotting people like Elon Musk, an intelligent guy, but if China needs a massage, Elon must give it to them because he requires their car batteries.  Suppose some billionaire must take up climate change as a political position to keep government out of their pockets with excessive taxation. In that case, they are stuck uttering things they don’t believe so that they can stay in business.    The point of the matter is that our current political movement needs to understand that the battle is fought not in financial capital.  Governments and mobs have found ways to capture financial capital and to manipulate all of society based on their ability to steal it.  But for me, I purposely don’t have millions of dollars in the bank.  I could put millions of dollars in the bank tomorrow, and so could anybody who has developed their intellectual capital to such a degree.  But the world’s governments cannot steal what’s in my head.  They can’t steal my thoughts.  They can’t tax what I have invested in to put knowledge in my head. What’s in my mind is mine, and that is the wealthiest attribute a human can have.  Once people understand that, the power of government loses all its ability, and they will wither in front of us like dried leaves in autumn.  The purpose of this story is to express to you, dear reader, that the way to beat these oppressive forces is not to play their game of financial capital. Instead, stick with intellectual capital.  It’s all valuable, and to my experience, intellectual capital is far more beneficial.  It can make millions of dollars.  But it can also do much more, which is what real freedom looks like.  It’s not just property rights and physical inventory that give power to people.  It’s what they think, what they know, and how they apply it to wealth creation that genuinely matters.  Ray Dalio and all the other billionaires secretly know this, and they are always in service to those who can think of new ideas, which makes them inferior in every way humans measure value.  And those, my friends, are the rules of the universe.  Use them to significant effect and maintain your personal freedom accordingly.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How to Defeat the Administrative State: Why being free is profitable

How to Defeat the Administrative State

I wrote my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because of the necessity in business and life in general to defeat the administrative state.  One of the most significant objectives in business cultures is to decentralize their operations and break down the silos that various departments often isolate themselves with tall walls of bureaucracy.  Most of the world is suffering under some form of administrative state.  When governments want communism, for instance, they want an expansion of the administrative state.   When people say they want to be freer, they want to have less restriction in their lives of an administrative state.  So it was my goal in that book to teach people to break down their limitations without destroying their organization by learning how to deal with decentralized administration and value the input of individual effort.  It will remain for quite a long time; the most significant problem humans have is their desire to create administrative states. Yet, their personal needs to function without them is what all life strives for.  The defining problem of Lean Manufacturing is to decentralize business operations with de-siloed methods.  But it never works well in America because, in Asia, people need less of an administrative state due to the nature of the people to submit to an authority figure, since they have always been accustomed to worshiping a king or emporer throughout their societal development.  That is why communism might appear to work in China, whereas it would never work in America because people will not follow directions from a centralized planner.  They might pay lip service to such instructional flow down. Still, Americans will always sabotage their central planners where in Asia, they individually accept their place in the scheme of things and follow directions in a decentralized way.

Decentralization, therefore, is the goal and the trend of all future societies.  How successful can an organization be if the administrative state is small and without teeth of authority?  I explain in my book why embracing decentralization of authority, there are more opportunities for success than in the slow, terrestrial administrative state filled with mind-numbing bureaucrats.  For instance, I like to use football metaphors, and the best teams on the field are those most decentralized.  If players have to look to the sideline for instruction from their coaches after each play, then coordinating all that activity in the face of constantly changing circumstances moment to moment while confronting the variables of an opponent, the chances for error are much greater. Instead, what the coaches should do is prepare each player between games for every circumstance, then once on the field, they can adapt through their onfield leadership on how to deal with the challenges they are dealing with.  For instance, coaching becomes much easier when a team has a great quarterback because you have leadership representation in the huddle, and audibles can be made much faster depending on the kind of defense presented.  That is the same in all things in life; if we wait for a centralized planner to tell us what to do, the opportunities for success in life, whether for the individual or a social group, are minimized and perhaps lost altogether.  When innovation and productivity are significantly reduced, people tend to be much unhappier, including people who function as members of the administrative state. 

One of my most common sayings is that I’ll trade my Black Belt for a gunbelt all the time.  In Lean Manufacturing, which uses terminology from oriental martial arts, the American perception of gunfighting is much more effective.  Where the martial arts of Asia are mostly a defensive fighting mode, not usually displayed for an attack on an opponent, such as a centralized authority, the American gunfighter showed traits where they could function as agents of justice even when the legal system was decentralized from the backing of a big government.  The frontier sheriffs such as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp were able to bring a sense of justice to developing towns in the Wild West through gunfighting that was unique in the world.  Never before in modern history, modern being the city-state’s development, did a nation form under the blank slate of natural human autonomy.  This is why to this very day, the political left, communists, socialists, even major corporations tend to seek sympathy for the American Indian, as they were soundly defeated during Westward Expansion.  They like the tribal Indian with all their administrative state, adherence to the gods of nature, the village chief, and social hierarchy formed in communal life.  When really, what we learned during Westward Expansion was the alignment of individual goals to the task of necessity.  For instance, President Grant made it known that there was personal wealth to be obtained in the Black Hills, which inspired many hungry individuals to risk it all in pursuit of opportunity.  When a great leader can align the needs of a business, or a nation toward an objective without imposing an administrative state in the way to slow everything down, great things can happen and did.  The centralized administrative state, the Indians, could not fight the decentralized frontier settler.  One was motivated by preserving a centralized authority. The other was driven by individual gain.  This is precisely the problem of our modern times with centralized authority for all kinds of reasons trying to pin down a society with the fear porn of Covid.  Americans pay lip service to authority but do what they want.  Other cultures where Covid was designed are quick to adhere to centralized planning, which ultimately fails because the administrative state is too insulated from reality to make the proper decisions in crisis management. 

When people look at the events happening to them right now and fear a global takeover of the “elite” of the “Davos Crowd,” I tell them not to worry.  The fight is not about force or even intelligence.  The administrative state will always have the same problems; they will always be too slow to solve issues in real-time as problems arise.  Yet, due to their desire for the safety of group affiliation, most human society seeks to create an administrative state as their first primal instinct. We’ve built our entire education system, our political system, our businesses, just about everything we do around the maintenance of an administrative state.  America was formed by people trying to get away from the overregulation of an administrative state. At the same time, the rest of the world suffers under much less personal wealth because they have been slowed down too much by an administrative state and its massive, slow-moving bureaucracy.  When centralizing order, such as visiting the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, regulation gains are at the expense of freedom and innovation.  That is why we all hate going to the BMV.  They are slow and uncompetitive.  Yet to drive, we all have to go to them and wait in the long lines because the government does what government does to their time frame.  That is always why our public education system designed by people like John Dewey doesn’t work, and it will never work.  We are teaching people to be members of the administrative state when the trend of the world is to be more decentralized.  So what people most crave in the world, even if they aren’t consciously aware of it, is to function successfully in a decentralized state, whether in their places of business, their neighborhoods or even within their families.  And it is our modern task to teach them how to let go of the burdens of the administrative state and function more as individuals, making nations great, businesses profitable, and lives much, much better off.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business