Tag: Government

A Monopoly on Violence: Elon Musk sees it, and soon will the rest of the world

The Government’s Monopoly on Violance

Elon Musk has said it in a couple of interviews toward the end of the year since Time Magazine has made him “Man of the Year,” that government has a lot of problems. He thinks that government should be a referee on the field but not a player in the game. And he has continued to say that one of the biggest problems with the government is that they have a “monopoly on violence.” I first heard these comments from him during a Wall Street Journal interview at a yearly think tank kind of thing they do in Washington D.C.  Then again, shortly after that, at a surprise sit down with the Babylon Bee, the online satire website. Many of us have been saying things like that for a long time. Elon Musk is obviously having an evolution as he runs his two major companies, Tesla and SpaceX, with the challenges of government regulation and global commerce that is trying desperately to move toward Chinese communism. The difference is that Musk cannot be canceled for saying what he does because he is at the front of the train on virtually everything. Actually, at a recent Joe Biden EV Summitt, Musk wasn’t invited, even though Tesla is undoubtedly the most important player when it comes to the electric car market. But instead of it looking bad on Musk, it blew up in the face of Biden, like everything does these days. So for Musk to say things about the government that are consistent with Tea Party positions over the last decade is quite a thing and certainly an indicator of things to come. When people like Musk are critiquing government correctly, many mainstreamers want the overflow of his money who will by default see things his way.

And isn’t that the heart of the problem with the government, that government has a monopoly on violence? That is precisely why they naturally are inefficient in everything they do because they never have to worry about someone calling them out as the big bullies. Or at least, that’s what they have assumed for a long time. That is why they feel they can start riots all over the country during 2020, trying to use racism to blame the Trump supporters for the unrest they created, but their real intent was to remove President Trump from office. But then when people went to Washington, a quarter-million people, to hear Trump give one of his final speeches and the frustrations spilled over into a mob at the Capitol building, the government felt it could arrest the participants and hold them in jail for some undetermined time ignoring completely any due process along the way. They also thought they could shoot Ashley Babbitt for no real reason and that there would be no recourse for their reckless actions. They felt they could arrest the participants of the January 6th, 2021 demonstration without any real just cause because of their monopoly on violence. In that case, they could have arrested people in all the mobs previously that were incited by the government, including on Inauguration Day in 2017 when President Trump was sworn in. The damage to Washington D.C. and other places was much more severe on that day, but as we have seen over the last several years, the government picks what it wants to enforce and abandons all laws when it’s not convenient to them. 

Then we have the FBI, which I have been talking about for a while now as one of the most corrupt law enforcement branches we have these days. They are obviously radical from top to bottom. They are not only corrupt at the top floor of the FBI in Washington. The revelations in the Whitmer case in Michigan prove that several FBI agents were involved in a set up of the Wolverine Watchmen, where several agents had penetrated the group and were trying to inspire them into criminal activity. Like it looks, they did on January 6th. The ideas for violence weren’t coming from the militia groups themselves, but from the FBI trying to plant ideas for violence to cause an action that they could then arrest people for entrapment. The corruption in the FBI is at the top level, the middle level, and certainly in every field office.

I know people who are in the FBI. I also know people in the Secret Service. Over the years, many people have worked for me who move off into these fields, and good for them. We always need people to do these jobs; like Elon Musk says, we do need referees to help keep the game honest. But we don’t need the government playing the game.   And when it comes to law enforcement, a badge doesn’t make a good person. Many people who have left me for some federal job I wouldn’t trust with a box of rocks, it’s not that they aren’t good people or were good employees. Yes, without good leadership around them, they go corrupt quickly, almost every time. I would never permit them to arrest people on fake FISA warrants in the middle of the night. What I have heard from the FBI, especially regarding their actions against President Trump, does not surprise me. And for what they have been caught in at the highest levels, you have to logically conclude that they are doing much worse where they never thought they’d get caught. 

Corruption in federal law enforcement, even localized law enforcement, comes from one common source when the government thinks that they have a right to inflict violence on you. Still, you are never allowed to give it back to them, so we have created a corrupt legal system. When power is given to anybody without some measure of regulation, that power will undoubtedly go to their heads. One of those employees I spoke about who used to work for me became a local cop. He was always good for me; he was a model employee. But without me, he spun out of control quickly, and soon he was pulling over carloads of young girls and scaring them with threats of jail and traffic tickets that they didn’t want their parents to find out about. So he and his fellow officers would force the girls to perform oral sex on them to get out of trouble. And it worked most of the time until someone finally came forward and reported what had been happening. By nature, no matter who it is, authority over others will corrupt everyone. The best measure against it is to remove any monopoly of violence. In our brilliant constitutional republic, we do have a measure of addressing that very issue, the Second Amendment. The only reason we have any sense of justice in America is because of gun rights. The government would have gone wrong beyond repair years ago without those gun rights. What’s terrible about these last few years is that the government has gone further in corruption than ever before because of the Trump election of 2016. They were so insulted that people would vote for someone like Trump that they have turned toward their monopoly on violence to commit some significant constitutional crimes, including what they have done with Covid. We will be sorting out that mess for many years to come, but the crimes were, and continue to be, reprehensible. But good things are happening, and when people like Elon Musk are where many of us have been for a long time, positive changes are on the horizon. And in this case, talking about the problem is the first step in fixing it. We no longer have the assumption that we can trust these government authorities. Left alone, they are prone to corruption at every level, and it is from there, we must take action to correct it in the future.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Don’t Forget to Watch, ‘Don’t Look Up’: In it, Hollywood shows why they are terrified of you

Watch ‘Don’t Look Up’

It was about a year ago when I sat down on my Rumble account and read off to the audience the 45 Planks of communist goals from the excellent book The Naked Communist. Many people at that time and for decades before were confused about the nature of our government and what they were really up to, going all the way back to the Department of Education during the Reagan years. I’ve been talking about these things for years, there was a time when I was a frequent contributor on radio stations and television, but like many of the modern Fox News personalities who now find themselves on alternative networks, like Newsmax, Real America’s Voice, and One America News, I was one of the first to be shadowbanned and ostracized because I saw too much and knew the truth long before anybody was really ready to admit to it. I even did some work in Hollywood during those years and quickly learned that my Cincinnati politics was not something any of them were willing to deal with. They all thought that if they controlled all those planks of communism listed in that book from 1957 as global objectives, they truly would rule the world. And in many ways, what I have been warning them out of kindness is coming true now that we are in 2022 and the midterms are coming up. I even noticed it while watching the U.C. v Alabama Cotton Bowl game on New Year’s Eve; the world that all these corporate types who took over our branches of government thought they were going to get is far from where real Americans are. Even though communists have taken over so many of our American institutions, they have not convinced Americans to accept communism. That was most notably obvious in the new Netflix film with some real powerhouse actors, Don’t Look Up. 

Don’t Look Up is something worth watching if you have a Netflix account. Anymore, I tend not to like Netflix. It’s primarily progressive material that does not represent what I’m interested in watching.   But I keep it so I can see what the other side is always thinking about, and Don’t Look Up is an obvious mirror to Hollywood and their obvious frustration that the 45 Planks of communism from The Naked Communist have not worked out the way they thought they would. The continued failure, which I have observed up close and personal among these media cultures, is the belief that culture is formed through art, not that art reflects life. When art is produced, for instance, out of the political or business realm, it is never effective. But when art comes from the realm of myth, well, then you can have life-changing circumstances that occur. Progressivism, socialism, communism are all products of the realm of politics. The MAGA movement and now the America First Policy Institute approach come from the realm of mythology, the core of American belief. There isn’t anything that any political class, business glass, or subcultural bubble can do to stop it. They don’t understand it, they have no desire to understand it, and their only reaction to these mysterious forces is to shut out people who challenge them, so they don’t have to face the music of their dismal failures.  

That is essentially what Don’t Look Up is, with its powerful all-star cast of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and many others is a mirror to Hollywood culture and its failure to wake people up to what they consider the impending doom of a Trump America. Meryl Streep essentially plays the President of the United States as Trump was but as a female version. It was almost a Saturday Night Live kind of hatred for Trump and his supporters that was an obvious mystery to Hollywood culture in general. In the movie, a giant planet-killing comet is headed for earth, and two astronomers work hard to let everyone know about it before the earth ends. They go to the President and get no significant reaction. So they hit the media culture and find that nobody in the world wants to hear about a comet that will end life on earth as the extinction event nears. The movie is essentially Hollywood perplexed about Trump voters and a culture that produced Trump as a candidate. Their blatant hatred of that culture seeps into every frame of the movie. I was perplexed why a major Hollywood project like this film, which was well funded and well-directed by Adam McKay, was going straight to Netflix. The reason was timing. Hollywood still believes that they could defend the Biden administration and the Climate Change objectives of the United Nations if they can get this message to Americans before it’s too late. For the director, and the actors involved, Don’t Look Up was a satire on reality, kind of like a modern version of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. But to the Netflix executives and the producers of Don’t Look Up, they have political hopes that they can rock the world with their silly little movie and change the nature of human beings in general. 

I say that last part out of personal experience, in talking with these types of people where they live and eat. I know what books they have read, what they learned in college, and how they speak at their parties. It’s communism that they have wanted because they are insecure by nature.   They lack identity, so they are actors because they need other people to give them identity. I thought all the actors in Don’t Look Up were fantastic in their roles. After the first act, I thought the movie was very well directed. The last part of the film went off the rails too much, almost like a desperate basketball team down 11 points with 1 minute to play and trying to full-court press and foul their opponent hoping to catch up while there was still time. But I was OK with it because essentially, the haters of America were showing their hearts in this movie. It was extremely revealing in just how scared they are of the rest of us, the majority of America who has not been seduced by communism even after all they have thrown at us. In so many ways, Don’t Look Up was an admission of failure and a desperate plea for another chance to convince us that communism is the way to go. People who wanted Trump and still want him as President are just stupid and can’t see the science of climate change, Covid, or the need for a global communist community run by China. Don’t Look Up pretty much says that very thing when the characters are frustrated over nobody in the world wanting to listen to them about the impending comet even when they could look up in the sky and see it for themselves. The entire movie was written and produced from that famous Santa Monica, California view of the world, a phony caricature of progressivism that has looted off the hard work of those who founded the area and are now inhabited by spoiled brats who have the philosophic grounding of a sliced potato in a garden of weeds. I would highly recommend the movie not for the reasons they want you to see it, but for all the reasons they don’t because it shows the cards of the political left going into 2022 and shows just how scared they are of the upcoming elections. And that is a wonderful thing to watch.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Political Climate Change Hoax: Yes, the Great Lakes are draining and will soon be gone

Climate Change is Rediculous

Oh my gosh, Greta Thunberg, an 18-year-old girl from Europe, is challenging Joe Biden on climate change. And California realizes that with all their hack and slash economic policies; they think they will save the earth; they won’t reach their emission goals until the next century. Meanwhile, the socialists of the world are making climate change the centerpiece of all their concerns displaying to everyone how little any of them know about actual science. To the smart people out there, they have seen the shell game. It’s the same stupid game that the left has been playing with Covid, phony statistics, phony scientists who are no better than whores on K-Street, that will say and do anything for a federal grant. They’ll “love you a long time” for the right price, and they’ll put anything you need in an Excel spreadsheet. But it came to a point for me while I was doing some additional research into the origins of life across North America. Hint, the Indians were not indigenous people in America; that too is a made-up lie meant to despair the creation of America in the first place. As I have reported in many places, some of the best archaeology we have in North America points to the mound-building culture that looks like it dates to the periods of Stonehenge. As it so happened, I was reading some of the books I recently bought at my last trip to Stonehenge and comparing them to the investigations into what is called “The Giants of Ohio,” and America in general, and that drew my eye to some of the radical swings in sea levels over just the last 10-15 thousand years. Yes, advanced people could easily have come into North America during the Archaic Period, and it’s pretty clear that they did, bringing with them a world economy that nobody has been thinking about over the last hundred years of academic study. 

Since I live in Ohio, the Great Lakes are a real treasure to the state that I think about. Most people know what they are and think of them as a kind of inland sea. Also, people might think of them as very old, but the truth was that they formed during the Ice Age, really in geological terms, was just yesterday. Humanity was building advanced societies, such as Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey. At that time in the world, the Great Lakes of Ohio and Michigan were former river valleys where massive glaciers were taking the path of least resistance, moving along slowly there. The weight of the glaciers was so great that they actually pushed down the earth’s crust in those locations displacing the curvature of the planet itself. As the ice melted, without the aid of global warming by manufactured contraptions, mind you, the water stayed in those low spots and formed the Great Lakes. The weight of the water and ice was negligible. However, when the mass changed, the water began to flow toward the St. Lawrence Seaway at an increased rate.

Fairly recently, scientists have discovered that the Great Lakes are actually draining at a rate faster than the rivers can supply them. Many in the region know that Niagara Falls is the point where all that water flows from Lake Erie into Lake Ontario. They also know that where the falls are currently will continue to move all the way down to Buffalo, New York, year by year by a few feet each time. It won’t take long before the falls are gone altogether. In fact, the whole of the Great Lakes, except for most of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, will be gone entirely in a few thousand years. Chicago will sit in the middle of nowhere with vast farmland to the east where people could walk over to Michigan. The same with Detroit and Cleveland. They, too, will be sitting on land that extends far into what used to be the lakes but will by then be vast expanses of farmland. The lakes are draining because the earth’s crust is trying to push up from under the weight of the water from where it was pushed down by the ice from the Ice Age. The more shallow the water gets from the lack of weight, the faster the landmass pushes up. In our lifetimes, we will see a significant loss of shoreline in those city areas because of this effect. Of course, none of this climate change results from a single human being. It’s just part of the lifecycles of the earth.

One thing that struck me when studying my books from Stonehenge and is something I learned about while visiting Dover on the east side of England facing France across the English Channel is that; just as the future of the Great Lakes, people used to be able to walk across the great body of water there. Back in the Ice Age, sea levels were several hundred feet below where they are now. Looking at the English Channel today, it seems impossible to consider such a thing. But that is what the latest science says. Ocean levels have constantly been changing, well before there were ever any people. My daughter and I had a wonderful time hiking Dover’s Cliffs, and I often think about it. We told my son-in-law and my wife that we were going to use the restroom and take a few pictures of the cliffs there and the massive English Channel. We’d be back in a few minutes, so they waited for us in the car. We came back seven hours later. It was an excellent adventure, but what made me lose track of so much time was in learning about these little details and how they have played out against the many changes the world has seen in geologic time. 

The point of the matter is that the climate change activists are phonies looking to convert capitalist cultures into communist ones and count on our ignorance to believe them. But reading a few books on the matter and just some casual investigation will prove that manmade climate change is a thing of politics. Climates have been changing on earth for millions of years. As humans, we have been lucky to have had our entire civilization spring up so quickly between these geological catastrophes, able to leave for space within a few thousand years. That is a miracle, and that is science. Trying to bend our economic system to some made-up whims of worshiping the earth is just downright stupid. And anybody who believes what these political hacks of climate science advocates say is ridiculous. Whether by accident or on purpose, the information to refute climate science activism is abundant. But like Covid, the government is seeking to exploit ignorance in favor of political power. And that is a game where the enemies of capitalism need to be defeated spectacularly. And just consider how pathetic their cause is, where they have an 18-year-old nobody as their spokesman. She’s not a scientist. She’s not the next Albert Einstein. She’s just a teenage girl. And that is the best thing that the climate change movement has going for it. Because the facts are not on their side, and anybody willing to look at them can see that quickly.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Stupidity of a Billion Dollars for Tri-County Mall: Its bad behavior that killed the shopping complex, money can’t fix that

A Billion Dollars for Tri-County Mall

Believe me, I want Springdale, Ohio, to succeed. My idea of going into the big city when I was a kid was going to the Tri-County Mall and the surrounding areas. They had everything there, and I have always loved it. When I was first married, the Forest Fair Mall opened just down the highway at Forest Park, and it had all kinds of exotic stores and places to eat, along with a movie theater. I thought I was in heaven. I raised my family in these malls, and I would love to see them stay alive. But I think the city council of Springdale is smoking crack if they think voting to spend a billion dollars on refurbishing the Tri-County Mall into a mixed-use development is going to work. It’s enormously stupid and is doomed to fail, and they should not do it. Instead, they need to understand why those malls failed, why all those stores and restaurants left, and make changes to their communities. Because if you don’t change the behavior of a community, throwing money at it won’t improve a thing. Instead, money is made in all economic activity because of behavior. Behavior is not changed by money. Behavior makes money. Bad behavior destroys money. 

From Springdale’s point of view and that of Forest Park, they blame Liberty Center’s success a few more miles north along I-75 for their demise. That state-of-the-art mixed-use community is a real treasure, and it’s where I go these days when I want to go out on the town. I love Liberty Center. It’s great to go see a movie. Eat at a nice restaurant. It has a traditional mall environment, and it also houses an outside mall area that feels like a downtown kind of atmosphere. But you know what it doesn’t have, thugs walking around with their pants half down acting like they will beat up all the customers. Liberty Center is privately managed to get rid of scum bags and losers when they threaten the positive shopping experience of the guests, and they do. They don’t put up with gangs of kids hanging out at Liberty Center, which is why the shopping area is doing well. That is also what destroyed Forest Fair Mall and Tri-County Mall. It wasn’t the change in box store status that came with online retail shopping. It was more that moms found it easier to shop for things from their living rooms rather than go to these malls where young people hang out and misbehave, dropping F-Bombs as they walk by and acting like they might be raped at any moment.  

This isn’t a racist thing; as much as progressives would like to make it so, it’s a behavior issue. When I was young, Tri-County and Forest Park were considered great places to live. Fairfield, which was just next to Forest Park, was voted in Playboy magazine to have some of the most beautiful girls in the country. I went to church in Fairfield. I dated lots of girls from Fairfield and Springdale. I used to be a driver for some of the old Cincinnati Bengals players after they retired, and they lived in Forest Park. I would take them home to their wives in their nice Forest Park homes. Those cities were family-friendly and full of economic prosperity. But as liberal politicians moved into their city councils and mayor positions, they brought many progressive ideas, which we all talk about now. But I was pointing all this out 20 years ago, and the writing for the decline was on the wall. The more liberalism moved into Springdale and the Tri-County area in general, the more that families moved out, north into Liberty Township, West Chester, and Mason. The smart money is left to get away from the bad behavior of progressive politics. And that same story could be said in just about every city that has seen its wealth leave, dropping the value of their communities to derelicts, government addicts, and substance abusers. People do not enjoy being around lousy behavior, and when they see it, they avoid it with other options. That is what killed Tri-County Mall and much of the retail in that area. The local government failed to protect their families by allowing bad behavior to move in and take power with some woke view of the world from a progressive perspective. 

Putting a billion dollars into the same bad behavior will not succeed in Tri-County. Case in point in Over-The-Rhine in downtown Cincinnati where Vine Street repurposed itself to give the illusion of a safe space. The problem is, the surrounding areas are still hives of gang activity and bad conduct up and down Liberty Street and around Findley Market. Instead of crime happening on those streets, gangs like the Glacier Gang follow millennials back to their homes in the suburbs of Sycamore Township and Mason and rob them there. It’s not something they are talking about on the news because they are afraid that people might stop going to downtown Cincinnati for a night out, but it’s a real problem that always stifles economic growth. Bad behavior kills the making of money. 

Oh, I’m sure people reading this who are in denial will say that such judgments are “racist” or are coming from the mind of “white supremacy.” Well, I’m none of those things. I would tell anybody who wants to know to interview any mom-type outside of the I-275 loop and ask them what they think of Tri-County. They’ll say openly that they don’t want to get robbed, raped, or groped because many moms over the last decade who have shopped at Tri-County Mall have been harassed in some way by gangs of youth who didn’t respect the shopping experience. Was getting raped an exaggeration on the part of the moms? Maybe, but it’s how they felt while going to the mall, so they instead turned to online shopping to avoid the threat altogether. Then once Liberty Center opened, they went there instead or made the drive over to Kenwood. With that said, Liberty Center has its own problems. It needs a government bailout as we speak because it’s not hitting the targets it needs to financially. Much of that is due to the changing market of box stores compared to online shopping. It’s a challenging environment these days under perfect conditions. But then-Governor DeWine of Ohio shut down the state economically, which hurt Liberty Center immensely. They still haven’t opened their playground there over liability concerns. The government often gets in the way of positive economic growth, which is undoubtedly the case at Liberty Center. 

To show how stupid government can be, just think of the Springdale City Council, knowing all I have said here but refusing to admit to themselves because of their progressive politics that somehow a billion dollars of investment will change anything. Who in their right mind will invest in a restaurant or store in this new complex knowing that the people who will be giving them money will likely bring trouble with them? And who is going to live in these new apartments? People who don’t care about getting their cars broken into? Or harassed as they are walking down the sidewalk with a gang of kids playing rap music out of the trunk of their car and selling pot out of the front seat? No, you can’t put lipstick on a pig and pretend it’s a flower. It’s still a pig, and until the government puts value on good behavior in their society, they will always see a loss of revenue 100% of the time. It’s a fundamental law of economic activity which progressives choose to ignore. But it certainly doesn’t make it any less relevant. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

No More Lockdowns: Unlike before, people now know that government doesn’t have the power

No More Lockdowns

I have been asked by many dozens of people over the last week of December 2021 whether or not we would have lockdowns again due to the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus.  What made things considerably worse for people was the decision of the Sixth Circuit Court to overrule the Fifth Circuit over the OSHA decision on Biden’s Executive Order making vaccines mandated.  All that happened around the same time that Biden had a nationwide address to talk about what the administration was doing about Covid spreading, panicking everyone into wondering if we were going to go through 2020 again.  So I’ll say here what I’ve told all these other people personally, no, we won’t be going through lockdowns again.  Now, if you live in a blue state or a blue city with some radical progressives making the decisions, you will see them try.  Democrats are polling terribly everywhere they are these days because they have been forced to pull off the masks they have been hiding behind for many years.  Now that people see what they are up to, they are running in the opposite direction.  The greatest thing to have come from the Trump presidency has been this pressure on progressives to show what they have always been about against a backdrop of pure capitalist endeavor.  I think people needed that lesson, and we are all better off for it.  But the most significant thing that happened, which I have watched happen over a great many years, but never better than with Trump, is that our population has learned about the American Constitution and its powers to limit government.  Now that people can see why that is important, they are fans of the Constitution in ways that will prevent further Covid lockdowns over a sustained period.

Just for review, there is no legal authority for a centralized government, even under emergency powers, to lock down our American society.  The planners of Covid assumed that people would trust their doctors more than they trusted the government, so they came up with Covid to attempt a global Great Reset of all capitalist economies into centrally planned ones, and many governors in America fell for it hook, line and sinker.  They weren’t exactly what you might call “constitutional scholars.” Hence, it was easy for communist health directors to take what the World Health Organization said, run by China essentially, and apply it in a centralized way in their states.  We certainly saw that behavior in Ohio with Mike DeWine.  He led the way for all the other states in America to go total authoritarian and break constitutional limits, all in the name of an emergency.  The government is not allowed to do any of that, even under a crisis.  Over the years, the government has abused this premise several times under provisions of the “greater good,” such as the New Orleans hurricane from several years ago, where the door-to-door arrests and gun confiscations were conducted under the umbrella of “safety.” So naturally, since it worked back then and these government tyrants took note, they were going to try it on something more significant and more far-reaching, convincing people to give up their constitutional rights under emergency conditions.  That is how the Covid approach was formed, and when they were able to trick President Trump into buying into the concept during an election year, they were sure they would have success, which they did get. 

But they only had success because people didn’t know their rights.  People could have told the government to go to hell from the very outset of Covid, but people gave the government the benefit of the doubt.  But I said it back then, and I continued to say it through the government made “plandemic” that there was no constitutional construct that government had to tell businesses when they could open or close or shut down.  The government made a move to centralize its authority, suspend constitutional rights, and attack elements of capitalism outright without having to justify themselves to the public. They were in love with this new ability.  And people followed for a while because they really thought they might die of Covid and that the CDC might actually know what it was talking about.  It turned out they didn’t know what they were doing, or if they did, it was malicious intent from the start.  No attempt by the government to stop the virus with therapeutics.  Their only remedy was a vaccine or nothing and to social distance for some ridiculous period to supposedly alleviate the pressure on local hospitals, which was never a problem, even in the height of the lockdowns.  Every court case that went to court in Ohio challenging DeWine’s lockdowns of the state economically were defeated in court, and they will continue to be defeated because they were never constitutional to begin with.  But the trend was seen by all; the government never did have the authority to go door to door and arrest people, like they have been doing other places in the world that don’t have a constitution as we have in America where the government has limited rights.  So the government has attacked our businesses through rules and regulations that they have controlled to show power over the Constitution, which is precisely what the OSHA challenge is all about over vaccine mandates. 

Biden’s timing was meant to put pressure on the Sixth Circuit Court panel of three to punt the case to the Supreme Court in the wake of the Omicron variant that was ravishing the news ahead of the Holidays.  But people are not biting on it.  The news has been hitting the public flat.  People are tired of the Covid talk, the masks, the lockdowns, and the nonsense, and they are finally pushing back because now, unlike before, they know their rights and just what government can actually do to them, which is nothing.  The government has already overstepped their authority and are in trouble of their own.  Not immediate trouble because many of these court cases take a long time to settle.  But ultimately, they will look foolish in court, and the rulings will go against the tyrants, as they have with Government Mike DeWine in Ohio.  But even more than before, companies are reluctant to follow government mandates because it kills their labor force.  A company of any kind isn’t much of a company without a workforce, so now that people leave their jobs and go to other places to work, the government has much less control over the companies themselves.  Before, companies only listened to the government out of fear of breaking the imposed rules.  But the greater fear that companies have is losing their workforce to another company that doesn’t have so many stupid rules. In that way, government power, even sidestepping the Constitution, has been ripped away from them, which is a good thing. It’s been scary to see that they would even try, but the results have shown us all that our Constitution works very well if only people would follow it.  It’s better late than never, I suppose.  But to answer the question of whether we will go back to 2020 lockdowns, I would answer again, no.  The government cried wolf, and people learned the nature of the threat, and they will never listen again.  And that may be unfortunate because trust with the people has been broken forever in this little insurrection by the medical community connected like crack addicts to government funding.  And they will never see that level of trust from the public, again, which I think is ultimately good for us all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Covid is a ‘Return to the Primitive’: Government attacking regenerative science so they can stay in control and imprison society at large

Government Returns to the Primitive

Well, if there was ever a great example of Ayn Rand’s book Return of the Primitive, a compilation of articles she had written in the 60s, the Biden speech on Covid was it.  So, you get tested, then what?  You find out you have Covid; what happens next?  How is testing a proactive measure by government in any way?  What is the point of testing?   Essentially, all testing does is give the media something to talk about in case counts.  But it does nothing to solve the problem of Covid.  The government assumes that once someone has Covid, they should sit around in quarantine for several days to avoid spreading it to other people so that we don’t have hospital staffing shortages?  The whole approach is one of the finest examples of government stupidity that there has ever been, and sadly, many people have been caught up in the shell game in negative ways.  What we have with Covid is a government-made cold that was tampered with by Dr. Fauci in partnership with the Chinese, who used all this panic as a means to alter the election of 2020. Now they are stuck in the perpetual lie that they have to maintain to cover up the original sin.  It’s really pathetic in the scheme of things.  For authoritarian types, those who like to do government work because they want to boss around other people, the temptation to always regress to the “primitive” is always there and is the most dangerous aspect of modern society. It’s not the virus that is dangerous with Covid. It’s the dumb government that has created many artificial policies to deal with it. 

In that Ayn Rand book, she points out the paradox of the space race and that the Woodstock music festival happened within a month of landing on the moon for the first time.  We saw the best that human ingenuity and imagination could achieve in one case.  Then we saw the reaction of the below-the-line thinkers, hippies, communists, and scum bags who wanted to listen to Jimmie Hendrix play a guitar. At the same time, the participants did lots of drugs, wallowed in the mud naked, and had sex with whoever happened to come along.  Those music festival participants essentially wanted to climb back to a time in the past when humans were subservient to the weather, to the seasons, and the village chief.  And essentially, we still have those same elements playing out before our eyes.  On the day of this article, Christmas of 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched to peer into the distant universe.  Space X is poised to test out their Super Heavy rockets for the first significant step into colonizing Mars, either for the first time or to return there from some distant past long erased from memory.  Then you have these government idiots telling us to run and hide from a silly virus that they made and funded essentially to manipulate political circumstances so that they could be the village chief.  But to be the boss, they have to cut off the feet of all the villagers effectively so they can’t run away from them.  To paralyze people with fear over Covid has been one of the most destructive things that any government has ever done to people, and the results have been pathetically ridiculous. 

Long-time readers here know about regenerative science.  There is essentially no reason ever to get cancer or get sick about anything.  Almost everything can be fixed at the level of a DNA strain.   Suppose we had a government not trying to crawl back into the past campfires and control vast amounts of our economy with government regulation and intrusion. In that case, we could really empty our hospitals by fixing the people who are stuck there rather quickly.  The truth is, and we can see it with Covid, the government wants people in the hospitals.  They want people sick.  They work like K-Street pimps in whoring out the pharmaceutical drugs because those are their donors, and an unsuspecting public awaits!  The government does not want regenerative medicine because it takes away their power.  There is power in fear, and when people are afraid to die, they seek the village chief, just as all primitive people have.  But it’s all by choice.  Real science says that we can fix anything in anybody at any time.  In fact, one of the latest Elon Musk projects is Neuralink which will allow paralyzed people to walk again, like usual.  There really isn’t a problem the human race can’t solve.  There is no reason to get sick and die unless it’s by some freak accident.  The governments of the world want people in a weak state to control them and their economies.  And that is all that Covid ever was in all its variants. 

There are solutions right now in hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin that can contain the virus outbreak but make sure to note that the governments and their pawns, Big Tech, corporate media, and other distributors of misinformation want to steer people away from anything that doesn’t make massive profits for their pharmaceutical donors.  The government pays Big Pharma then gives away the medicine for free to build a mandated client base for the drugs for the virus that the government made to control all those people. It’s the most significant sham ever tried, and its mission statement is regression, to take mankind back to the campfire, not to the distant stars of the universe as a species.  The government doesn’t want solutions to the problems they caused because they want the issues to steer society in ways they desire, which is profitable as authoritarians.  When Biden gave his speech to the nation without a plan on putting society back to normal, it was an insult.  All he could utter was some babbling talk about testing without a plan to get rid of the virus and make society normal again.  Instead, all the government wanted to talk about was some method of listening to their tainted leadership for safety and an endless list of nonsense that would keep people in a depleted condition forever. 

But despite all that government tampering, science has evolved the state of the human being, and to this very moment, there is no mystery as to some problem that can’t be solved, not with humans themselves or the greater world around them.  All cancers could be solved, every disease has an answer, and biological improvements are there for us to pluck off the tree of life like a ripe apple ready for our stomachs.  It’s all there for us if only we would reach up and just take it.  But the government is that snake that says, “no, don’t leave me behind. Don’t eat from the tree of immortality.  Eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as defined by evil! Don’t take Ivermectin to kill the virus we made to make you love me. Don’t solve the problems I gave you to be together.  Stay with me in Hell, forever, because I love you so much.” It sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it?  Yet that is precisely what Joe Biden and his government losers were saying in his address to the nation over Covid.  It was pathetic, a declaration of the primitive, and a lie in the face of real science, which is yearning to bust free of government clutches and do good work for all humanity, well into the future.  A future the government would instead sabotage than endure because that future means we would need them much less.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Importance of Family Gatherings: Don’t surrender the youth to chaos, destruction, and progressive attack

Its All About the Youth

I’ve been to several family events this year and have noticed maybe more than usual that nerves are frayed.  The stress of the news, or more specifically, the summation of political beliefs played out on the world stage of the present, is a bit too much for people, and they want to talk about anything but the conditions of our times.  The small talk at family gatherings that might only happen once or twice a year has been, “Hi, how’s little Billy. How’s he doing in school?  Is he playing in sports?” That kind of thing.  These days there is a lot more to it.  It might go something like this, “Hi, how’s little Billy?  Oh, Billy is now Beth because he identifies as a woman.  Well, how’s school?  Oh, you had to pull Beth out of school because of the mask and vaccine mandates and homeschool he/she.  Oh, he’s a girl now, so he can compete in female events in sports, and he’s winning everywhere.  Well, I guess that’s nice.  Pass the gravy.” Small talk obviously isn’t enough for the trouble of our times and the old rules of engagement, in not talking about religion or politics just isn’t enough anymore.  And I don’t think it should be. Instead, what is needed in these family gatherings isn’t more passive acceptance of the world around you but leadership.  If there is one thing that young people need more of now than ever, it’s leadership from their elder statesman.  That doesn’t mean they’ll be excited to hear it or that they’ll hug you for the advice.  But someday, they might thank you for it.  Whatever the case, we have a republic, not a damn democracy, and the success of that republic depends on the intelligence of our society.  And that intelligence cannot have a chance to grow if the older people do not show leadership to the younger generation.

I do not go to family events looking for trouble.  I don’t impose myself on anybody, anywhere, really.  But, I think I’ve wanted all my life to be the age I am now, someone who has lived a lot of life and has some experience to share with people who need more experience in life.  And I think it is disingenuous not to be the most authentic person you can be as a role model for those young people.  After all, isn’t that the meaning of life, to come into the world, experience life in all its variables, and get something of a guide of how to go about it from the previous generation?  I think if we are being honest that we can say that one of the most detrimental introductions of progressive thought over the last century has been this ridiculous notion the youth is all that matters as we turn our elders out to sea to be processed and erased into the soil that grows the next batch of crops.  This approach ignores the wisdom that older family members can provide to the youth, leaving them to seek their direction in life from government figures and worthless celebrities and ultimately their own personal downfalls.  Life and its condition are all about the decisions that young people make for themselves given all the countless options they have, and they do need help to see what decisions are good or bad. 

It always pains me to see young people making the same bad decisions that have been made since the beginning of time.  The young flower of a girl, for instance, who is fully in bloom.  All the little bees out there want to pollinate her.  She shows up with a new bee every year during this period, each time with a new tattoo, another year of smoking cigarettes out of sheer rebellion to how she was raised, and body piercings reflecting the Earth First primitivism that they are taught in public schools these days. They expect you just to sit there and not say anything because nobody is supposed to be judgmental, especially older people who have already lived their lives.  When I see this kind of thing, I feel a need to say something about it and do it.  Yes, it causes trouble, but I keep getting invited to these family things despite it.  The kids need guidance and told that they are going through a temporary thing.  Once some bee pollinates you, and you start popping out kids, and age starts wrinkling up your skin, nobody will want to be around you for those reasons anymore, and if you don’t have a developed intellect, you will be in deep trouble.  Alone and thrown away in the world, nobody who loves one of these young people wants to see that.  A life ruined by bad decisions early in their life.  So I would propose that the rules about talking about religion and politics at family gatherings during the holidays were made up by the same idiots who made up the rules for Covid and put Joe Biden in office.   They didn’t know what they were doing, or maybe they did, and wanted the opportunity to ruin the lives of the youth to destroy our nation from the inside out.  Either way, leadership is always needed to be our authentic selves.  To give those kids an opportunity to make better choices in life by imitating you.  So the worst thing you can do as a leader in your family is to follow the rules of some social tyrants who want the destruction of America, starting with the family.  Part of the maintenance of a republic isn’t just in voting and picking good candidates as representation.  Often, it begins at the family dinner table during holidays. 

It is OK to have the youth mad at you, especially if you have given them contrary information to the flow of the political universe that is coming at them through popular culture.  Many of the rules we all follow over family gatherings have proven to be much more destructive than the Biden administration, and it’s time to stop following those rules and give young people something better to follow, even if it causes great conflict in them during the process.  The purpose of family is to grow people into productive lives of fulfillment, and dancing away from conflict is a sure way to give them the wrong impression that government or popular culture is more powerful and influential than that wiry uncle at the dinner table or bombastic grandparents. They always seem to have a new story to tell.  Character is more important than following some social rules that have been imposed on us by people who want what’s worst for us and that if we’re going to see a resurrection of what’s good in our country, it starts in our families, not at the next Trump rally.  It would be my advice to all, even more now than ever, to not shy away from telling kids not to drink.  Not to do drugs.  To not get stupid-looking tattoos that will make you look like an idiot when you are older, which is most of their lives from 30 to 80.  To pay attention to politics and to have an opinion.  And that if they have a penis, not to compete in women’s sports.   Let the girls have the trophy, compete with other men; otherwise, the victory doesn’t mean anything.  They can roll their eyes and be upset.  They can hide from your judgment.  But you know what, they’ll thank you later.  Your advice may be the only good advice they will ever hear, so don’t hold back on it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Mike DeWine and Joe Biden are One in the Same: It’s all about Trump in Ohio

Vote for Jim Renacci

It is way beyond coincidence that Joe Biden and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine did precisely the same thing in reaction to the Omicron Covid variant making its way through America presently.  Both progressive executive branch personalities applied federal troops to assist with what they say would be crowded hospitals due to a surge in illnesses.  And, of course, both of them are wrong.  It is a sad state to say that the highly liberal Joe Biden and the worst president in the history of our republic are just like that so-called Republican Mike DeWine, but that is the case.  They are reading from the same playbook, which leaves me to drool over the primary election in May of 2022, where I can’t wait to cast a vote for Jim Renacci to primary DeWine.  Ohio would have probably done better to elect a Democrat for governor because at least we would have known what we were getting instead of this old establishment tyrant that emerged under Covid.  DeWine was a disaster as governor, and the costs are so enormous as to what he cost us in our state that we will still be talking about the damage decades from now.  After the much-criticized speech by Joe Biden in response to public pressure to say something about Omicron, the thick plot of corruption and malice was evident to anybody with eyes to see it.  Mike DeWine was never a republican.  He was always a progressive to complete communism.  How do we know?  Well, when a governor sets up a system where he decides what time a restaurant must close or whether or not we can attend church, we can know that we have the wrong guy in public office as they are obsessed with central authority any way they can get it.  And thankfully, in Ohio, our legislature took that power away from him.  We must remove him and replace him with a Trump Republican, Jim Renacci. 

Ironically, and I don’t see how anybody could think of Jim Renacci this way, many people think he’s a RINO too.  Well, I know Jim, and he’s no RINO.  I am fully in support of Jim Renacci without any reservation.  People have been asking me why I’m not supporting the cowboy hat-wearing Joe Blystone.  After all, he’s probably more my kind of guy.  I like Blystone a lot.  Not for governor this time around, but I could vote for him for any number of positions.  I think Jim Renacci gets the RINO label because people know he’s wealthy, and they assume that corruption comes from that wealth.  I see Renacci as a business guy like Trump, who is entirely in the Trump corner, and it will take that to beat the DeWine machine in the primary.  There is no room for a weak-kneed approach on this issue.  Getting rid of DeWine is a mandate we must all get behind.  The fight we are fighting is against hard-left Democrats.  Mike DeWine has obviously been on Dr. Fauci’s inside tract of authority thinking for a long time. Otherwise, he never would have hired the abortion supporting Amy Acton as his chief health director, which essentially ruined Ohio during Covid.  DeWine was always on the progressive side of things, and he showed most recently just how much so being entirely in lockstep with Joe Biden.  But there are many Republicans who still think DeWine is a conservative, and they will vote for him in the primary.  Whoever runs against him will need something significant in their corner, like a Trump endorsement, to pull off an upset against the machine. 

If I were Joe Blystone and wanted to help do something good for Ohio, I would get involved in the Renacci campaign.  If it’s a matter of wanting to be governor of the state for the sake of some name recognition, well, that’s another thing.  But if Joe wants to help Ohio, he would get behind Jim Renacci and support the campaign to beat the DeWine machine, the real villain.  Many would say, why not do it the other way around.  Why not have Renacci support Blystone or some other independent-minded challenger?  Well, it’s because of Trump.  Trump is connected to Renacci in a big way.  Few candidates in the United States can call up Trump and get his attention as Renacci can, and it’s essentially the only way to generate the kind of votes it will take to beat DeWine in the May primary.  Blystone certainly won’t win against the machine on his own.  There are not enough Republican voters who will crawl out on that branch without some massive effort to generate participation.  Primary voters are not the same as those in general.  They tend to be the type of people who give to campaigns, and over the years, lots of people have given money to Mike DeWine, and they are going to be slow to admit what a terrible investment it was.  When it comes time to vote, Trump will have to get involved to generate interest in voters who usually don’t vote in primaries. That’s the only way to beat DeWine.

I’ve met Trump on many occasions.  But one of those was when Renacci was with him.  That is actually how I met Renacci is when he was with President Trump coming off Air Force One.  I am 100% sure that Trump will run for re-election in 2024.  I am part of the America First Policy Institute, so I am seeing all the work going on behind the scenes getting ready for the new social media company Trump is getting ready to put out, and what kind of positioning will launch AFPI influence into the 2022 elections and then setting up 2024 for Trump.  Trump is a winner.  He will not leave this life, allowing what happened to him and his supporters in 2020.  He will burn down the whole house of progressive cards if it takes that to win again. I’ve seen it in his eyes. I’ve seen the same thing in Jim Renacci’s eyes. I’ve felt it in handshakes with both people.  I know their hearts, so it is up to us to put the right people in the right places for what is coming, not necessarily what we have seen.  In the next 12 months, the political landscape will change dramatically, and the best person poised to make the best of it is Jim Renacci.  There is room for people like Joe Blystone in this new world.  But the game for governor means we must build a team of Republicans.  Renacci knows the game and can pull them into his camp under a Trump endorsement.  And Renacci is independent enough to appeal to Blystone voters.  Renacci proposes to govern like Ron DeSantis in Florida, which we can all get excited about. 

I’m looking forward to pulling the lever for Renacci.  I don’t think it will be an issue, but this far out, there seems to be a lot of people on the fence still, which I would say, look at Joe Biden.  That is the enemy that must be defeated.  Mike DeWine is just like Biden. We have the power to do something about it right now, to remove one of these detrimental political characters and send a powerful message to the political establishment.  Renacci is not an establishment person, no more so than Trump is.  What makes Renacci particularly good is that he doesn’t need the money or the job like Trump.  He just wants to do something good for the country and use his influence to do it.  It would be my advice to understand the strategy and get behind Renacci because it will take everything we all have to knock off Mike DeWine, even with all the problems he has brought to Ohio. It’s a numbers game, and while many people complain about DeWine, they don’t typically vote in primaries.  We need a way to make them want to vote in this one.  Splitting the vote between political activists in the minority in a primary will only help the Joe Biden’s of the world, like Mike DeWine.  So vote for Jim Renacci, and let’s make history in 2022 as Trump launches his ambitions for our benefit.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Tornados of Mayfield, Kentucky: Government using tragedy to grab more power for themselves

The Government Power Grab after the Tornados of Kentucky

It’s more than worth it after the media tried to portray Rand Paul negatively after asking for tornado disaster relief for his state to tackle a usually obscure issue of government interference.  Paul has a history of speaking out against every little bailout, but I understand Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell’s problem in Kentucky.  In many ways, it’s the only thing they can do now that the government has embedded itself into people’s lives the way they have.  They really have no choice.  Saying no to federal money would be like denying people surgery after they’ve lost a leg.  The only option but to bleed to death really isn’t practical. This topic deserves some analysis for the many evils that come after the tornados ruined the lives of many thousands of people in Western Kentucky, an area I know very well.

In some cases, there was a tornado on the ground for over 200 miles, so the level of destruction was enormous, even to the point where Rand Paul had to put his differences aside and ask for federal money when he clearly, otherwise wouldn’t.  There is something else at work here that is much more sinister than the tornados themselves.  In a drool of excitement, the media revealed it, and it’s something we must all contend with while dealing with these issues in the future.  The media and their partners in government ultimately want a universal wage to pay people and control them totally. To get there, they have an anti-work attitude about everything hoping to rob people of their joy of work so that the universal wage can become possible.  Where people would just accept the government check, accept what role the government gives them in a heavily managed economy, and lower their standard of living to such an extent that the government could justifiably become everybody’s parents from the perspective of a panel of experts who themselves are nothing but lazy slugs looking for a government check. 

The instant target was a candle factory in Mayfield, where reports were that the management there ordered workers to continue working even during the tornado sirens.  The communist governor Andy Beshear has stuck his nose into the situation to promise an investigation.  The media and government both quickly jumped into an anti-work sentiment indicating that safety is always first, no matter what.  Now, I have a long history with this kind of thing, and honestly, I would have kept working.  When there is something to be done, nothing comes between me or it.  However, the rules say that you are responsible for their safety if you employ people, so I would have let the employees seek shelter or even gone home.  If it had been me in charge that night at the candle factory, I would have been tracking the storm on my phone, and when the red part of the cell hit our area and moved on, I would have then had everyone return to their jobs.  The whole tornado drill would have lasted about 15 minutes.  The employees could have worked a little overtime to compensate for the lost time.  But, I can see why the management would have been skeptical of the storms and the weather reports.  Usually, the news is wrong about these kinds of things, just as they have been over Covid.  So when the media cries wolf too many times, people just stop listening.  Tornados in December are pretty rare, and I can see how management would have thought it a safe bet to ignore the news and keep working.  After all, some things needed to be done, and just because the media says something, it suddenly doesn’t make everyone who hears it culpable.  You see, that is the little secret that is really behind all this.  The media wants to do the bidding of the government and claim powers it doesn’t have, such as telling people when it’s safe to work and when it isn’t.  And they use every little tragedy that might come along to gain that power little by little.  So the management of companies that did not run for their lives when the media reported a tornado warning is under attack not just for not believing the news or ignoring the information, but in putting work and the need of it over all else.

I’ve ridden bicycles in tornados, I’ve worked through serious tragedies, I’ve steamrolled through every kind of problem imaginable.  There have been times when my wife and I only had one car, and I’d ride a motorcycle through snowstorms to get to work.  I am one of those never-call-off types.  Work is always the most important thing to me, to hell with what the rest of the world thinks.  And yes, I have been in charge of many workers under dangerous conditions, and everyone has always gone home without harm to their families at the end of their shifts.  People might get angry with me, but so what.  If there is work to do, that is always the highest priority, end of the story.  The media and government have been trying over a long period to gain control of work through socialism, regulation, emergency powers such as they did with Covid, and to throttle productivity into something they control.  Every time there is a tragedy like these tornados in Kentucky or a hurricane in the south, the government can’t wait to pass out confiscated wealth to the victims so that they can then set new rules against the qualification of money because they have become so litigious that all human resource departments are now slaves to every little government whim.    And in that way, Rand Paul had no choice but to take money from the federal government to help the victims.  Because that good ol’ fashioned “can-do” spirit that is quite well-known in regions like Western Kentucky is destroyed under the liability of making the wrong decision according to the government.  And nobody wants to take that chance. 

The government stuck its nose in our economy over Covid, and we have never recovered.  That is why fast food lines are taking too long, shipping is stuck in ports, and planes are canceling flights.  The government creates a liability to alter behavior and, thus, to tamper with the enthusiasm to be productive.  Most of the time, the media gets tornado warnings wrong, and even though that candle factory was pressed to fulfill orders during a holiday season, and the Amazon plant there was trying to stay on top of things, tornado or not, everyone would have gone home except for this extraordinary situation of a perfect December storm.  Without question, it was wrong not to let workers seek shelter, and people did die.  But, the government doesn’t really care about those deaths; what they want out of this tragedy is more control.  The management had the liability to follow the storm and to listen to what the “experts” said.  And because they put productivity over safety, according to the government, they are now accountable for what nature did to them.  And companies all across the country are watching and taking note.  When people wonder how companies become so “woke,” this is how.  They overreact to every government action because it’s really the only way they can stay in business.  And when compliance to the government becomes more important than the productivity of industrious effort, you have an economy that is moving more to the static. You are putting up with government interference that is far worse than the death of a freakish storm.  You have tyranny that is disguised behind safety and a government that looks to eat all innocent people in its perpetual desire to grow and dominate our lives from behind a desk of bureaucracy and wants to rule us all without the risk of a physical, risky takeover.

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