Tag: philosophy

Gurpreet Singh is in the Butler County Jail for Murders in West Chester

So what makes a man want to kill his wife and her family, or even think about doing it? Well, only a lowlife functioning from sheer evil would even consider such a thing, and a generally stupid person who didn’t know how to navigate the difficulties that can take place in family politics. But that is precisely what people are wondering after the indictment of Gurpreet Singh that West Chester police say shot and killed his wife, Shalinderjit Kaur and her parents Parmiit Kaur and Hakiakat Singh and his wife’s sister Amarjit Kaur. At the time of the murders in my community of West Chester which is one of the best places to live in the world the behavior was mystifying, and nobody really knew what to think about it. The way normal people deal with family problems in an affluent community is that they go play golf or partake in any of the other wonderful things that there is to do in West Chester that can ease off the steam. But for dumb people encumbered by cultural standards that are not conducive to intelligent discourse, it appears that Singh wanted out of his marriage contract with his wife and her family, so he killed them with 18 bullet holes dispatched in their little apartment not far off RT 747 in the valley beneath Beckett Ridge.

Cold blooded killers are often good liars and con artists who can lie to your face and sound very convincing. In fact, it was Singh who called the police on that dreadful night in April 28th of 2019. When they arrived, they detained him for questioning but did not arrest him as a suspect because he was able to sell himself off as a credible victim who had found the bodies and went into a panic. But Singh seemed fishy from the start, I certainly thought it was him who had committed the murders. Of course the thing to do was to withhold judgment until the investigation fleshed out the details and those details did emerge. Many of us who live and work in West Chester took the murders as a personal offense because those kinds of things should not happen in such a nice community with nice people. But the situation appears to be an assimilation issue where he forgot that in America there are many other ways of solving disputes rather than killing your wife’s family.

But Singh was crafty and sold himself off as innocent which police considered safe the night of the murders. Then when there was a vigil for the slain family Singh was there to essentially continue selling off his innocence by participating. But he moved to Connecticut where he was arrested a month ago once all the arrows of the investigation pointed at him. On Friday of this past week he was extradited back to Ohio and booked into the Butler County Jail on charges of four accounts of murder.

That certainly isn’t the typical case of other members of the Sikh community in Cincinnati. They don’t typically kill each other when there are family disputes, but Singh obviously played this trend to his advantage by being very cooperative with police. However, in many places in the world where marriage means different things to different people, a simple divorce is not always a path out for irreparable disputes so apparently murder is the only way for their small-minded view of the world to deal with the matter. It’s a situation many of us face, even if we’d like things to be different. When you marry a person, you marry their family, otherwise the relationship would just be considered an extended date, or a roommate with benefits. Marriage is the unification of families with all different value systems with their own histories, so it can be very difficult to navigate through troubled parts of a marriage especially when the extended family is involved which in Singh’s case, they were all in his apartment. It is hard to imagine a case where a family argument would ensue that would inspire someone like Singh to grab a gun and kill them all not thinking through the implications. Then throwing that gun in the lake outside of their apartment hoping that nobody would find it. Then call the police and try to sell off his innocence. Really, only an idiot would do something like that. It’s a sad story in every case, and a real insult that the killer has hung that stupidity on our community that really doesn’t deserve it.

Of course, what’s worse is to have the job of the attorney, in this case Charlie Rittgers who had to go out yesterday and declare Singh’s innocence. What a low life job to do, to offer yourself as a voice to such an evil person. If Singh didn’t do the killings, then who did? He left motive and evidence all over the place and his body language was terrible. But in our legal system, we are supposed to give the benefit of doubt and force evidence that proves guilt, well I’m fine with what I’ve heard so far. I thought Singh was guilty that first night, probably the police did too, but needed to gather all the evidence. Now that there is enough evidence for an indictment, what a terrible job to offer yourself as an attorney to try to explain away such an evil. It really is a disgusting endeavor under even the best of circumstances.

When families don’t get along you just can’t kill them or try to hurt them. You must have at least enough mental facilities to work with them otherwise you should never get married to whomever the family is connected to. Most of us have those skills, obviously, Gurpreet Singh didn’t. Instead he used his limited intellect to attempt to pass himself off as an innocent member of the Sikh community. But that is where the real sense of justice is quite evident, because it was other members of the Sikh community who were quite convinced that the killer was Singh because there is still enough honor left in their culture, as opposed to mainstream American culture, to make judgment calls when bad behavior becomes obvious. Singh insulted us all when he tried to pass himself off as an innocent hoping that his broken English would sell him as a husband in mourning over his slain family. But his family and friends knew better and helped the police get to the real story which turns out to be just another sad domestic violence case where resolutions to the problems were out of reach of Singh’s mind.

It wouldn’t be any of our business if the killer didn’t put it in our laps with a murder that should have never occurred. I’m sure it will come out in court, but likely the people Singh killed knew he was a phony which is why he wanted to get rid of them. He came across as a phony in all his public appearances almost shining like a light bulb for a guilty plea. A tough job for Rittgers but if that’s how you decide to make a buck covering for killers, then have fun. For the rest of us, we want to see justice brought to fruition because this idiot put a stain on our community that it clearly didn’t deserve. Singh’s lack of skill and understanding in how to deal with his family should not have given our community the black eye that it did and for that, we all deserve to be more than angry about it.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Why Nobody Can Beat President Trump: The great rally in Cincinnati

It was strange to watch the Trump rally in Cincinnati because it was the first one I haven’t been to once he has come to my hometown. But honestly, even with a VIP ticket, seeing him is an all-day event and I just couldn’t block out that kind of time. So what does that say about him and his presidency? When did anybody ever wait all day to see a president and fill a 20,000-person arena along the Ohio River an hour before the scheduled speaking time of 7 PM? At 6 PM in fact all the seats all the way up to the luxury suites were full except for a those who had left into the concourse to get food. The floor in front of the speaker’s stage was filled and there were still lines wrapped around the arena outside.

I was at that same rally when Trump last came to US Bank just a few weeks after the infamous Access Hollywood tapes that would have sunk any other candidate. But even then, when the media had wrote him off with a torpedo hit and as we have learned, many other sabotages, some by our own government, Trump still filled that arena even as Hillary Clinton couldn’t fill up a park just a few hundred yards down river. I thought then that Trump was going to win but at that time I was one of the few. Yet he packed that place and people were very happy to be there. It was a great experience that I have never forgotten, and it was amazing to see it duplicated just a few years later under much better circumstances. This time he was the president and suddenly everyone wanted to speak ahead of him. Even one of the best Supreme Court Justices in the country, Sharon Kennedy of Ohio spoke a few hours from Trump’s ostentatious patriotism on full display once he arrived.

So why, what is the reason that Trump can do this while nobody else can? Why are the Democrats still pushing an impeachment narrative even after all the premise for such a thing had legally been tossed out the window? Why? Well, the answer is celebrity and not just the kind that Hollywood produces. What Trump has built over the years is the real kind of celebrity that actually built Hollywood at a distant part of their history, which they have lost. Celebrity is when a person, an actor, or a representative comes to embody the unspoken thoughts and words of a significant number of the population. That is why Trump had crowds in October of 2016 when Hillary Clinton could barely fill a spot 10 times smaller. Hillary Clinton in her final push tried to bring in celebrities to push her over the top yet couldn’t. Trump won the election anyway even though the forces against him were phenomenal. And at this present rally in the summer of 2019 people saw in Trump parts of themselves that they didn’t have a voice in any other way. So, they lined up to see him making an entire day of the event and they were happy to do it. They are an untouched market in America that no professional consultants had spent time trying to understand. They still don’t get it, but US Bank was the measure of their failure. It filled when the media thought there weren’t any supporters left and not only did Trump fill it easily, he did so hours before the show even started.

Think about what people were waiting to see, a 70 something year old man, a politician, talk for an hour or so. There was no music to accompany the show, the whole thing was just Trump talking about current events and world affairs. There is no conventional wisdom that could explain it, so unconventional study is needed to even begin to comprehend it. There isn’t any Democrat in the United States or in the world who could do what Trump did in Cincinnati or anywhere, even telling basically the same speech over and over again over the years. To be a celebrity who can generate that much excitement, who in their right mind thinks that anybody is going to beat him in 2020? I said in in 2016, nobody. And I’ll say it again now, there isn’t anybody who is going to beat Trump for a return to the White House in 2020. It is astonishing that an arena that big could be filled by anybody. Carrie Underwood sold out that arena, but that is for a full concert. What Trump has done is simply incredible.

Celebrity is a vote all its own. Even with the cheating that Democrats are known for throughout history, whether it is stuffing ballots, getting dead people to vote, or trying to qualify illegal aliens and prisoners to tip the scales in their favor, they have nobody like Trump. Not a single celebrity in Hollywood. No athlete, no musical artist. Nobody. People showed up to see Trump speak for over an hour and they spent the day doing it because they wanted to. And in a country where votes still matter, even when cheating does go on, people are speaking with sheer numbers of support even as the media and establishment culture tries to suppress that information from them. When Trump speaks to people directly people reward him with support, because that’s the only voice they really have—the celebrity that they gave to Trump because he represents their true values.

Deservedly, those who work against Trump should be concerned. Those who have taken their shots to end the Trump presidency made the whole story about him as a person, but what they failed to understand was that Trump is the representative of the people who elected him. People don’t follow Trump as some dictator they follow him because he represents who they are and without him they have no other voice. Enemies of Trump don’t want to just stop him because they disagree with him, but they want to silence the voices that back him. They don’t care what those voices really want out of their government, they want to pretend that they are in charge and can lead them toward some progressive objectives.

Those against the Trump presidency are in denial of what really makes Trump tick. In a representative government has there ever really been anybody who really was more authentic and representative than President Trump? Who thinks that people stand all that time to see an old man talk about current events? Its not so much him, but that he is their vehicle to bring forth their own voices, and for that they will wait all day for just a short shot in the spotlight. I have seen those events before, but this latest rally in Cincinnati was different, it was even bigger and more spectacular, and more of a statement about the real state of the nation. It wasn’t a racist event, it wasn’t a dictator, it was just a celebrity who represented the real people of the nation and no representative from the other political side can go toe to toe with him. And for that, it was an event to celebrate and be grateful for.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

What Comes Around Goes Around on the Wild, Wild Frontiers of Thought and Culture

It’s always a good day for me to attend the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio where I rejoin old friends and meet some new ones at that annual event always set during the last weekend of July. In many ways I am happiest during that period because the world is as I’d like it to be and I get to dress the way I’d like for the event. This year was a little different however because its one of those transition periods for me. I’m in the middle of writing my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and have been working on several themes that were born right there in Greenville over the last several decades. As a lover of Ohio history and of frontier life in general I find great solace in the small towns up and down Rt 127, from Hamilton, Ohio all the way up Celina on the Grand Lake St. Mary. Lebanon, and Eaton come to mind as well, and of course Greenville itself nestled there in God’s country with the smell of corn dogs and ice-cold Coke offered from the various venders. But more than anything I enjoy competing with those old and new friends and pushing myself in ways that I don’t get to do in regular life, and the results are always rewarding, such as in this very close example shown below of our Bullwhip Fast Draw competition during the finals.

Yes, it’s fast. I have been practicing Cowboy Fast Draw for quite a long time now and have a pretty good feel for how fast is fast. The events shown in our Bullwhip Fast Draw are around .600 of a second down to about .450, almost as fast as the pistol shooters who were also there at the event. I spent quite a lot of time with them as well. Yet it amazes me how fast the Bullwhip Fast Draw competition has become, and how fast we have become in conducting all the various steps literally in the blink of an eye. For a lot of people, the blink of an eye is about .015 of a second. So, we are moving very fast these days in performing a task that really should be nearly impossible. But you never really know until you start pushing yourself with competition which is one of the big themes in my new book.

I am an optimist, really an unshakable one. I’ve seen more than my share of tragedy and heartbreak, but my optimism has always been intact no matter what’s going on. Over the years this Annie Oakley event has been that reset period for me that no matter what has been occurring, it gave me an opportunity to be around people who aren’t losers and activists of malice and just enjoy good people in a good flag waving country. Many years ago, I broke away from the entertainment aspects of my relationship with the western arts and went to apply my skills to real life problems, that were very controversial. It was quite a thing to do before Donald Trump was president, but now isn’t considered so radical, because the country is snapping back into shape, thankfully. The evidence is everywhere. This year at our Western Showcase event a really good Lone Ranger impersonator stopped by and did a show which I enjoyed quite a lot. As I listened to the Lone Ranger creed from him, I couldn’t help but think of myself and some of the decisions I had made along the way leading up to that moment.

In 2004 I released the book The Symposium of Justice which featured a bullwhip cracking vigilante that was at war with the corruption of his hometown. But in the years thereafter I found that many of my themes were quite real and that as an author, I couldn’t just write about them, I wanted to be the real-life character of my stories. So, I turned my skills to the real-life problems of my community and many reading here know the rest of the story. Up until Donald Trump emerged from the Tea Party to become President of the United States, I felt I needed to be the real-life characters I had written about. But that has changed due to the sudden shifting of the winds. The western arts no longer feel like a dying thing as it used to, but something that is reemerging and becoming new again. That makes me very happy. Not only does the world need it, but it confirms many of the things about people that I have long suspected and those are the clear contents of my new book that will likely come out next year.

It has been sad that so many people who still believe in things like the Lone Ranger’s Creed have stayed out of the fight that has needed to be fought. I couldn’t just sit around and think about it. I wanted to do something about it and I am proud that I have. But hearing the Lone Ranger impersonator go through the creed this year in front of our audience was for me very refreshing. Some of my favorite quotes are “That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.” And “in being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.” Or, “That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather it and light it himself. Those are all good quotes and who could argue them? Well, Democrats for one, and many of today’s youth who get their morality from Grand Theft Auto rather than the Masked Man as they used to.

View this post on Instagram

Another good day in my favorite clothes. #life #family

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on

That is why I love the Annie Oakley event so much. It is a break from the disappointments of today’s culture and the youth being born from it, from the primitive cravings of body piercings, tattoos and shaky morality. Of loose sexual standards and a proclivity toward drugs and intoxication. From lazy losers who want socialism over capitalism and champions of expanding government who will issue them mailbox paychecks for just sitting around and letting mother government drop food in their mouths without doing anything to deserve it. For one day a year I get a break from all that and I cherish it tremendously. If I could have every day like the days I get in the middle of God’s country every year in Darke County I would take it eagerly. Unfortunately, that is not our reality, but it should be. Most of the people who go and participate in those events there don’t have the same kind of reflections that I do. They just go and enjoy the festivities without giving it much thought. But not me, I see the potential and reflect on what we used to do well and how we could do it again. And perhaps a new day is emerging. Whatever comes I at least feel good about what I’ve done to make the world better, which I will always do. But I get the feeling that the world is getting more favorable to those grand old traditions and that the thugs and losers of life aren’t winning any more, they are being swept away into the garbage heaps of history, where they belong and that makes me the happiest of all. For the first time in many years I think that tomorrow will be better than yesterday, and that is very encouraging.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Steampunk and the Future of Technology

My readers here might have noticed my new mask which is kind of Steampunkish and likely wondered what the deal with it was. Well, I was shopping with my family in the famous Charleston City Market which has been around since 1804. One of the booths had kind of a Steampunk theme which my kids are into. I haven’t paid much attention to the movement because to me it represented a time that never occurred and was rooted in “what ifs” instead of factual observation and an understanding of history. Steampunk however has turned out to be very aligned with what I want to do with my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business so through buying this mask it gave me several good ideas to build off of, so I started using it on my social media platforms because I think its pretty cool.

Death and life have very much been a part of my thinking lately, I’ve had some sick family, my own aging process and all this constant news about artificial intelligence taking over the human race–becoming actually a terminator type of conflict that seems much more possible today than it did when that popular movie first came out—has been on my mind. The mask to me is a clear indication that we can enhance our own flesh now, and the future looks to be even more of a case for it. So even when our flesh dies of natural causes we can continue to live on through various mechanical means, and this new mask of mind makes me think of those potentials and consequences, so I was very excited to get it. And in talking with my kids about Steampunk as an art movement that’s when it became clear that my argument for going back into the Wild West period to look at our value systems, which is key to my own efforts, was the same in bridging those values with the technology of the future.

As kind of a prerequisite to buying that mask my wife and I spent some time in Gatlinburg, Tennessee looking at grandfather clocks, which have always been on my radar. There is a very nice store on the main strip there that we have always gone in and contemplated. Even though these days a digital display clock is often better and far, far cheaper, there has always been a charm for me in the craftsmanship that goes into a grandfather clock that I crave. And at the height of the Victorian era for which the Wild West period was a part of that is why the stylized outfits and fonts looked the way they did. It was a very exciting time where guns became very reliable and could be used to shape a culture as the Victorian designs immigrated from Europe and moved with the expanding train system into the wild frontier of western expansion. These days many of our smartest people, people who enjoy thinking, are finding that they enjoy the values of that period and would like to see a return to those values. But we are all on the technological frontier of so many other positive elements that we must find a way to bridge these values, which is how Steampunk came to be as an art form.

Its not at all a mainstream thing yet, or if it ever will be. But one thing is quite clear, it was mainstream enough to have that mask I bought displayed at the very popular Charleston City Market and people walking by all stopped to look at the crafts displayed at that booth, so there is some very obvious curiosity by most people about this type of art, whether they understand it consciously or not. I suspect that subconsciously most people are thinking the same thing, they don’t want to lose themselves as individuals in the technology of the future, and they very much want to be in command of that relationship. We don’t want to lose our lives to technology, but rather want to see humans continue to set the agenda—but one way or the other, tech is here, and we must find our way with it. So suddenly, I’m quite a fan of Steampunk.

This mask is appropriate for me because honestly, I have no intentions of every dying. Now the nature of life may change, but my essence I suspect will live on in various forms forever, and as I get older, I am quite open into whatever enhancements I need to utilize to continue enjoying life. After all think about it, I have written so much that it will float around in cyberspace or whatever form of that space exists well into the future, that it will likely go on forever as defined by universal life spans. Even if all that is left is a skull, I will get all I can out of life because that is how I approach these kinds of things. While I do advocate for the values of the past, of the Victorian era Wild West values of pure capitalism and frontier justice, I think very much that those values not only work here on earth, but will work as we colonize space whether it is the moon, Mars or the moons of Jupiter. If I could live 20,000 years to see all those advancements happen or to help them along, I’ll do it whether the form is a living entity, legacy memories, or as a variation of that mask, a biological entity more machine than traditional life that exists without losing the basics of humanity.

Coming back from Charleston I had been listening to Rush Limbaugh while staying in the very nice Mt. Pleasant area and looking at all the sites and thinking about how Google was being thought of as evil, and that Facebook was capturing so much of us to build an artificial intelligence that it was forcing tough political and economic decisions for the future. For me the solution was in Steampunk, or at least the first doors to solving those complex problems and that mask gave me a reference point. But when it came time to come back home and I punched in my address to my Google Map app on my phone it stated at 5:30 AM in the morning that I would arrive back at my home in 10 hrs. and 16 minutes. Thinking about Rush Limbaugh’s radio shows and some by Alex Jones that I had been listening to online when everyone else had gone to bed I wanted to try an experiment knowing that Google had a profile of my habits that it had been collecting about me for many years. I decided to leave my phone plugged in so that I wouldn’t reset my destination forcing Google to recalculate my destination time.

On the way home I traveled with one of my daughters, her kids and my wife so there were lots of variables. We didn’t leave at 5:30 but the time really didn’t change from when we actually did so the Google Maps had figured out all our stops, our pace of driving and the traffic conditions from Mt Pleasant to our home address and all the surprises that can happen along the way. Outside of Columbia, South Carolina we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for breakfast. At the North Carolina line we switched around some drivers. Just outside of Ashville we stopped to let the kids use the restroom. In the heart of the mountains near the tunnels just before the Tennessee border we stopped to get some more food. In Knoxville we stopped to get more gas. Ahead of Jellico Mountain we stopped by McDonalds just to stretch and get a snack. On the other side of the mountain from Jellico to London, KY we had lots of single lane traffic and some serious traffic delays. We pulled off the highway to use the restroom yet again and we fiddled around for an additional 15 minutes because we were all tired of driving and didn’t want to rush only to sit in traffic again. We stopped just north of Lexington just to stretch because we were tired and wanted to get home but were getting impatient. Then we hit traffic in Florence that lasted all the way through the city of Cincinnati. By the time we got to our driveway the time on the trip back was 10 hrs. and 17 minutes. One minute longer than Google Maps had predicted originally, which I thought was astonishing.

Technology can be our friends or our enemies, what it becomes will largely be up to the values we bring to it. I for one plan to embrace it with an eye toward longevity and accomplishing more in a lifetime than typical biological existence would otherwise allow. And even the sad stories of family sicknesses prove that technology is on the cusp of solving many of those problems. But then what? Well, that is up to us to figure out, and that is my focus in helping to shape. And for me, that is a very exciting prospect and what I think about when I see that new mask found at the Charleston City Market. To me its not a scary thing, but something that will help us live beyond the terminal existence of yesteryear, but if we hold the values from the past that worked best and combined them with the future, we wouldn’t just get Steampunk art, but perhaps a new reality that matches what Jesus said when he walked the earth, “heaven is all around us, only men do not see it.” Well, maybe its time that we start looking at it.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

We Have an Obligation to Attack Enemies, both Foreign and Domestic

I have planned to take a vacation from politics and this forum so that I could write my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which is coming along nicely. However, this recent debate between the Trump administration and the four progressive insurgents Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib bring up an important point that Democrats are going to have to get used to. Watching and listening to their comments, and those of the other liberal presidential candidates that have come in in their defense after President Trump lacerated them at a North Carolina rally, we need to talk about a few things. Trump didn’t just act correctly in calling out the anti-American rhetoric that has been frequently discharged by the four women, and many others for that matter, but we are all expected to do as Trump has done, and in doing so, we would be by no means acting as racists, or bigots, but as people of value who love our country and are justifiably pissed off by those who show their open hostility toward the values most of us embrace as “Americans.”

It is ridiculous to suggest that we are supposed to allow people, who happen to be women, or people of color, whether or not they are American citizens or not, to trash talk our country without some retaliation. It’s just not in the realm of considerations. In no way should any of these women, or Democrats expect to get a free pass to do and say whatever they want without people getting angry about it. After all, isn’t that what they were trying to do all along? Omar, and Cortez particularly have been very bold in attempting to make as many people angry at America as possible, what did they think was going to happen, that they’d be allowed to hide behind their femininity and their race without anybody answering their challenge? When the crowd broke out chanting during the Trump rally in North Carolina to “send her back” meaning Omar, they were perfectly correct to express their opinion, just as the four progressive Democrats had. They don’t get a free pass to act because they are minorities. Why would they even think such a thing?

I have a son-in-law who came to America and gained citizenship to marry one of my daughters and I admired the work he did to go through everything. I was particularly touched during the swearing in which all politicians must go through at some point, and many others, where an oath to protect the notion of our Constitution is made. I’ve heard it a million times but during his swearing in it had hit me particularly hard, when the lines, “I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The word “domestic” rang a bell because we were seeing increased terrorist activity coming to our nation at that time, in the years before the Trump administration entered the White House and it was very obvious that some of those terrorist cells, particularly those finding refuge in ISIS were American citizens who had gone astray. Just having an American citizenship wasn’t enough to make you an American. You had to also support the way of life that being an American required. That meant capitalism. The Constitution along with all the Bills of Rights. It meant at least respecting the flag that brought all of us from all over the globe together to make America great. The freedom of speech didn’t mean you could just march around our neighborhoods burning the American flag and preaching on about Communism without someone kicking your ass. Those are the rules and we are all mandated to do so, by the Constitution when we see that domestic enemies are attacking our way of life.

I have known many media personalities over the years, and honestly, they are not the most inquisitive bunch. You won’t find them reading books about history in a Waffle House at 4 AM in the morning, the way I was when I was there age. They are more excited about talking to their friends on Facebook and finding out where the next music festival is, or some drunken orgy. Unfortunately, these are the people who interpret these events for us most of the time, so we have not been looking at people who speak against America as “domestic enemies” but they are. Nike made themselves into a domestic enemy when they picked Kaepernick’s position over the shoes of Betsy Ross. That soccer star for the women’s team completely overshadowed their great victory by using her fame to debase America life as anti-gay and racist when it was our great nation that gave her the ability to use her skills to their best effect on a world stage. Megan Rapinoe could at least have said “thank you.” Instead, she made herself into a “domestic enemy.” Her choice, but the choice was clear putting the burden on what to do about it on us all.

I just traveled the Carolinas and spent some time in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for a couple of days and even for me, I was quite taken by the patriotism displayed there. I couldn’t help but notice that no Democrats are having rallies at the convention center in Gatlinburg. But if Trump went there maybe hundreds of thousands of people would show up and pack the streets. I saw lots of Trump bumper stickers and lots of flag waving, and it was the kind of thing I have not seen represented in the news for over twenty years. I don’t know what the Democrats are thinking these days, but that span of the South from Charleston to Lexington Kentucky, and I would add, on up into Ohio and Indiana, is as pro Trump as it gets. And its not Trump himself I don’t think, but because Trump represents them Constitutionally. Rather than them having to take up arms to fight off domestic enemies who the media fails to identify for them, they are happy to support Trump to prevent the unneeded bloodshed. But yes, the situation is that serious, who would think otherwise?

Honestly, these progressive attackers, Bernie Sanders included are getting off lucky. Thankfully we have a system of government that does a pretty good job of preventing violence from happening when domestic enemies present themselves. Free speech usually defeats them when it is allowed to work. But Google, Facebook and all the media companies have involved themselves into censorship to allow a false platform to exist for these anti-American progressive ideas, because for some dumb reason, they think they can trick the system into buying into their dumb ideas. But all those actions have been anti-America because they are attacking the very foundations of American life that we are all supposed to agree on, justice for all, economic activity for all, and common decency to everyone. However, among those values are that the winner takes all because that is how the best and brightest among us elevate our entire society. An attack on that system is an attack on our way of life and we are obligated to defend it from domestic enemies when those events occur. And for their own benefit, those domestic enemies of America, they are lucky that it is only Trump calling them out during election debate. It could be much, much worse, because the people who put Trump in power are very much in the majority, and they are pretty pissed off with the attacks against their rights to guns, against their churches, their energy consumption, their basic values. And it wouldn’t take much to turn them into very angry soldiers in the streets toward justice.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

 

 

I Fully endorse George Lang for the Senate District 4 seat in Ohio

I was quite excited to learn that George Lang was running for the Senate seat that Bill Coley had been occupying in Ohio for several years. The seat itself was terming out and George let me know that on Monday at noon he was going to announce his run for it, and it brought a lot of joy to me. I first learned of his candidacy while on vacation with my family in Charleston, South Carolina touring sites that many were reviewing as the best in the world. I kept hearing while on my weeklong stay in Charleston that this neighborhood, this beach, this restaurant, this shipping lane, this and that were the best anywhere. I had to admit that everything was very nice. Property values were certainly great, and shipping vessels seemed to come into the harbor every 30 minutes loaded to their max. Even at 3 in the morning from our Mt Pleasant home I could hear the cranes working and I found all that economic activity very exciting. Yet the town of Mt Pleasant across the harbor from downtown Charleston was quiet and very chic at that time of night, just as it was all other hours of the day. The people there were prosperous and happy, no crime was in sight. Prosperity tends to do that to a community. So I was a little sad to leave and come home, but then for comparison as my family hit Cincinnati starting at Florence then going up I-71 to avoid the traffic on I-75 it was a startling comparison which culminated into our last moments of the journey travelling down Butler County Regional Highway where for as far as the eye could see, there was prosperity, especially in West Chester. After coming from an extremely wealthy area full of vibrant economic activity, it was obvious that my hometown of Butler County, Ohio was even greater and that is something the rest of the nation hasn’t been talking about. And for the last twenty years, it was my friend George Lang who has had a tremendous hand in that success, which was why I was elated that he was running for that Ohio Senate seat.

It goes without saying then that I endorse George Lang for the Senate District 4 seat in Ohio, fully. I could tell stories all day about why he’s qualified, but the best part of his resume is in this opening paragraph. I had spent a week in one of America’s most prosperous communities and coming directly home to West Chester, where I work, and Liberty Township where I live it becomes obvious that we have it better than most anywhere else in the country and that is due to the very pro-business environment that Lang has championed for many years starting as a trustee in West Chester. Even when Lang was outvoted 2 to 1 on most issues in West Chester by the much more liberal trustees who were there at the time, Lee Wong being one of them, George managed to be a change agent for the betterment of business and the results are obvious today, and the spill over has poured over into neighboring Liberty Township and other regions connected directly to West Chester very positively.

I remember well when George benefited from Mark Welch getting elected into that second trustee seat knocking out a longtime incumbent so that a second vote could be obtained, and real growth could occur for business. For a few years George Lang and Mark Welch opened West Chester to a very positive pro-business culture that is now carrying over into our current conditions which rival any of the best in the entire country and now George wants to bring that culture to all of Ohio. When George was elected into the 52nd House of Representative seat, this was his ultimate goal which he has been working toward. However, as a Senator, he will have much greater leverage to make that pro-business platform more prominent and to take it above the noise of all the other political matters that permeate the state.

George really doesn’t have any competition for this spot, his rivals during the upcoming primary are Candice Keller out of Middletown, who I think is a wonderful person. But when it comes to experience, George has many of the same positions as her on conservative ideas, but his understanding of business and his pro-business platform just puts him on a higher level. Then as I’ve said about Lee Wong, he’s the kind of guy who is a liberal in a conservative area. He has no choice but to run as a Republican. His policy decisions are very much that of a Democrat. If he were running for office in Hamilton County or even Dayton, he’d be a Democrat without question. It was Lee who stood in the way of many of the growth ideas that George wanted to implement in West Chester. I seem to remember Wong’s campaign slogan was that you “Couldn’t go wrong with Wong.” Well, yes you can, in a big way. He’s a nice guy but he’s not on the level of Lang, in any category. In many ways Lee stood in the way of growth, it was George and Mark who broke through his resistance to give West Chester the great prosperity that it sees today.

So, if there is a theme to all this, management does matter and who we elect into these positions has a major impact on all our lives. Obviously in Charleston South Carolina they have a lot of good things going on. Essentially there they have a deep and rich history to draw from which has put politics on the efforts of preserving that history, and not getting in the way of businesses wanting to capitalize off that deep history. In West Chester, Ohio the situation was harder, while Butler County does have a great history going back to before the Revolution, just as Charleston does, we had to be good the old-fashioned way, in the middle of the country with great highway access. We needed our politicians to make the most of those advantages with low cost compliance and protections on upfront investment for businesses. In West Chester, George Lang alone for a long time, then later with a good support staff from a very good Republican Party presence, have created an economic boom that plugs straight into the Trump administration. There is a reason that President Trump enjoys coming to the southern Ohio area so much, and George Lang is more a part of that success than just about anybody. Not in what he has done, but in what he hasn’t.

Most politicians measure their success by what bills they sponsor and ultimately by how much they grow government. In George’s case, it’s the opposite, he measures his success by how much he can get government out of the way of business, allowing them to spend their time and energy on being profitable, which then allows a high quality of living for everyone. For people who have lived in the Butler County area for many years, its easy to take for granted just how good it is. But if you have traveled, the benefits are obvious in comparison. I am very excited to see George Lang do for Ohio as a Senator what he has done for West Chester. I personally think Ohio has an opportunity to become one of the great economic powerhouses of the world and it will take people like George to make it happen. So he has my endorsement and then some. I simply can’t wait to get him in that seat so he can start the work, for which we will all benefit.

 

Rich Hoffman

 

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Merits of Dueling

The Merits of Dueling:

As I have said, I have been working on a new book called the Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and I’m about halfway through it.  For my readers of a long time here who have been sending me a lot of emails missing the daily articles, they will return.  But I offer this little sample of this “gunfighter” project to give a taste of what is to come.

The concept of getting “satisfaction” from a personal insult went a long way to establishing honor and proper conduct among business transactions, in the time before modern rules as we know them today. As we have seen often where various religions and their value are not unified, and therefore cannot be expected to hold up in a court of law, there needs to be a mechanism that brings about honor and to hold it into the context of moral conduct where villainy will quickly grow like a weed in a garden of dreams. Dueling in the classic sense, especially in the New World during the time of the American Revolution was an answer to this problem. And if there is an argument against the American Constitution for changes, it was in the original rules of the nation that mechanisms of honor were already established before the courts were needed.

In doing business in the orient, particularly in Japan where honor is still a respected trait, business transactions are accelerated because the interactions mean something with one another. This is obvious at the airports around Tokyo among men and women as respect is a universal language that makes interactions between people start on common ground. In the West we have allowed our own culture of respect to drift away into the more centralized regulation of the state which outlawed the practice of dueling essentially so that lawyers could profit off the instillation of justice. The cost was that individual satisfaction for an insult did not get the respect it deserved while the emphasis was on protecting society from itself by settling matters in a court of law. This has led our culture to adapt into a more passive aggressive society where trust isn’t always easy to find in other people. It could be argued that we were all better off when we tried to openly kill each other to protect a slight against our individual names.

Dueling was so common at the start of America that the governor of South Carolina wrote a book on it to make sure everyone did it right called The Code of Honor: Or Rules for the Government of Principals and Second in the Art of Dueling in 1834 by John Lyde Wilson. Dueling in the time of the Revolutionary War was quite common. While it was slowly going out of style at the start of the invention of a republic form of federal government once George Washington took office, in the South, particularly in Charleston, South Carolina where so many important battles occurred in defining freedom during the start of the new nation, dueling was so common that the governor felt compelled to create some legal means of settling disputes, which sounds barbaric compared to our modern legal system, but in hindsight seemed to generate more responsible people on an individual level. This certainly helped in business commerce, because if a business deal went bad, the parties may find themselves in the streets fighting to the death to obtain their satisfaction.

The important aspect of satisfaction is that the emphasis was on the individual reputations of the participants. It wasn’t some third party “state” that decided justice, it was the people at the heart of the conflict, and in many ways, society was more honorable. People had to treat each other individually better as a result. The more the states intruded on management of the affairs of people the more passive aggressive disputes have become leaving business conduct to suffer greatly. After the Civil War it was particularly immigrants from the South who moved West in search of gold and other opportunities, and they took with them the concept of dueling that had been very much a part of early American life. Dueling with fast draw had with it a way of bringing honor where there wasn’t yet law and it forced people to treat each other better and more honorably which is why there is still reverence for it.

At the state level we can all see today that the concept of taking honor and responsibility for good conduct away from individuals has been a mistake. While dueling was a violent concept the amount of people who died from it were arguably much less frequent than the kind of violence we see in modern times. That is why thinking in the way of the gunfighter is better than in the modern context of leaving disputes to be settled by those not directly responsible for the conduct, such as lawyers and the state as a legal entity. These days instead of getting satisfaction for an honor tainted we say “see you in court” instead of settling the matter right then and there. Then of course those who can pay for the best lawyer become the winners in most cases and the state enjoys the revenue and job opportunities that come from settling disputes. But what is lost is the individual responsibility for the actions taken and the merit of an honorable exchange. Taking the example of the famous duel between General Gladsten and General Howe in 1778, both Generals in the Revolution and were in a dispute over troop possession. They took to the streets of Charleston, South Carolina where many such duels were taking place at the time and when the time came stared each other down waiting for the other to make a move. After taunting each other for a good bit of time finally General Howe fired his pistol and clipped the ear of Gladsten. Gladsten in response, who was thought to be the John Adams of the south and inventor of the famous “Don’t Tread on Me” flag deliberately fired his shot into the ground inviting Howe to try again. Eventually the two men shook hands and that settled their dispute with only a minor injury occurring to Gladsten’s ear. Otherwise, the business between two major Revolutionary War figures was settled respectfully, something that certainly wouldn’t have occurred if the two had fought it out in court with lawyers acting as their pistols and fancy words spoken in legal jargon as bullets.

The point of the matter is not that dueling is a desired trait, or even that we should bring it back in the form that it was. Killing another person isn’t a desirable outcome for any dispute, but the finality of it tended to put in the participant’s minds the seriousness of an issue and this mindset certainly set the West and its expansion ablaze with activity that couldn’t have been regulated by any legal system at the rate that human ambition was expanding at the time. Honor was preserved by the potential for dueling and this threat allowed for proper respect when a nation needed it most. We could learn a lot from this period today where honor among business transactions is desperately lacking, particularly within the American borders. Other countries have their honor driven rituals and it is noticeable during business transactions. In the United States however, we have allowed our laws to be governed by lawyers and judges who take away the responsibility for personal conduct and place it in the hands of the state, and many of our businesses have followed. The impact has been a loss in honor among business interactions that has not been desirable. Yet honor could be restored if only we stepped back into hindsight and dusted off the values that did emerge from dueling and upgraded that sentiment for our modern needs which starts in thinking like a gunfighter.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Taking a Break to Usher in the Future

I take a lot of pride into being able to produce a lot of work in a 24-hour period. However, presently I have a lot of big projects that I’m working on so for about 60 days I’m going to take a bit of time off this news outlet so that I can contribute that time to a book I’ve been thinking about for several years now called A Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Even with my very busy schedule I write around 1200 words per day, and to get the book done, I need to give myself that time to put those words into an actual book. The strategy for doing this is obvious from my perspective. When you want to put more chips on the table to sweeten the pot, you have to make sure you have the right hand, and I do. The timing for this project is ideal so its time to make that move.

Don’t worry, I’ll return to this effort after the time indicated. But in the meantime, I need to focus on the themes of the book instead of covering everything all the time. I have always viewed this site more as a talk radio program where freedom of thought can stream over the words without worrying too much about grammar and little structural errors, in the same way that my experience with talk radio taught me. Not to get too hung up on the 8th grade English teacher rules of language and focus more on getting the ideas out of your head and down on paper so that people can share in those sentiments and help build a movement toward a more creative and more free future. The reality of such experiments is that most people think the same things, but what they have to overcome is the alienation that comes from structured politics in isolating people from their biological need for collective sentiment, a parody of our ancient past. The wave of the future of course is the one of the American, independent, wanting to break the rules of conformity which holds us back, and the understanding that we make money in America, we aren’t ruled by it.

I have offered all this work free of charge because I want to help people come to terms with themselves, and to ultimately allow that freedom to be reflected at the voting booth. This new project of mine is for sale, so there are higher expectations for the results. If I want to do my best on it, then I need to give it the time required. Regarding the book and how it gets to market and all those elements, it takes a lot of work and won’t be a fast deal. But nothing happens until you actually write it. Lately as I have come to understand the need for a book like it, my mind has been obsessed over its contents. It took a few years for me to work out the theme and how it would distinguish itself from other business books on strategy. Thankfully, over the last several months I have had all my points sharpened into what has given me a distinct and unusual way to look at the world of business not under previous presidential administrations where some of the concepts I’ll be proposing would be laughed at by previous modes of thinking. But the Trump economy is a very real thing and will have long lasting impacts, and that change in market focus will require a uniquely “American” perspective, which will be the primary theme of the book.

For so many years America has been studying how other people do things and has been concerned about the feelings of other countries to the point of crippling our own economy to appease them. Yet America is the premier market driver of the world and has the strongest economy. So, it should be obvious that they should be studying us, not us them. And we need to understand that what we do is more effective than what others do and to finally be proud of that attribute. There has been an invisible force active and I see it every day when dealing with people no matter where in the world that they are, that highlights the weaknesses of our natures instead of seeking to overcome them, which has a direct impact on overall productivity. I think there is a lot more juice that can be squeezed out of the orange and I am very excited to show others how to do it.

The way the world works is that even if I put these thoughts down for people to read for free, they would not value them. By paying for the work, naturally more value is applied to the subject matter. So for the long term gain, the short term refocus is more than worth it. Ironically all this became very clear to me the other night, while playing poker. There are so many terms that come from poker that are applicable to business and I couldn’t help but think of the early days of pure capitalism as adventurers, pirates and politicians invented what we consider poker today in the saloons of New Orleans, just ahead of westward expansion, which unleased one of the most ambitious periods of world history. The shackles of mankind fell away. Not only was the practice of slavery coming to an end due to the American Constitution and the philosophy of it but also the concept of kings and queens of Europe suddenly not being a concern of average people. Those people could suddenly gain land and wealth if only they had the courage to endure the wild frontier, and it was along those lines that the idea for the gunfighter emerged, not like the samurai of Japan dedicated to protecting the house of their lord, but the gunfighter was out for themselves essentially for the first time in history. Poker was a game that emerged out of this culture and involved playing kings and queens for advantage, not worship.

That is essentially the game of American business. I’ve read many books on the subject and to some degree or another everyone misses the mark. My life is unique in that I have had my foot in lots of different fields and at high levels. Yet I have always stayed very grounded. I recently had a very important meeting with representatives of the Trump administration and an hour later was playing with my grandkids in the yard. In my mind I consider all those things equally important, and it is from that perspective that I have some unique thoughts to offer on the matter of business conduct not just around the world, but from the perspective of the American.

It’s time to stop apologizing, or hiding our thoughts and feelings to appease others, and to get to the concepts of value and how they come about in business, and therefor the conduct of politics on the world stage. Most of the books of this nature that are offered on the local bookstore shelves all in my mind have their value, and I have learned a little bit from all of them. But what is needed is something that unites many fields of thought into a concept that isn’t just a reflection of where we have come from, but where we are going, especially in this new Trump world. To me its very exciting and I think everyone who reads here every day will enjoy the results. So, don’t freak out when you don’t get a daily article from me for a few months. They’ll be back. And once I get this project moving forward, I think you’ll find that the daily articles will be better than ever.

I was originally planning to write this book about ten years from now, however recent events on many different fronts have convinced me that its needed now, (now being loosely affiliated in the publishing world as during the Trump administration years). By the time we arrive at his last day in office in 2024 America will be very much a different place, much better than it was in 2016 when he started office, and American business will be the envy of the world. At that point in time people are going to want a guidebook, so that’s why I’m writing it now. It’s an endeavor that is worth doing, and in these kinds of things, timing is everything.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

House Bill 6 in Ohio is a Good Thing–if you want free markets, then provide them

There has been a lot of criticism about the passage of House Bill 6 which is the “Ohio Clean Air Program” because both sides of the political spectrum are missing the point. The bill essentially is a government bail out of the Akron-based First Energy Solutions nuclear power plants. The hippie liberal communist environmentalists don’t like that the bill strips away cash credits for “renewable energy,” such as wind power and solar while raising $200 million per year to cover the costs of the plants as a government heavy highly regulated industry that continues to lose money to the point where they won’t survive past the year 2021.

On the other hand there are the free market capitalists who don’t like that the utility company has donated over $1 million to Republicans to keep fossil fuel energy production alive, where the Obama era administrators sought to kill the industry in 2008 with more government mandates. Given the climate of government intrusion to begin with, and the need for good, reliable energy in Ohio, H.B, 6 further allows for local townships to vote by referendum any wind or solar powered take over of land and other assets to launch their “renewable energy” proposals, meaning the government can’t just decide to put up wind power plants by force. People in local areas would have the right to vote on them, which has the radicals infuriated. But equally infuriated are the capitalist who think that the whole deal is just another example of crony politics, where politicians will do anything for the donor base.

Here’s the deal, and I have been talking about this for a very long time, our utilities companies are monopolies that are directly attached to government management. And they shouldn’t be. If they weren’t “public” utilities then the management burden wouldn’t fall on government to have to solve, and Republicans in Columbus wouldn’t be tasks to bail them out or otherwise watch them fail down the tubes. And if the companies fail, what’s that do to our ability to produce nuclear power? Letting them fail at this point simply isn’t an option. And putting regulatory barriers on that industry just to facilitate hippie energy isn’t going to solve the problem either. What is truly needed in the long term are true free market solutions, which I suggested in Thorium, where every single home could generate their own power off a government regulated grid, kind of like how each home has their own air conditioning units. The technology is there, but government needs to get out of standing in the way of it, and when it does problems like what First Energy Solutions is going through would then become a private problem instead of a government problem. That is where the real issues reside.

The current state reality of energy creation is that it isn’t privatized, which by no coincidence is precisely why the health care industry is going through the same problem. If health care were privatized competition would bring down the expensive medications that are on the market. Government intrusion raises those cost and puts all the power in lobbyists. Until health care is privatized, costs will continue to be high and no easy solution for providing health care to people will be conducive to reality. Energy is hampered by the same restrictions. Power companies are government mandated monopolies, made that way through the incredibly high barriers of entry into the market. Regulator considerations destroy anything but the deepest pocket investors who then look to government to protect their investment. It’s much like the railroad situation at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. Someone had to build all those railroads, then someone had to manage the trains themselves and the people getting on them. Public utilities do great work, but they are expensive, and they are vulnerable to mass outages which hampers so many people because they must maintain and old grid of power supply that is in this present time old and obsolete.

But until we invent a better means of power generation, such as personal Thorium power plants the size of an air conditioning unit on a home for every home in the nation, government is stuck keeping the old dinosaur alive, which is what H.B. 6 in Ohio essentially is. The future of power generation isn’t the government mandates for solar and wind power plants passed down from the communist oriented Obama administration, its in private investment and personal maintenance, such as moving public transportation from the train to a car.

I love camping and always enjoy the sites of an RV park. Sure, while they are stationed in these weekend warrior hideaways, they are plugged in usually into the campground system of power and water maintenance. But in looking at all those great RVs within most of them are generators and tanks that allow them to function independently while traveling along the vast highways of our nation. It is from them that we should be learning how to push technology into each of our homes and businesses with more independent power generation and to get there we need to allow competition into the public utilities, which of course they don’t want, but that is the ultimate solution. We have allowed government to stand in the way of that energy independence so we really shouldn’t complain when they are called on to manage the trouble.

In that regard I completely support the Republican position on H.B. 6 and the Governor DeWine’s reasoning on the matter. They are dealing with dinosaur technology to supply the energy needs for a sustainable Ohio. The goal thankfully isn’t to pander to the flimsy hopes of the environmental terrorists, or the communist desires to destroy capitalism in the United States through heavy regulations tied to the backs of “Green Energy” but to deal with the two nuclear power plants that we do have, which have already cost a lot of money and do employ a lot of people. We need to use the energy we do have to bridge us into a 21st century solution. Likely the utility companies won’t like that solution but that is a bridge to cross when we get there. But we do need to get there.

Independent energy has to be the answer for the future, and free market competition to bring down the costs. Government needs to be out of all these economic transactions so that real free market solutions can come about, just like it did when the telephone utilities were deregulated. That is how the cell phone came about. Imagine what would happen if utilities were deregulated to allow for new methods of power generation to emerge. It amazes me how good some of the RV power generation innovations are these days. Imagine what it would look like if every home in the nation had their own source of power. Think of the lack of destructive impact to any economy that happens during every major storm where power grids get knocked out and hundreds of thousands of people are out of power for days, putting many people at risk. The option could be that every home treated their power supply like they do their air conditioners or heating services. A few downed trees wouldn’t kill the power for several neighborhoods. Instead one or two homes might be affected who could solve their problem with a simple service call from a competitive repair person. If we really want free market conditions, then let’s get government out of the utilities market and put them in the hands of the private sector.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Great Trump Poker Game

In case you haven’t heard, there are even more text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok that show directly that the Clinton campaign was involved in the FBI cover-up of DNC tampering into the 2016 election which Donald Trump won anyway. But now the skin is off the cat and its quite serious. It doesn’t seem that way to the mainstream media outlets because largely they refuse to cover it, but people like James Comey Clapper, Brennan and many, many others involved directly with the Obama White House are in deep trouble, and they deserve to be. It’s getting worse for them week by week and is why they came out against President Trump from day one, because they feared this day, where they no longer controlled the flow of information in government and could be tied to many crimes they knew they had committed to stay in office against the wishes of an official election. Meanwhile the state visit of the Trumps to Buckingham Palace in London was something even the most cynical person against Trump should have been very proud of. For those who have always supported Trump, it just made us prouder of his presidency.

What makes the Trump’s so good at these oversee visits with rulers, kings and queens of the world is that they’ve been there before. Long before Trump became president, he had become the very definition of the rich and famous, so looking comfortable among the most elite of the world is nothing new to him. And Melania is just such a great first lady, always looking and acting like the best that America has to offer. I can’t think of a single Democrat or Republican who could pull off one of these visits with the Queen of England so well, as if it was second nature to Trump. Which of course it is. I mean before the White House he and Melania actually lived in a tower of gold named after him. That lifestyle has certainly put him at ease in events like this one in London and I am personally glad. His approach certainly represents the way I think America should sell itself to others. Not just as an equal partner, but as a respected leader of the world and something others should feel a need to live up to.

But that is also why there was so much opposition against Trump to begin with. For many decades the plan was to diminish America’s role in the world and to cheapen our leadership in every way possible. So when we elected Trump to the Presidency the powers that had been engaged in all this diminished activity were inflamed to protect what they had been destroying. They certainly didn’t want Trump to repair our status around the world, which is precisely what has happened. Do you want to know how you can tell that Trump is unbeatable in 2020? Just look at how he has been playing the game. If his presidency were a poker game, which I’d say it is, he held great cards from the beginning, and now that the River has been revealed he has a 100% chance of winning the hand and the massive pot in the middle. The reason is that the Democrats went all in with what they thought were great cards, even cards they stuffed up their sleeve. But Trump had the aces and during the flop two more aces were revealed along with a King a Queen and a Jack. The King was the Mueller investigation, the Queen was the Strzok and Page FBI text messages, and the Jack was the phony Russian dossier paid for by the Never Trump establishment helped along by the Republican John McCain. And the other two Aces were the tax cuts and the great economic numbers that came from Trump’s policies. The two Aces Trump had all along were his great ability to lead people and generate excitement wherever he went, and his ability to be independent of the stuffy establishment with his own personal wealth.

Trump always had a great hand but once the Mueller Report was finished and the economy was continuing to truck along boldly, there wasn’t much anybody playing the game against Trump could muster. They had nothing and what’s unusual about politics played at this stage is that Trump knew how to play the game all along without all the advisors who whisper in the ears of leaders and usually guide everything in the direction they desire—who are completely controlled by establishment objectives. That made Trump a very unusual political figure, and one who couldn’t be beaten playing the game conventionally. And Democrats don’t have a candidate on the horizon who can match him.

That seemed to be the understanding of the English who finally did this state visit and put forth all the pomp that would be expected by such an occasion. When Trump was first elected, I was in London and saw how the local news had been covering him. I was at Big Ben and saw the massive protests around it trying to steer English politicians away from embracing the new American president. So, no doubt, the Queen waited to see how things went, so no immediate plans for a state visit were entertained. Now, two years later, as all the gas has gone out of the opposition forces, Trump is going to be around for a while, so the English might as well embrace it, so that had even a bit more sauce for this fine meal. Capitalism was making a comeback and any world leaders who didn’t want to be left behind understood that they needed to make friends with this American president, which is why the smartest of us elected him. We were tired of the bowing and apologizing that had been going on and decided to take matters into our own hands, and Trump was a great hire.

Personally, I was very proud of the Trumps at Buckingham Palace and the performance of the whole family on that very important trip. Even while the theater of pomp was in full bloom, the Russians called Trump up to indicate they were withdrawing their support from Venezuela. Mexico was reeling from the proposal of new tariffs, which will cripple their already deficient economy, and China is being bent over backwards from the tariffs that are now in place and is really bringing much needed pain to their economy. Its good to have an American president who understands the Chinese book on strategy, The Art of War. Finally! It’s not hard to beat them at their own game, we just need people in leadership positions who get it, and Trump does. There is just so much to be proud of even the biggest Never Trumpers that there are realizing that their efforts are futile. Trump has all the good cards in this game and he knows how to use them, and the best thing that everyone could do is to fold, before they lose everything. The Queen of England knows the story and she was very gracious in receiving the Trumps. They may not be her cup of tea, literally. But she is a smart woman and she knows how to play the game too, and for her and everyone, that means giving Trump credit for getting this far and still having Aces. Most of the chips on the table are on Trump’s side of it and as an American, that’s what I expect to always see.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.