Tag: Politics

The Caves of Lakota Schools: An email and another attempt to divert attention to Darbi Boddy from where the real problems are

I keep getting asked why I haven’t reported on the big Lakota story. Well, for all the reasons that we saw at the last school board meeting, one of the most intense emails that could be sent to a government body was sent that very day. But in the end, the board was OK with Channel 5 doing a story about a mad mom complaining about fellow board member Darbi Boddy again, who compared her to a school shooter. That was the news at 11 after a day of very interesting information. I received the same email that the board had, so I knew the content of it, and based on that, then the meeting started with a strange executive session; another hit piece by Lakota against Darbi Boddy was hardly a concern. Instead, watching the behavior of everyone involved has been interesting. As I say all the time, don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do, and you’ll learn the truth. Or, in this case, “don’t say.” I am watching how the authorities deal with this email. They have the information, and the clock is ticking.

The silence has been revealing. Everyone in town had this email. I had communicated with Karin Johnson from Channel 5 earlier that morning, so the buzz was……buzzing. Yet the story they chose to do was one against Darbi Boddy, again, about the same trespassing in the halls story they have been pushing. And that story was one that Darbi Boddy could easily say was slanderous, character defaming, and intentionally misleading. It is one thing to have an embarrassed mother of a girl who ended up in the Channel 5 story speaking at a school board meeting. It’s quite another giving school support behind it, and the way the board reacted was almost in relief that the news was talking about something else except what was in that email. 

The email was unbelievably bad, so to answer that question properly, I think it belongs in the hands of authorities to deal with quickly. But at this point, I am more interested to see how all the participants behave, which unfortunately goes well outside the government school of Lakota. So, I have not been eager to report all the details because on this one; it’s more important to see where all the insects go when the light is turned on. Turning the light on too fast will only scare them into hiding, where they stay all the time. One way or another, this email situation was much more significant and demanded that the light be turned on differently. I am more interested in seeing how everyone behaves rather than seeking justice for the few involved. Because what’s at stake is the heart of all public education and the mechanisms of the Liberal World Order. Every vestige of the Administrative State, of government built by the foundations of the Seven Liberal Studies, taught to us from our earliest memories, was at work. The media was at that school board meeting because they were looking for acknowledgment on the contents of that email and what management planned to do about it. Instead, the behavior revealed things about their collective strategy that was very surprising, to say the least. They were fine to sacrifice Darbi Boddy as a fellow school board member as they have been from the beginning with the defamatory rhetoric of a community member. But they were uncomfortably silent on the real matter that everyone was there to hear, and they certainly didn’t come to the defense of Darbi when such an accusation was leveled at her. They seemed to welcome it.

One of the ways you can trace the flow of water in underground caves is to pour colored dyes into the water upstream and see where those colors come out of the cave and into an outside creek or river—doing that gives the study an understanding of how water flows through the complicated crevasses and mazes within the cave that wouldn’t be obvious while crawling through the mud and tight corridors. Sometimes the best thing when you can see that crawling through underground caverns isn’t the best way to understand complicated problems; a different approach is needed. Well, the same thing is true in complex social and political issues that emerge in society. When you want to know the who, what, when, where, and how, you won’t find out that information by crawling in the mud with them. You need to see how information flows through their networks and how they react to it. And then, only then, will you understand the nature of the problem. When it comes to emergencies, I think everyone did what they needed to do. The email itself might be so unbelievable that it would turn out to be complete fiction. There are witnesses, and professional medical staff who are available to cross reference, so there are ways to validate the email. At that point, a small press conference about it would be appropriate, and a cautionary tale, no different than the mom who accused Darbi Boddy of being a school shooter would have transpired. After all, we are dealing with public figures here, and everyone involved should be able to endure a bit of scrutiny for the safety and security of the children in the schools of Lakota. If they are innocent of wrongdoing, they should get in front of a camera and say it. Then move on to the next thing.   But that’s not what we are seeing with this email. We see the lights being turned on; the cockroaches are scattering to their hiding places, only this time we are observing the actions with night vision, and can see the difference between light and dark, and can then trace where our bug problem really is, by first admitting that we have one.

So to all those concerned out there who are looking for justice and information, I would caution you to value information above all else. This is obviously a much larger problem that requires a complete understanding of what we are dealing with. So I have been in no rush to turn on the light for all the reasons mentioned. Rather, I would prefer to see how the colored water moves through the complicated politics of our community and to what walls it bounces off of so that a greater understanding of friends and foes can be established. Because when it comes to schools, their whole point is to provide a safe environment for kids. Schools are not a playground for the adults to make large wages and have an easy time making a living. If the adults involved are more interested in the politics of getting rid of school board members they don’t like or protecting a teacher’s union, then their priorities are all wrong, and they need an adjustment. If the media is more interested in the gossip of local politics rather than protecting children, then we have big problems. And if law enforcement is as corrupt as many people fear it is, then we’ll have to address that as well. But we will never know if we just turn on the light. We need to study the flow of information and see what people do with it. Even knowing how serious that information is, it only gives credibility to the data collected through observations made. It’s not acceptable just to have fears and speculations about the motives of the politics of government schools that are attached to tax dollars, radical leftist labor unions, and global political sentiment intent for the destruction of America. Facts and information are far more critical, and what we are learning is infinitely more valuable. So be cool and watch where the bugs run once the lights are turned on. And you’ll have your answers.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

‘The College Scam’ by Charlie Kirk: Rethinking the education designed by the Liberal World Order

I would highly recommend the great book by Charlie Kirk, The College Scam. It’s a great book, a timely book, and one that shows clearly where the world is headed. So if you want to make adjustments ahead of that change, reading Charlie’s book will undoubtedly help you. Like all things regarding the Liberal World Order, which is what Democrats and even Republicans are calling their multi-century attempt to establish a New World Order as defined by the goals of Freemasonry going all the way back to Egyptian society, predating the Greeks by thousands of years. It’s been a long road for them, and we have all found ourselves tangled in their web, and we are seeing the collapse of that order in modern politics. Most notably, the election of President Trump and the continued attempts to keep him out of any public office because of the threat to that Liberal World Order that people like him present. But it’s too late. It’s been too late for many decades now. As Charlie Kirk lays out the case in his book, college has always been a scam. Its never been suitable for American society built on capitalism and has seriously harmed intellectually the people who have gone through their liberal arts instruction of life sciences, physical sciences, logic, philosophy, history, social science, and creative arts, the seven teachings that the Renaissance world thought would make a complete human being. I have always said that these seven topics aren’t nearly enough to make a complete human being. And the problem with this kind of instruction is that the quality of the people doing the teaching was always a problem. People of low quality obviously weren’t going to teach people of high quality to be better. A bad teacher often penalizes good students into mediocrity for the rest of their lives.

I’ve been to college and lived on the University of Cincinnati campus for quite a while, and I hated every minute of it. I, of course, made the most of it, but I learned firsthand how to hate the college experience. I used to have lunch every morning on the campus with my stacks of books, eating an omelet made just for me. I was not like the other 20-somethings in those early college days. I had already experienced a lot of life before ever getting to college, traveled extensively, and lived the life of essentially a 40-year-old before I ever attended one college class. So it was frustrating for me because college was not made for people like me who had lived very colorful lives and wanted to know more than the limits of the seven liberal arts. I would eat my breakfast and get through my college homework as quickly as possible so that I could get on to my favorite reading material, my many Joseph Campbell books. It didn’t take me long to realize that college was slowing me down tremendously, and I wanted to go so much faster than the college institution was built to provide. Like many things in life, college was built with good intentions but essentially became a pathway to hell paved with those good intentions. I could see that it was crippling people. The classrooms were boring, stupid, and severely lacking by lazy teachers who were not the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic. And in their off time, the students were wasting away with a party lifestyle that was turning good kids into monsters, committing acts that would embarrass them for the rest of their lives. 

When it came time to send my own kids to college, I was violently against it. Many family members were upset with me for my decisions, but it didn’t matter. I saw college as a liberal meat grinder that served only one purpose: to get an interview because too many corporations had done as they would later do with Covid, and that’s to set a standard for job placement. They would only talk to college graduates for most professional positions. But reality said that was a dumb practice because apprenticeship looked to be a better way to develop an organization’s talent. But complying with the liberal world order was what corporations were committed to due to the requirements of the various trade guilds around the world. So they didn’t do what was best for themselves; they did what the Liberal World Order told them. And what they ended up with were students taught by college institutions that weren’t very smart, overly compliant, and too submissive to the circumstances around them. And they had lost themselves during the college experience to their personal authority. Campus life for most turned out to be embarrassing looking back, and it compromised their moral authority as adults. So there wasn’t much good to come out of college graduates and the things they learned. 

I refer to the Freemasonry movement because that is how the concept of college and the liberal arts was implanted into our current culture, and it was a mistake. They didn’t do it on purpose. As I said, they had good intentions but lacked philosophy on the motives of the human race and how to instruct the human mind. College was created around the limits of what was known to science during the Renaissance, but as we know now, education should not be limited to what is given at public schools and colleges during very limited hours of instruction during a certain period of a child’s life. It has turned out not to be a good thing to wrestle away a kid from their parents at age 5. And sending an 18-year-old away to college to allow liberal education to essentially destroy the child of their upbringing has been devastating. It doesn’t happen to all kids. I know plenty of kids who survived the experience just fine. They had good parents, and they turned out to be fine adults. But I also have watched many kids come out of college as entirely different people and were ruined for life. What was destroyed in them was not worth the ability to get a job interview a few steps up the ladders of life. It would have been better for many kids not to ever go to college. They would have turned out better in life had they not been sucked into the liberal education system that was designed for them by Freemasons, globalists, and political hacks around the world, too in love with wine and art museums instead of the essence of all life and productivity, the art of ambition and imagination that come from life experience, not training by incompetent fools masking themselves as authority figures. It was a hopeless experiment from the start, destined to fail.

I always thought that, but it was confirmed for me when I went myself. And I would never impose such a thing on any of my kids; it would only doom them to a lackluster life. So I found Charlie’s book refreshing; it’s about time that we have an honest conversation about the massive failure of the college culture and what they teach kids and how. Like Covid, College and the corporate endorsement of it has been for the benefit of their political Liberal World Order and not the development of individual intellect for the proper life well lived. But compliance to that Liberal World Order and submission to the needs of the masses in all the destructive ways that history has made so many mistakes. And The College Scam is all about acknowledging that failure for a better future by admitting the obvious, which is so difficult for many because it’s all they’ve known all their lives. But that never made it the right thing.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

President Trump Needs to Announce Now that He’s Running Again: The DOJ will indict him, so the best thing to do is beat them to the punch

All other legal matters aside now is the time for President Trump to announce that he is running for President in 2024.  As a direct answer to the FBI raid on his home, which was an entirely politically motivated and gross abuse of power, and the decisive victory over Liz Cheney in Wyoming, the time is ripe for his eventual announcement due to the behavior of the opposition forces and the only schemes they have left on the chessboard.  President Trump should make it formal and do his Trump Tower escalator speech part two now.  We all know that its an eventuality anyway, so because of what the Department of Justice is planning to do to Trump, the President needs to go on the offensive and capture the hill before the Biden White House has a chance to capture the news story and put the Trump team in yet another defensive position.  It is usually best to attack in these kinds of cases, to be in front of the story instead of a defensive recipient of other people’s aggressive actions.  And let’s face it, yes, the Biden Department of Justice has been weaponized.  They are operating a corrupt FBI who are clearly working to put Democrats in power and to keep them there by any means necessary.  And the phony trial about January 6th was designed from the beginning to indict Trump somehow to prevent him from running for President again.  So the best way to beat that story is to arrive at the destination first.  Make the announcement; then, when they do indict him, it will be clear to the public that it’s a political rival using the force of government to keep a challenger from running for office.  As it stands now, Trump isn’t technically running for office again, so any legal action against him can be considered procedural.  But once Trump announces, then it becomes purely political, and that is how people need to understand what is happening now.  Trump needs to change his status from a “former president” to a “potential one” now that he has all this political capital to his advantage, rub the opposition’s face in it, and keep it that way through the midterms and on through 2024. 

The Biden DOJ has no other option but to indict Trump and hope that it shifts public sentiment, so they will certainly try.  I would argue that an indictment of Trump would be great for the country because it would expose just how ridiculous the FBI and DOJ under abusive authoritarian rule can be.  Through the discovery process, Trump would be completely vindicated, and the strong-arm tactics of a corrupt government would be on full display for all to see, which would be a good thing.  Unlike the January 6th mess that Liz Cheney led, which was all one-sided, representing only a Democrat point of view with a few liberals who were calling themselves Republicans conducting the mock trial to the public, an indictment of Trump would allow Trump lawyers to cross-examine and present evidence and have all kinds of dialogue exchanges with the Biden opposing forces that the government simply isn’t prepared for.  They would have used it if they were prepared and had anything substantial against Trump.  There is no smoking gun in breaking open a Trump prosecution.  What we are dealing with now is a desperate government that is terrified that Trump will run again and that he will win again because they know what they all did to put Biden in the White House, and it won’t be so easy next time.  They know that Trump gained many millions of votes over Biden and that the only way they were able to cheat that 2020 election is with the Covid rules that were written on the back of a napkin at the last minute to allow for loose, mail-in ballots that were massively, illegally counted.  So they have only one move to make against Trump and his supporters: to keep him from running by abusing the legal weapons at their disposal in infinite amounts. 

With all that in mind, if Trump is planning to announce he’s running for President anyway, and his family is already prepared for it, then now is better than later to make the announcement.  Trump has quite a solid case to make about why he should be president again and why now.  As a natural sequel to his speech from 2015 when he came down the Trump Tower escalator, a lot has happened, but now we have open borders, criminals all over the streets, and a criminal cartel in the White House essentially who has control of our DOJ and FBI.  And it’s time to drain the swamp, especially now that we know where all the swamp monsters live.  Before we knew they were there, but they were concealed in the chaos of politics, just under the water and out of our view.  Over the last seven years, we have drained the water of the swamp, and now we see all the ugly creatures, and they are hungry for victims.  They are vicious and suddenly very aggressive because their concealment has been revealed to the world.  Liz Cheney and what happened to her blowout loss in Wyoming is a perfect example between the Karl Rove consultant class in D.C. politics and the normal voter in flyover country and how they see the world.  The sleeping giant of Republican America has been awakened, and they know Trump is their best option for a government they can believe in and a country they can be proud of.  And they are ready, despite anything the corrupt forces of Washington D.C. can throw at Trump.  Trump literally has nothing to lose in making his announcement now.  But he can gain a lot by getting in front of the DOJ before they make a formal indictment.  When they do, it would clearly be an action against a political rival, not just trying to keep a former president on his heels with legal pressure.  What the DOJ wants most is to scare Trump away from announcing.  Once he does, then the hopes of stopping him will go out the window. 

I agree with Alen Dershowitz when he says that even if the DOJ indicts Trump, there is nothing in the Constitution that says he can’t still run for President.  There is just an assumption that someone under criminal indictment wouldn’t be able to win an election.  But with Trump, people see through it, and a criminal indictment would only make Trump more popular.  We have seen this kind of thing going on for years in smaller elections that are regional in nature.   The assumption is that a criminal investigation makes a political candidate off limits for holding office.  But when the Constitution was written, this level of political sabotage wasn’t a new thing.  Criminal allegations from an abusive law enforcement entity are one of the oldest tricks in the book, and it won’t keep Trump out of the White House if the people pick him again.  And by all indications, they are poised to do so.  So the purpose of any criminal indictment would be to attempt to scare away voters and Trump from even announcing to run.  With Trump making that announcement now, it would take all the air out of the Department of Justice balloon and the Biden White House and put them on their heels for a change, with nothing left to do but look into the camera and have that blank stare they are becoming known for.  There is nothing for Trump to lose in making his announcement now.  But there is a lot to gain.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Snake and the Mouse: How to defeat the Liberal World Order

I was asked a few times during the North Coast Gunslinging Championships off of Lake Erie where I got my rattlesnake skin grips on my Ruger Vaquero and why I had them. It’s not enough to just say they are cool, for me, as there usually is a backstory. I explained that it was good to be a snake in life, which raised some eyebrows because we often think of snakes as maniacal devilish creatures that are the embodiments of Satan. So as a crowd gathered around my story, I explained that the Liberal World Order designed for snakes to be seen that way in our society because that’s how they see themselves. They get their ideas from Plato’s Republic regarding their ability to be the philosopher kings who rule all of society. One of their big concerns in life is to gain enough social prestige to be considered to be in that category, which is one of the primary aims of government, to be among the ruling class the way Plato envisioned it. They are fine for the rest of society to be scared of snakes because they are like the snake in the Genesis story, the possessors of knowledge of all good and evil who trick Eve into defying Adam and God to eat from the fruit of that tree and bring down the whole kingdom of everlasting life with the knowledge of good and evil, as defined by that ruling class. As I’ve explained many times about John Dewey and even going back to classics like the socialist propaganda book from 1888, Looking Backward, public education itself was designed around using peer pressure to control all the inhabitants of society to do as they are told and to be fearful of the opinions of the ruling class so not to fall out of favor. That is the purpose of the ruling class over all others, which is created for us very young in public education and politics. 

As I continued the story, I mentioned that I recently had watched a snake being groomed as a pet, eating a mouse thrown into its little aquarium enclosure, which I have seen many hundreds of times over the years, but it has always bothered me. Of course, the snake wants to eat. The mouse just wants to live. They are doing what nature designed them to do, one to eat the other. But it is troubling always that humans insert themselves into that process by capturing the snake and being an intermediary. The snake is now dependent on a human to feed it. And the mouse, once put into the cage, has no defense. When the snake decides it’s going to eat it, the mouse has no option but to accept its fate. It’s always a sad thing to watch. The poor little mouse, once thrown into the aquarium, knows it’s over the moment its placed there, and the creature will do everything it can to avoid the inevitable; it will try to dig its way under a water bowl or some other aquarium feature to survive, but there essentially is nothing it can do but wait for the snake to eat it. The only defense it has is to attempt to ignore the snake and live its life normally, hoping until that last moment that it will live life as long as possible. Thus, its only defense is to ignore the problem and pretend that its crisis is not a doomsday scenario.    

My life in this grooming process was never what the Liberal World Order expected. I never developed a care for what other people thought about me going way back to 2-3-and 4 years of age. Therefore, my public education experience was utterly divorced from Dewey’s purpose for it, which was to break down members of society into their various social groups, ultimately to be led by the philosopher kings, those with the highest liberal level of education in society, and to be like the mouse in life, to live in the aquarium of their own making and to accept our fate when the snake decides to eat. Of course, the philosopher kings of Plato see themselves as the snake and the rest of the world as their next meal. That is the purpose of all monarchies, secret societies, every bureaucratic organization, even sports. But what was unique about my life is that I never accepted such an absurd concept as a little kid, and of course, that caused a lot of consternation as I got older and didn’t fit into the socially constructed categories. I never accepted the liberal world order aquarium we were all thrown into. Several times in my life, this relationship with the established order and its expectations of it rattled the participants. In the video above, I tell a few personal stories that are comical where the people trained by the Liberal World Order were disarmed entirely as to how to deal with me. One was a 5-year class reunion for the public school I went to. The other was a big presentation I was a part of with the mayor of Cincinnati, city council, all the big media at the time, and all the powerful money people for what to do with the Banks Project back in the 90s. In both examples, I represented life outside the aquarium, and the rulers didn’t know what to do with me, so they ignored me as best they could, which is a typical reaction. To them, it’s earth-shattering because they think of themselves as the snake, but when they meet someone who does not follow their liberal world order rules, they realize that they are actually the mouse in life, and they freeze and try their best to pretend that their end is not near. And it’s terrifying to them.

The purpose of me telling that story to that small group of Trump flag-waving gunslingers on the shores of Lake Erie was to assure them that the Liberal World Order is not scary. They are easy to beat; all you have to do is not care what they think of you. And once you do, you will gain all the power in the relationship. They have been taught by the Liberal World Order that they are the snake in life and that everyone else is food for them. But when you do not care about their controls, they are powerless to do anything to control you, and in that way, the roles become reversed, and they become the food. Watching them go through their cycles of paralysis when they realize such things is always funny. And when it is wondered about what will happen next in the political world of our current life, that is the ultimate fate for them. They were never the snake but were always the mouse, and they are food to be consumed at our leisure. And now we’re hungry, so it’s only a matter of time. And that is what I told that group who asked about my gun grips. That is how I see myself, and my work with the guns is my own reminder of that fact and the vulnerabilities of the Liberal World Order. Like the snake in the aquarium, we can eat when we see fit, and that reality of the Liberal World Order is the most terrifying aspect in the world. They have trained all their lives that their role was the other way around, that they could use peer pressure to control all of existence. But the moment they run into someone who doesn’t care about their opinions and actually sees them as food, they lose all their power, which is the inevitable fate for them all in the months and years to come. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Brain Dead Losers at the IRS: And those idiots want to hire 87,000 more of them and give them guns to kick down doors to confiscate more wealth for a bloated, out-of-control government

Of course, there should always be a concern when we are talking about putting 87,000 dumb and inefficient people onto a government payroll and encouraging them to go door to door with guns to extract more money from the American population. It’s a plea by stupid people in the administrative state to feed the beast they have created. They can’t get tax increases passed in government, so they are looking to extract more money from the public to fund their gross inefficiencies with force. But they do so without dealing with their previous inefficiencies. Instead, they insist on creating a larger government with proportionally more lackluster effort without a care in the world to the incredible cost it would bring across our economic engine to society. From my experience, IRS agents are dumb as a box of rocks on a good day. In my life, I keep things very simple, not for my sake, but because in my previous involvement with the IRS, I find them such a stupid class of people that have difficulty understanding basic things if I can’t show my incomes on simple W2s then its simply not worth doing. I get investment offers for crypto, real estate, and business opportunities of all kinds several times a day, all days of the week. But I turn them all down because the opportunity cost of doing them likely would never exceed the pain in the ass required to deal with the IRS and the set-up for the audits that require hours and hours of time spent with some of the dumbest people on earth. I’d rather give up making millions and millions of dollars so that I could gain the riches of not having to talk to a box of dumb rocks who took a government job so they could be paid well to mask their lazy life and still have authority over other people as a representative of big, out of control, inefficient, government.

The audacity of the proposal to hire 87,000 more IRS agents is that the government is already grossly inefficient. Adding this many more inefficient employees to the government payroll is only pouring gas on an already blazing dumpster fire. Government employees of all kinds are some of the worst in the world regarding lazy economic generators. I have always talked about how horrible it has been to pay public school teachers what we pay them only to get the horrendous work performance that we get out of them, not to mention the political activism. When they ask for tax hikes to pay for their bloated services to the community, it is always my default mode to require them to lay off some of that inefficiency because that should always be the goal.   Efficiency is the first thing anybody dealing with money should be thinking about. But government always throws money at inefficiency to achieve their stated objectives. In this case, they want more money to operate the administrative state, so they throw more money at the same inefficiencies that caused the problems to begin with. So not only have they compounded those inefficiencies and now connected more labor to those inefficiencies, making the situation considerably worse, but they failed to deal with the root cause of their inefficiencies in the first place seeking to mask it with ominous authority rule. That has always been the joke of public education. But you can see it most notably at your local BMV, where slow, horrible service has become the accepted norm. If you want to drive a car, you have to deal with these slow-minded losers who show up for work brain dead and end their days comatose.   All government employees become some representative of a brain-dead lifestyle by the nature of their tasks. So the greater expansion of government services, the more zombies that we put into society and pay them way too much to achieve way too little.

Because government never wants to admit what a burden it is to society, they never measure anything in opportunity cost. Instead, their goal is to leech off effort and fuel their disgusting lifestyles off the opportunity of others. With the expansion of 87,000 IRS agents, the government intends to fuel itself off the efforts of others. But as I said, there is a cost to inefficiency; it can’t be hidden on balance sheets. It emerges in undesirable ways frequently. When employees show up for work at 8 in the morning and are ordering their lunch by 9 am. It arrives at noon. Then after eating it, they are done for the day and ready to go home. So rather than work the rest of the day, they play on the internet sending messages of nothing to each other until 5 when they go pick up their kids at daycare, then meander home to die a little bit each day in front of the television too tired from their day’s activities to lift a hand to do much of anything else. Then when they finally get to their weekend, they waste it complaining about how tired they are from the previous week. That is the life of the typical government employee who has lost the ability to think because they aren’t paid to think; they are paid to waste time, money, and intellectual effort, which is precisely what the government gets in exchange for their overvalued employment. 

I remember how it was in 2010; I was on the IRS target list for Lois Lerner’s targeting of conservatives by direct order from the Obama terrorist organization that had occupied the White House. They confiscated some of my videos and other Tea Party material as evidence, and I will admit to having some fun watching them view the material. It was like watching dogs turn their heads to some invisible dog whistle, contemplating things beyond their comprehension to grasp because they didn’t have the mental capacity to do so. It was beyond their range of understanding. I’m probably being too nice when I say that IRS agents are dumb as a box of rocks. They are actually worse than that, and that’s because the mismanagement of those resources starts at the top and flows down to all the field agents. So when we add to those numbers, of course, proportionally, we will get much more inefficiency when employees are added because we did not make a leadership change. That is just dry wood on an open fire regarding the administrative state. Adding more employees to an already inefficient government agency is a useless and more costly gesture. What they cost alone is excessive but minor when added to the opportunity cost that the IRS imposes on the culture at large, the many trillions of dollars of money that could have been made if government was just out of the way. Regular hard-working people would be free to do their tasks unimpeded. And that is the cost of the additional IRS agents. The shakedown of regular people is just the beginning of the problem. The real burden comes from things that don’t happen, ultimately worsening the world. It’s bad enough to think that giving such lazy and stupid people so much government power might be a solution the administrative state values, but it’s in what doesn’t happen that holds the real costs of their incursion. And that is what the brain-dead losers of the administrative state never consider because they don’t have the minds to think it. What they want, all they want is to consume off the efforts of others. And by expanding the IRS, they are just looking the squeeze the orange a bit more for a spoonful of juice in all the inefficient ways that have become the norm of government activity.    

Rich Hoffman

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Thomas Hall Wins the 46th Ohio Representative Seat: Sheriff Jones has no clothes

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a political candidate who deserved election or re-election more than Thomas Hall did in a very tough year where districts were redrawn at the last minute. There was more internal party opposition against an opponent than what he not only survived in an August 2022 primary but excelled. In the end, Thomas Hall beat his rival, Matt King, by almost 12%, although with the addition of Liberty Township to the new 46th district, it looked like the race might tighten up. By the time the smoke cleared, it was an easy win for Thomas Hall despite the opposition. Part of that was that he has had an excellent record during his first term. But the rest of it was that he just worked so hard to win, personally knocking on over 6000 doors and meeting voters face to face. And many members of the Butler County Republican Party, led by Sheriff Jones, threw everything they had at him, including the kitchen sink and all the plumbing, to defeat him. But it didn’t make a dent in Thomas, which didn’t surprise me in the least. I had called the race over eight months ago and given my personal endorsement. And as history shows, when I endorse someone, they tend to win. Not so much for anything I do, but for the quality of people, the candidates tend to be and for knowing the trends in politics. Nobody was going to outwork Thomas Hall, and as I have come to know him, he’s a good, sincere person to his very core. Nobody would beat Thomas Hall as long as he let voters know who he was, which he did, walking neighborhoods for many weeks now, shaking hands and talking to people instead of just sending out mailers, robocalls, and hit pieces on Facebook. Thomas was well funded and did all the usual political stuff, which I mentioned. But in addition to that, his campaign put in many thousands of hours of labor into direct communication with real people cutting out all the traditional media from hijacking the process. And for voters, they have come to realize they are lucky to have someone like Thomas to vote for. 

The sad part of this story, as positive as it has been, was the tragic fall of Sheriff Jones, who made it his personal vendetta to destroy Thomas Hall in every way, shape, and form. For several months now, I have felt sorry for Sheriff Jones. I see what he is going through now in many of the competitive shooting events that I do throughout the year. It’s tough to be the best at something, then suddenly, some young kid who can do it better, faster, and more often than you comes along, and it hurts. I’ve seen that kind of jealousy destroy many people, and many never recover from it. Thomas Hall wasn’t willing to kiss the ring of one of Butler County’s kingmakers in the Republican Party. Jones obviously took it personally and decided to primary Hall for a second term in the Ohio legislature as a Representative. I watched over much of the fall of 2021 as many fellow Republicans were unified and would attend events together in great camaraderie, to suddenly being enemies with one another. That’s about when Sheriff Jones went on WLW radio and went out of his way to embarrass Thomas Hall because the Sheriff didn’t like his voting record. So, he wanted to show himself as the kingmaker in Butler County and put his aggressive efforts behind Matt King to primary out of office Thomas Hall. Suddenly, many of those same Republicans weren’t getting together anymore, and by the spring of 2022, the sides were split. Most Republicans who wanted to maintain a relationship with Sheriff Jones had turned against Thomas, betting that his political career was over because Sheriff Jones had decided it was. 

I’ve known Sheriff Jones for a long time. I have liked him most in the early days of the Tea Party movement, then again during the first Trump term. To his credit, he was one of the first area Republicans to join behind Trump in 2016. But I remind people often that Trump used to be a Democrat. So did Kari Lake, for that matter. Sheriff Jones, to me, has shown himself to be a big government Democrat who dresses as a 50s-style cowboy sheriff. I like the look. But his actions are much more Democrat than conservative. We had a mutual friend in David Kern, so we have tolerated each other the way relatives do at Thanksgiving Dinner. Sometimes we got along, sometimes not so much. I’ve always liked what he brought to the “Republican” brand as an image. But have been embarrassed by him often as a public official. I understand that he’s never done anything but public life. So it’s been a relationship I’ve been willing to take the good with the bad. That holds until I see him start abusing his power as he clearly did with Thomas Hall. Then anything good Sheriff Jones had done all these years suddenly gets tossed out the window as he does the very Democrat thing, abusing his authority to exert power over others. He went way out of his way to make an example out of Thomas Hall, and many other Republicans followed after him. 

In the end, the good guys won. Thomas won due to his great reputation and his very hard work. He didn’t need a party endorsement, even though he should have had it as a good incumbent. Nobody wanted to cross Sheriff Jones and feared what their own political futures might become if they did. So, things got very ugly during the campaign. Nobody would have thought poorly of Thomas Hall if he had caved under pressure. I always thought he was the clear winner, and I would tell him that. I knew if people could get to know Thomas the way I had, that they’d easily vote for him no matter what Sheriff Jones said. I also knew that Sheriff Jones didn’t have the political capital that he thought he had. Outside of some Lakota school board members, some reporters at Fox 19, and some thankful tax increase moms in the neighborhoods around his house in Liberty Township, a lot of people don’t like Sheriff Jones because they have come to know him as a bully. And so long as Jones has stayed in that bubble, he hasn’t had to face the truth about how people really feel about him when his back was turned. I have often thought some of those feelings were unfair. I always thought Sheriff Jones meant well, looking at him through the eyes of someone like the late Liberty Township trustee, David Kern. But after what Jones did to Thomas Hall during this election cycle and other Republicans who dared to support him, I could see why so many people would not like the Sheriff. So, I knew when it came time to vote; people would pick Thomas Hall. And, of course, they did. After all the money that was spent against Hall by the Sheriff Jones-led Matt King challenge, it’s evident that many of those characters were stuck in the past and had not learned the lessons of recent political trends. You couldn’t buy elections anymore with ads in the paper, simple yard signs, or robocalls with the Sheriff talking endorsements. I had many tens of thousands of hits on this site over the last several months from people looking for more information on Thomas. And what they found was the truth, the truth better than paid ads and sheriff endorsements can give. People were able to see Thomas Hall for the excellent person that he was. And that’s why he won and will continue to well into the future. 

Rich Hoffman

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What ‘Bob’s Burgers’ says about American Society: What people will do to have a good family

At face value, it would be one of those strange mysteries. But when you dig into the issue a bit, it makes a lot of sense and says a lot about what kind of society we really are as Americans. I’ll admit, I was perplexed as to why any studio would produce a Bob’s Burgers theatrical release. With so many streaming services that are out there these days, why would anybody make a movie of the somewhat popular cartoon on Fox called Bob’s Burgers, which is a version of the typical animated formula that they have made so popular over the years with other offerings like The Simpsons, and Family Guy? I’m not too fond of Bob on Bob’s Burgers; I think of him as a loser. He’s not very ambitious; as a dad, he’s perpetually broke. He runs a little New England burger place in a resort town, and he can barely rub two pennies together.

Most of the episodes are about the problems they have as a family because they never have enough money to do things. And of course, my famous saying to people complaining about not having enough money is just to work and make more. Especially in America, if you want money, you can have it. You may not make all the money you want in 8 hours of work. Forty hours a week may not be enough; you might have to work 80. When I was raising a family, I have told the stories of only having one car, and I rode a bicycle 25 miles a day, so my wife could have the car for the kids and worked two full-time jobs to make the money we needed as a family. So, I can’t relate to Bob in Bob’s Burgers, and I find it odd that young people like the show so much. But, apparently, they do. Enough so that they made a theatrical movie release this year as something they thought was justifiable. 

I also had a unique experience while attending various comic cons with my daughter, an outstanding illustrator who does exhibitions of her work at those types of events. As I have said, it’s interesting to watch people cosplay at comic cons, the kind of outfits they want to dress up in, and invest so much of their time to bring characters they enjoy to life in some way. I can understand the various Star Wars characters and those from the Marvel movies. Those are action movies that make you feel good when leaving the movie theater in some way, so it makes sense that people would want to dress up as those characters during Halloween and at comic cons. Bringing fantasy to life is a specific function of the human imagination, a conceptual vehicle that expresses inner values that manifest in mythological impressions during social exchanges. Dressing up as a favorite character is a way to vote for the kind of values that you see in pop culture. Imitation is the ultimate compliment. But while I was at these events, I was just a little shocked to see young people dressing up as characters from Bob’s Burgers, which is hard because they are all cartoons. It’s not easy to bring a cartoon character to life, yet people did, and some were really good costumes. Why? I’ve watched many episodes of Bob’s Burgers, and I just don’t enjoy the show that much. For me, it’s often filler in the background while I’m doing five or six other things. I occasionally watch it because I like the colors of cartoons. But I can’t relate to the characters much at all. 

Oddly enough, my wife likes Bob’s Burgers a lot. I’d say it’s her favorite show, so this problem has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Yet, in working to understand the current political sentiment of our mass society, I felt something was going on with Bob’s Burgers that was worth noticing, significantly if film executives believed that a theatrical release of a subpar cartoon series on Fox justified its own movie. So the one thing that really jumps out about Bob’s Burgers that is likable is that all the family members like each other. Bob, his wife, and his three children all live in a little dump of an apartment, yet they don’t act like a bunch of losers who are waiting in line with a bottle of booze to buy lottery tickets. They work hard for the money they make and love each other as a family while running the family burger business. Bob is always a few cents short of whatever the family needs, but his wife never talks about leaving him for a better life with a more ambitious lover. The kids are just happy to have mom and dad together in the house. The brothers and sisters aren’t out to kill each other; they go on many neighborhood adventures and solve problems like rational people. They are a very “traditional” family. 

And that’s what it is with Bob’s Burgers; like many of the other Fox primetime cartoons, they all have in common a mom and a dad in the home who love each other. That is certainly the case with Family Guy, a very progressive show that features a family that stays together. There aren’t step-parents and step-children in these cartoons. They are all very traditional. Other animated shows have tried to make it with more progressive storylines, but they always fail. The ones that stick around over the years are the cartoons that feature traditional family settings. The Simpsons have been on for decades now, a very long time. And yet, with many hundreds of storylines, Homer and his wife Marge still love each other and work through marital problems together in a way that never ends in divorce or a family breakup.   And that was the key to this Bob’s Burgers mystery. Here was a family on an animated show with many problems, and they seemed limited in their ability to solve those problems. But, they enjoy each other as a family. You don’t see Bob running around on the town to cheat on his wife. Or running away from the attention that the kids obviously want from him. He’s a good dad, even if he’s unambitious socially. And his family loves him for it. Obviously, the audiences who can’t say the same about their own families have found a reliable father figure in Bob’s Burgers. In Bob’s Burgers, they see the family they always wanted and never had in the fictional settings. And it has such an impact on them that they even dress up as the characters in cosplay. It says a lot about the true state of our society when those types of fictional stories indicate what people really feel inside. Their vote for the type of entertainment they wish to enjoy says what all people really crave outside of political theater. Most people would give up a lot to have a family like Bob’s Burgers, where at least mom and dad loved each other, and their siblings worked together to help make the family a family. In a world full of disappointments, at least Bob and his animated television family were willing to fight through disappointments for the key ingredient to all happy societies, a good family that might not have a lot of money, but at least they had what all humans crave, a genuine love for each other. And that is worth noting and something that should give us all hope for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

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Fast Draw at the Annie Oakley Event: What the world looks like out in God’s country

For me, the western arts is a religion of sorts, it’s something I think about every day, and I work with some aspect of it several times a day in just about everything I do. And for context, the white hat I wear so much came from my favorite hat shop in Jackson, Wyoming, on an extraordinary pilgrimage I made there with my entire family. I’ve traveled worldwide and seen many of the world’s best things up close and personal. And I’ve been to rodeos they have out West, specifically the one at Cody, Wyoming, which is fantastic and about as good as it gets. A rodeo experience out to Cody, Wyoming, is in itself worth a vacation just to do that. But I will say that the Annie Oakley Festival they have every year in Darke County, Ohio, in the town of Greenville, is one of the best displays of Americana on planet earth, and I never get tired of attending. I look forward to it every time they have it, and when they do, I usually am involved in some aspect or another in the shows they put on. This year I was in the bullwhip competitions, as I usually am. But additionally, I was able to be in the Ohio Fast Draw Association’s competition, a two-day event that I have always thought brought the Annie Oakley Festival into the realm of uniqueness that establishes it as a vacation destination all its own. For people looking to get in touch with America again, I would recommend everyone to mark the last weekend of July on their calendars and make the trip to the Annie Oakley Festival when it’s happening in Greenville and to put the noise of life aside for a few days and experience the festival in all its glory.

I’ve been participating in the Annie Oakley Festival for a few decades. During that entire time, I worked with my friend Gery Deer at the Western Showcase to put on Saturday bullwhip competitions that are always crowd pleasers. I started working with whips on my grandparents’ farms when I was very young, so they have always been a part of my life. When I learned that my great grandfather could crack a fly off the wall with a bullwhip, I decided that was something I was going to do, and over the years, it has become my own version of a martial art. In my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I take many of the concepts I have been thinking about over the years from the Annie Oakley Festival and apply them to the ways of the world that have influences from everywhere. I have thought of the Annie Oakley Festival as a kind of unique American philosophy that shows what all people, no matter where they come from, gravitate to when they have the freedom to be away from government and go to God’s country without a lot of United Nations influence. And from the showman side, I have watched the audiences and come to some very definitive understandings that are unique to the Annie Oakley Festival. The Buffalo Bill Wild West show has always been a definitive presentation of what America uniquely is. Without Annie Oakley, it would never have become the global phenomenon it was. And I find that Greenville festival every year to be the embodiment of that definition, more so than in places like Cody, Wyoming, which is the authentic real deal cowboy life, right in the middle of a desert in the traditional way people think; of the “West.” But it’s the swagger that came from the Buffalo Bill show that Annie Oakley specifically brought to the whole exhibition that I have always loved so much. It’s why that event is a yearly reset period for me, where I clear my thoughts and push the noise aside for a few days and just soak up the American flags and the smell of gunsmoke.

After the bullwhip competitions, I always used to go over and watch the fast draw guys. But I couldn’t make fast draw part of my life for a long time. Getting the equipment to participate was a bit expensive, but more than anything was the time. Many of the shoots last entire weekends and are all over the place. You can’t just show up at Annie Oakley once a year to commit to the sport and compete. It has only been over the last few years that I finally have had the time to commit to it, so it’s something pretty new for me. But it was always their shoot at the Annie Oakley Festival that I looked forward to watching. So, it was really enjoyable to be able to attend as a competitor, and I made the most of it. This was the first year I did both events, the Ohio Fast Draw Association shoot and the Western Arts Showcase, so it was a very busy weekend for me. So busy that I didn’t even have time to look at my phone and answer the many text messages that were adding up due to the news of the world. I was able to get caught up after the festival, but the time off was well worth it. I have provided several pictures and videos of the event to capture a bit of the atmosphere, which I never get tired of.

That’s what makes my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business such a unique book on business and life in America in general. The Annie Oakley Festival has always given me a unique opportunity to see America for what it is and get to know people as spectators wanting to get a piece of that old Buffalo Bill Wild West show that so clearly defined our young country to a world perplexed by it. That challenge is still very true and even hostile at times. But when you are there, you can clearly see what people want and how much of that noisy world they are willing to take. Practicing the combat arts, the fast draw, the bullwhips, and the cowboy-mounted shooting are all exhibitions of the kind of skills that make America, America. And there is no need for apologies regarding the Second Amendment there. No hint to it. People generally agree on how the world is, understand right and wrong, and treat each other well and respectfully. The world does not look so screwed up when you escape the coastal media influences of Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C. It’s always good to see people for what they are. Many from the liberal coasts would be horrified by the stoic tenacity of the people from the flyover states, especially those who attend by the thousands the Annie Oakley Festival. But what’s clear when you attend something like that festival in Greenville, Ohio, is that there are a lot more of those people than there are from liberal politics. You just don’t hear from them on the nightly news. They are out working in the fields, and living life as the coastal types fly over, high above in comfortable jets going from one big city to another, maintaining their bubbles that allow liberalism to grow as a concept. That is until they stop by some place like Cody, Wyoming, and see what people really think of them. Or, they drive into the heart of Ohio, way out in God’s country, and see the many yard signs dedicated to Trump, and get a sense that Annie Oakley never really died, and neither did the Buffalo Bill Wild West show. It lives on in Darke County, Ohio, and recharges me yearly. I spend my days between Annie Oakley events thinking about it. It’s never far from my mind. And given the way the world is now, they would do well to learn their own lessons from the Annie Oakley Festival. It’s a vacation destination all its own and well worth the time to do so. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Midterms Aren’t Enough: This problem goes back thousands of years

As we talk about the midterms and the massive increases of House and Senate seats that are projected for the GOP and watch with mystery the obvious ruse of Nancy Pelosi poking the stick at China, seemingly going against the Biden administration’s pro-China policies, we need to understand just how desperate Democrats are and to what extent globalists around the world will fight to keep power. And we also hear that Joe Biden has Covid yet again; the Democrats saw that Joe polled better when he hid in the White House residence, just as he did when he ran for President by hiding in his basement; they intend to exploit every advantage they can get their hands on fully. The Never Trumper movement will do anything to keep Trump out of office, including running a third-party candidate to help Gavin Newsom get pushed over the top as Bill Clinton did. Never-Trumpers don’t mind dealing with the Democrats in office. And, of course, Democrats will do anything to obtain power. They aren’t just going to accept a red wave vote and disappear into the night. They will fight until the very death of themselves and their party. They aren’t going to respect the will of the voters. So be cautious of every trick and expect them all to be played. It might be too late for them to correct course by the midterms. Just like the recession forecasts that have been talked about all of 2022 only to come true ultimately, the midterms will also. But Democrats will spin it with their eye toward the next goal, much as they did with the economy. They are what any definition would call the very foundations of evil. Not because they think differently, but because of their intentions toward mass society, and they are getting ready to make their final stand. Once the midterms are won, the fight will just be getting started. It’s not very long until 2024, yet it’s a very long way away as well, and a lot can and will happen. 

For Democrats and global progressives, the political fight in America is not just about ideas on how to manage society. It’s a religion to them. That is why they are willing to work with Never-Trumpers, and there is essentially a “uniparty” in Washington D.C.  Most politicians in political theater, whether it’s Fox News or CNN broadcasts are essentially the same. Everything they have ever been was shaped by two opposing forces. Yet the MAGA movement is the natural evolution of a third political force that has tried for many years to manifest into reality but has always been lost by one of the two basic religious philosophies. President Trump represents a threat to that entire world order which is older than history itself.

On the one hand, members of the dualist religions believe that all life on earth is evil, driven by materialism and that the goal of all humanity is to escape from the limits of the body and be resurrected as a spirit for eternal life. Then there are those religions, such as the Roman Catholic Church, which intended to be the government on earth over every micromanaged aspect of people’s lives. They intend themselves to be the gates to God, putting themselves between everlasting life and the material needs of existence. No matter what time humanity has found itself, one of those two forces has shaped all political theater suppressing any other ideas that might have emerged. So what the administrative state, as we call it, is fighting for is nothing less than a preservation of the old order and preventing any new ideas from emerging. 

There is a reason no other ideas emerged beyond those two forces, the dualist religions and the kinghood of the other dominating entire regions to the embodiment of a ruler on earth. Most of the secret societies we always hear about have operated in the background to preserve these orders, and they are hard at work right now to keep this threat of President Trump from emerging again. Donald Trump is an exciting creation of the American lifestyle. This materialist literally lived in a golden palace high atop America’s most capitalist city of New York with his beautiful supermodel wife. He had top-rated television shows, wrote books, and was the face of American capitalism in ways that significantly threatened the order of anti-materialists who have always maintained the religions of dualism, earth bad, eternity good. Trump showed that a person could be a materialist and could be smart about eternal life. He is an eternal optimist, never crying in public and not even slowing down for the death of people close to him. Trump is very much a creation of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is uniquely American and is terror to the old religions of the world who use the fear of fire and brimstone to control people from birth until their graves and claim to have influence even into eternity. That lack of fear and respect for the duelist religions and the king state concepts of the modern pope or some monarchy are reprehensible to the political left. And they will not disappear into the night with a golly-gee, shucks mentality. They will be out for blood and must be dealt with knowing that.

Expect every trick in the book. Splitting the vote with a three-candidate field is the most obvious, but I would caution everyone not to fall for it. This new Republican Party under Trump is something very different from what it has been in the past. Immigration running from terrible conditions worldwide is looking toward the Republican Party. They don’t want America to become the kind of places they ran from. Democrats planned that those immigrants, illegal and otherwise, would vote for big government because of the giveaways. But most people coming to America, no matter where they came from, want the preservation of family, want the freedom to make money, and try for the American dream. They reject globalism because they have seen what it does to communities where it has sunk roots. And none of that is part of the Democrat plan. It’s not part of the Never-Trump plan either. For the first time in human history, something is emerging in America that is different from the other stagnant religions of the world, the duelists and the king-state. What Trump has represented is a uniquely American idea of religion that is not controlled by the previous embodiments of social organization. It honestly terrifies those who currently want to be in charge. These new rules are what the next elections are all about. Yes, there was election fraud in the last election, at least. There has likely been election fraud in the previous decades as well, knowing what we do now about how political parties run elections while they are in charge and just how little they think of people in general. And they will try again. But what’s different now and likely for the first time is that people are aware of the problem and act honestly in their own self-interest. That self-interest was defined by one of those two previous religious ideologies. But now, there is an American stamp on it that transcends all the aforementioned controls and the administrative state in the halls of institutionalism that had run the terror. They don’t know what to do to hold on to power when so many people continue to turn to Trump for a change, a change away from them and their rules. And to maintain their illusions, don’t underestimate them at all. Because they will do anything to keep power. Cheating in elections is just the tip of the iceberg. 

Rich Hoffman

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Bad, Mad Moms Can’t Rule Anything, Especially in Politics: What the real anger towards Darbi Boddy at Lakota indicates

I usually wouldn’t care, but as I’ve said many times, I support Darbi Boddy, who is a Lakota school board member, and there are a lot of mad moms and some strangely testosterone-free dads who just absolutely hate her and are petitioning to remove her from the board with a signature drive. So I’ve been reading some of the comments and listening to their complaints about Darbi more than I otherwise would to see if there is anything to their anger. Of course, there isn’t. Much of what they don’t like Darbi over is the result of their own terrible parenting, which requires some point of reference to consider. First of all, the attempt to remove a school board member with a petition drive is a steep hill. No matter how many signatures they gather, there were still 8 thousand people who had just put her in office, and a judge would ultimately have to rule on the action. So, just because there are a lot of mad moms signing a petition, that doesn’t mean they have any power to remove Darbi from her position, no matter how many of them sign a piece of paper. But let’s forget about that for this article and consider what they are so mad at, why they are angry with her, then consider what impact such people have on government in general. This situation with Darbi Boddy is just one local example of a much bigger problem that creates a lot of noise in all government interaction, the mad mom activist and the reasons they lobby government to compensate their children for the things that they, as parents, should be giving them. When you listen carefully to their complaints about Darbi Boddy, psychologically, what we really hear from them is nothing that Darbi has done but that they are planting a seed of discontent that will put the blame for their own bad parenting on a politician or a school. They crave more centralized authority to mask their own parental inadequacies.

I personally think motherhood is the most important job on planet earth. There is nothing else that comes close to the importance of motherhood. There is no CEO job or President of the United States that has a more important job than a mom in a family. She gives children everything they will ever be; if she does a bad job, the kids will be screwed up for life. It’s a big responsibility, and I think we should support moms much more than we do as a society. But, saying all that, often, moms are just kids themselves. As 20-somethings and 30-somethings, about to the age of 40, people just don’t have enough emotional development to have all the wisdom that children require. Motherhood is tricky business; in the beginning of a child’s life, it’s easy to know whether or not a mom is doing a good job.   Kids need everything when they are born. So if a mom keeps a child from crying, then they could be said to have success in their task. If they are there to help teach the child to walk, dress themselves, and can keep them from crying, because that’s all kids know to do when they are born, then a mom can say to herself that she is a good mom. But, at about age five, that entire relationship changes, and most parents don’t adapt. This second part of the job of raising a child is much more difficult, and most parents, especially in the kind of society we have these days, are not prepared for the task. 

From ages 5 to 15, children need wisdom from their parents, especially their moms. They need to learn to start managing risk and to advance their intellect through many minor bumps and bruises, which will then instruct them how to solve problems when they are adults. But too often, moms are still trying to keep their children from crying instead of teaching them not to cry and to solve their problems, no matter what they are. Kids need wise advice more than a padded room during this period of time, and it is monstrously difficult for moms to make that transition. I call this the “fat ass” phase, where anxious moms overeat because their own childhood neurosis explodes against the perpetual disappointments of the intellectual needs of their children, and it shows in the parents with expanded waistlines and upsized jean sizes. It’s no longer easy to just stop them from crying; what kids need in those formative years is much more difficult than simple pacification, and most mothers fail at it miserably. So they eat too many bags of chips, they divert their attention to too much ridiculous trivia, and when the children need that wise advice, the mother simply doesn’t have it in them. Too often, moms led embarrassing lives up until the time they were married or decided to have a baby, and all the guilt from that previous life comes back at them now that they are in charge of another life, and they just lack the confidence to give wise advice to anybody. 

Those mad moms turn to the government to help raise their children. This momma-age voting bracket is filled with big government disasters of people who were ill-equipped to have children or even be married to a spouse. So they vote for big government to hide their many faults behind government action. So the anger you often hear leveled at a school board member like Darbi Boddy at Lakota is because the parents feel inadequate. They want government to give them cover for their bad parenting skills, and a person like Darbi is encouraging more responsibility. When she takes pictures of kids dressed like prostitutes in the halls of Lakota, violating dress codes, it makes the parents feel bad because their bad parenting has been exposed. I can certainly understand why it would hurt their feelings, but perhaps it should. Rather than getting angry at Darbi, perhaps the right thing to do would be to change how they are parenting for the child’s sake. Trying to be the cool mom to a child that clearly has issues based on the way they appear in public isn’t going to give that child the skills they need once they become adults. What will end up happening is they will just repeat the process when they have their own children. And we’ll have more societal disasters in government as a result. Those people will become voters who seek to hide their bad behavior, their wasted lives behind more big government programs, which then gives us the kind of trouble we see today in politics. 

The worst public excuse that you can hear from a mother when they make demands on political sentiment when they are trying to express validation for their cause is to say, “I’m a mom,” as if that should say it all. Because she’s a mom, she has the right to ask for anything, and society should do whatever it takes to help her kid become successful. But she should have thought about that when she wasted her own youth sexually reckless, doing the floss at every wedding reception in a drunken stupor to the big butt song, and taking too many drugs from ages 15 to 25 when they realize that their flowers are wilting and they better do something to start a family by around age 30 before all their petals fall off and nobody wants to buy a house with them. Those are not the kind of conditions that produce a healthy family and make well-balanced kids who grow up into success. Those are crippling conditions that destroy lives, not just of the mother but of all her offspring. And Lakota schools, any government school, or any government agency cannot help such a person hide all the mistakes they have made in life with more policy, more rules, all driven from neurotic nonsense. Kids need a mom and a good person who can give them good advice. And when parents don’t feel confident in their ability to provide sound advice, they become these train-wrecks of people you see at school board meetings speaking about what they need Lakota to do to make their kid better. Or they complain about Darbi Boddy and put a lot of attention into getting rid of her with a petition drive. Rather than spend that time listening to their kids and advising them on how to be good people, they instead spend all their efforts getting rid of a school board member so that when their children are disasters of people twenty years from now, they can point to the school and blame them for all the mistakes. But the truth is, the problems begin and end with the moms who never made the successful transition with their kids from preventing them from crying to the wise advisor that children ultimately need. The great crisis of our time is that when kids reach that critical age, there just aren’t enough parents who can fill that role, and kids are greatly hampered in life because of it.

Rich Hoffman

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