Tag: Politics

The Best Thing that Could Happen with the J6 Committee Would be to Indict President Trump: Accelerating the end of the Democrat Party

We all know by now what the UnSelect Committee, who has been putting on a show trial over what they say is the darkest day in American history, January 6th, 2021, is up to. They are seeking to hide the election fraud they participated in, and they hope they can use the proceedings to indict President Trump and tie him up in court to disqualify him from running in 2024, which they are terrified of. And to all that, I think there would be nothing better for our country than to have Trump indicted because, in the process, there would be legal discovery and all kinds of a mess that would be blasted into the mainstream news cycle that has so far been contained from the public. The result of that would be a complete destruction of the Democrat Party. Which I think is destroying itself quite nicely. But an indictment of Trump would be the end of them and the established order of the Beltway, which would turn out to be far greater than just having Trump run for President again, only to go through the same kind of resistance we saw before. The pressure of Trump is far greater than actually being in the White House. There are a lot of people who could run for President in 2024 who could represent the MAGA movement.  Ron DeSantis comes to mind.  What is being built presently is a new kind of political movement that will far outlast many of the people currently holding office. The net result of all these efforts will save our nation from the looters and scumbags who have given us the mess we see now. But an indictment of Trump would accelerate the process in ways that nobody has been thinking about and would be very beneficial to the ultimate destruction of the Democrat Party due to the kind of case that would be put on full display for all to see. 

What we see happening with the J6 Hearing spectacle is the undoing of the George Bush era New World Order that Klaus Schwab and the other Desecrators of Davos are fully committed to today, with billions of dollars in personal assets fully dedicated to the change state of America from a capitalist country and into a socialist one. They stand to lose a lot of money and power if Trump returns to the White House, which is why they rigged the 2020 election. They couldn’t afford for people to run their own elections; it put at risk all the money and power they had built up over many years. It’s a globalist view of the world that started to be dismantled by the election of Trump in 2016. Back then, the system chiefs thought it was all a joke. They had rigged elections for years and knew how to keep things close to make Americans think they actually picked their own representatives. But most people didn’t believe in the system at all and just didn’t participate, making it easy for the “uniparty” to run all things any way they wanted to. They gave us fake wars and fake economic cycles. They manipulated everything to the gradual sell-off of our country to globalist investors while hiding their vile actions behind red, white, and blue patriotism and selling themselves as patriots as well. But truly, what they were preserving was a kind of Beltway aristocracy that many in the political class craved more than a thirsty person desires water in a hot desert. They wanted power over others more than anything else in the world, so they built a corrupt system to give themselves that power. They had to share it with other Beltway types, but so long as they were members of an elite aristocracy, they were happy to at least do that. 

Then along came Trump running as a person who didn’t need the donor class. He understood the media better than the media understood itself. And he knew how to make real business deals because he had built his brand doing so very publicly. So people showed up and voted for him in more numbers than the election cheats could deal with, and he snuck under the algorithm door in 2016, much to the surprise of everyone. Then, the Beltway, including Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and many others, worked for the next four years to undo the person that the people picked because the hidden little secret all along was that the Beltway ultimately picked the people it put in office. Voters were supposed just to play along, vote to make everything look like a choice, then go quietly back to sleep while the Washington Beltway types sold America away to everyone willing to pay a little cash for the opportunity. And in the process, they have committed so many vast crimes of excessive evil that the parameters were unfathomable to ordinary people. And while Trump was in office, so many crimes were committed to get rid of him, of the people’s pick, that many more crimes were committed by the FBI and the Department of Defense—especially regarding Covid. Many of the things that Wikileaks was publishing which could be traced back to many of the congresspeople and senators we see on television every night, were caught up to some extent or another in sedition, treason, and worse. Actions against America and its constitution left them no choice but to support complete insurrection to foreign interests to hide the crimes they had committed over many years. 

Ultimately, the desire to get rid of Trump and to prevent him from returning to the White House is the desire to cover up all these crimes with a phony trial by the UnSelect Committee over January 6th. The abuse of authority already displayed over Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, General Flynn, Rudy Guiliani, Steve Bannon, and Peter Navarro crossed the line long ago. But to put Trump at the front of the room with all the evidence he has collected along the way and the mouthpiece to sell it to the public, there would be no way for the Beltway types to survive that. We are dealing with new territory politically that we have never experienced before. An indictment would only accelerate a process of destruction that the Beltway has brought on itself. They are the ones with everything to hide, and their attempt to hide so much scandal behind the legitimacy of law and order would only work if people weren’t paying attention. But now, they are paying attention, and the bad guys no longer have control over the media. Social media is more than just Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Fox News does not represent conservatives like it once did; there are many other options now than there were even a few years ago. They don’t have control over what people say to each other. They do not have control of publishing, of anything really. The word of their crimes has gotten out, and now too many people know. It’s over for them already. By indicting Trump, they would only accelerate that process by years and compress them into months. So nothing would be better than to indict Trump. The government cannot live up to the measure they are enforcing on Trump, which is to say that he had an obligation to stop people from behaving the way they did on January 6th, to be angry at election fraud as they knew it at the time and felt that the government had not respected their vote.

The great fear behind the charade of the J6 spectacle is that the political class is not in charge of the millions of people they had taken for granted for decades. And the potential for all-out violence was a genuine fear for them. But in context, they would have nothing to fear if they had not acted so poorly and tried to hide so many crimes behind a façade of political theater. The tricks of old will not work any longer. People are awake to it, and they aren’t going back to sleep. And indicting Trump would only accelerate their own inevitable destruction, which couldn’t come sooner. So yes, indict President Trump, and let’s get the complete destruction of the Democrat Party out of the way once and for all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Message from the SWAMP: Voters are not in charge, the administrative state is

I’ve thought from the beginning that there was massive election fraud in the 2020 election. I watch these kinds of things intently and was watching the news coverage as the steal took place late in the night when people went to bed witnessing a sizable Trump lead, where even Vegas was calling it for Trump. Then in the morning, Biden suddenly had these huge spikes of voter infusions. I watch enough of these things to notice that something was very wrong with the performance of the vote counters, to say it lightly. At that early time, it wasn’t the evidence of voter fraud that we had to go on, but it was the continued behavior of the SWAMP itself, after the Durham Report, the two impeachments over nothing, the spying on the campaign, the actions of the FBI, the complicity of the media, we knew on election night November 3rd that they weren’t all just going to go away and suddenly give up. As I say all the time, judge people based on what they do, not what they say, and you’ll know the truth even in the most voracious lier. So in that regard, the election fraud was blatant, even if, at that moment, we weren’t sure to what extent. Now, after two years of trickling evidence, which grows by the day, there is no question that Trump had the election stolen from him, but worse than that, it was the real people’s pick that was stolen, and that is a problem far greater than the mess we find ourselves in now. We are seeing a conflict play out that goes back to before the Revolutionary War itself, the clash between the idea of America and the conformity of Europe, to the world suddenly being smashed together through technology in uncomfortable ways. The election problems of 2020 were about a lot more than just getting Trump out of the White House.

Essentially, by the morning of November 4th, the collection of bureaucrats, thieves, insurgents, and international bankers were saying with a smile on their faces, “you, the people, are not in charge. We, the administrative state, are, and there is nothing you can do about it.”  They stole the election to essentially protect the same premise that the War of 1812 was all about, can people govern themselves, or were they always to be at the mercy of the aristocratic administrative state types? The answer was evident in their actions. They would not live in a society where people ruled themselves because it invalidated everything they stood for as people. They were refusing to let people govern themselves, and if they had to be obvious about it, instead of hiding in the background allowing the poor fools to believe they were running things, then so be it. They dared us to challenge them and now are panicked by the results. Even going into the details of what happened over Covid, we saw a world thrown together that was run mainly by socialists and communists who were jealous of America in so many ways that they were going to destroy it any way they could. They no longer cared if people knew what they were up to or not. They had lost patience with the whole debate, and that’s why with smiles on their faces on November 4th, they felt utterly validated to declare that Trump had lost and people were just going to have to get over it. Their message to all of us was to put our masks on and shut up. And if you question the election in public, we’ll destroy your life, as they attempted to do with Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell.

I have always said that people, especially in America, will follow the rules until they no longer work. Even now, obviously, the government has been caught in not just stealing the 2020 election for its own reasons of self-preservation, but they murdered people behind the Covid social conditions, and they knew what they were doing as they were doing it, which will be the subject of much future material for me. The evidence in hindsight is quite clear to see the purposes for social distancing, masking, and mandatory vaccinations. The types of people who love the administrative state and their role in it were literally willing to kill to preserve it. So election fraud to them was a gift. At least people weren’t massively slaughtered in the process of a coup in the White House, and people should be happy about it. That’s why it was so terrifying to them what happened when voters with some impassioned instincts about not certifying a fake election stormed the capitol on January 6th in frustration by what they had witnessed. Several hundred thousand people had come to hear Trump speak at a Stop the Steal Rally at the White House, and that was terrifying to the administrative state, which had organized so many mass riots and caused so much damage during all of 2020. Even after a year of Covid, people were willing to come out into the cold to support President Trump or even the idea of him, a people’s pick. At the end of the day, a portion broke into the Capitol Building to let the politicians know there that they weren’t in charge; the people were. 

Many people have offered that the efforts of the January 6th Committee and the optics that have been shown on television are purely put on to hide the bad inflation numbers of Democrats controlling all three houses of our government. Or the many other missteps that are destroying the world, especially the liberal commitment to eradicating the economy of America to save the world from their religion of fanatics regarding climate change. Their actions on gas prices, food shortages, and other deliberate terrorist acts are far more radical than the terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center by running planes into them or the actions at WACO, Ruby Ridge, or Oklahoma City. The January 6th Committee is about more than anything anybody has so far put their mind around. It is about aspects of many things, but at its heart is the hatred of people who think they can rule themselves and not have their “betters” ruling over them for their own good because the answer to that question is one that the human race has never had to answer, except to leave places and to resettle in areas with less bureaucrats in them over the last 10,000 years. The human race collided for the first time because the planet was too small to any longer ignore the question. As Trump likes to call them, the Unselect Committee has one purpose and one purpose only, to ensure that the administrative state is in charge and that voters were not.

To become in charge, you had to be in the “in” group like they were. You couldn’t just rule yourself. They were happy to play along all this time and let us think we were in charge, so long as they pulled the strings. But after two elections of Trump, they had lost patience to play the game any longer, and they expected us to kneel to their power. And when we didn’t, then insisted that we were still in charge, like many did that day on January 6th, well, that was a bridge too far for them, and that’s where we find ourselves presently. They aren’t willing to give up power or what they think is power. And they will do anything to keep it, even kill if necessary. In that way, we know who we are dealing with, and there is no way that this all ends in peace.   The question is, can it end without lives lost. That will depend on the authenticity of the next election. People are willing to give elections a chance. But they will not be ruled by incompetent losers from the administrative state, and that for those who are, is the scariest thing in the world—not having power and knowing that the people of the world refuse to be ruled over by the administrative class.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

“The Disrupter,” Jennifer Gross, Gets an Award: Standing up for what’s right when it costs the most to do so

At the Patriot Awards at the end of May 2022, Jennifer Gross, my State Representative, received the Ignition Award. When I talk about Jennifer, I refer to her as “The Disrupter,” and she likes it. I don’t mean it in a negative way when I say it. I think she satisfies a much-needed role in Ohio politics. On the one hand, there is stoic politeness that is part of the process of writing and voting on new legislation. Bridgebuilding with others is very much a part of that process, and often, politicians find that by the time they compromise with everyone to get something done, there isn’t much left of their original idea. And during her first term as a House Rep for the 52nd District in Ohio, she has caused consternation. I wouldn’t say she’s made enemies because she is a very likable person. But she’s too independent for many people’s liking  in the Statehouse.

On the other hand, many are very critical of the political process and see all the compromises that have to go on as evil and part of doing the devil’s work. All the bridgebuilding that goes on with lobbyists and other members of the House and Senate is what many say give politics a bad name because the people they are supposed to be representing are not part of that process. From my perspective, Jennifer Gross does an excellent job threading the needle of all those forces to do what she thinks is an excellent job for all the people in her district, even if they didn’t vote for her. And she is certainly deserving of an award for going above and beyond when it counted most during 2021 and 2022. 

Things did get very hairy several times during the fall of 2021 when Joe Biden, the illegally inserted president who had no authority to do so, issued an executive order mandating that OSHA manage mandatory vaccinations and that all federal employees, anybody who touches a federal contract which is nearly impossible these days because the government sticks its nose in everyone’s business to such a large extent, would have to get mandatory vaccinations. This was a huge problem. It was detrimental for the government to insist that people put medicine in their bodies to work. It was undoubtedly a sensitive exploitation of the standard Chamber of Commerce position of employer sustainability. Employers needed to maintain their rights to regulate their own workforce and impose the things required for their business, such as proper PPE like steel-toed shoes, gloves, and safety glasses. The Biden order made it hard for Republicans to defend employee rights and still support the Chamber of Commerce’s position of employer obligations. Suddenly, the way the Covid vaccine shot was being proposed was meant to split those elements and put them in combat with each other. It was a complicated issue to navigate politically, which was part of the federal plan to take over the entire industry with ill-defined rights. It took months for the legislature in Ohio to respond correctly, and by the time they did, it was too late. The saving grace in the matter turned out to be court cases that were striking down the mandate in federal court as being what we all knew was unconstitutional from the beginning. Yet, that didn’t stop the federal government from trying. 

Before the Biden administration issued their executive orders mandating vaccine mandates, in September of 2021, Jennifer Gross sponsored H.B. 248, the Vaccine Choice and Anti-Discrimination Act in April. It was introduced to get in front of the problem, but it received a lot of pushback. Many legislators were upset by Jennifer’s approach to the bill and her unwillingness to do the kind of team building that was required to get that kind of legislation to move through the House. At that precise time, Jennifer was way in front of what was acceptable criteria for the validity of the vaccines. Many in the House leadership were not comfortable with the testimony that Jennifer was offering showing that the vaccines might be potentially dangerous. Like the election fraud issue, challenging the premise of the mandatory vaccines was a political nightmare because many wanted to believe that an answer to a major pandemic could be solved through institutionalism, not individual free will. So even Republicans were split on the matter.

Meanwhile, the tick-tock of the clock was pushing toward mandatory enforcement, and the House was stuck on how to proceed. Defend the individual person or the company where people are employed. Could people just vote with their feet and leave their companies only to jump out of the frying pan and into the pressure cooker. Either way, individuals were being imposed upon by the federal government. Jennifer’s positions, which sounded really radical at the time, turned out to be correct, which is the contents of the Robert Kenndy Jr. book, The Real Anthoney Fauci, where the danger of the vaccines, the government position on Covid, and the origins of Covid under bioweapons direction from the Department of Defense have all turned out to be true. At the time, nobody but Jennifer Gross even considered doing anything about standing up for individual people in a case of blatant government tyranny and extreme overreach.   

Jennifer can afford to be a disrupter, upset House leadership, and challenge them healthily. She has a nice husband. They are not in debt, and she has no care in the world at all to become wealthy. They are a happy couple who are not beholden to many people in the world and are free to make their own personal choices, which made Jennifer free to take a position on the vaccine mandates. When things really got heavy in those challenging moments of government overreach coming straight out of the White House, Jennifer showed what kind of person she was, and we are lucky to have her. There were a lot of lessons learned during that episode that everyone is much more prepared for going into the future. When things got really heavy, and it mattered most, Jennifer Gross was willing to disrupt a process that the Biden administration was clearly exploiting for power grabs meant to erode away the constitution through the nature of the bureaucracy of state government. And without Jennifer, there wouldn’t have been much discussion about pushback. When federal judges were thinking about what to do on this executive order ruling, there is no question that the national debate that Jennifer Gross was a part of bringing the legal questions that they had to consider to the front of the discussion. And when those judges saw how the case was shaping up, with state representatives like Jennifer Gross pushing back against vaccine validity when Ohio State University was going the other way, its clear that the value wasn’t in the legislation that would be passed in the House to become actual law, but that the debate was in constitutional validity which the judges saw would shape how history remembered the matter. And when it was most dangerous to have those opinions, Jennifer wasn’t afraid of the consequences. She did what was right, even if it cost her to do it. So in that context, Jennifer Gross, “The Disrupter,” did Ohio an excellent service. And the political world is much better off for it, and she certainly deserved the award she received at the Patriot Awards. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Elon Musk Voting for Republicans: There is no way an intelligent person can support Democrats for anything

The sudden shock of Elon Musk saying that he is now a Republican or that he’ll vote Republican in the upcoming midterms is not a surprise. Actually, as a guy now in his 50s, he’s right on course for where many people arrive during their lives if they have reasonable intelligence. You really can’t be an intelligent person and be a Democrat. It’s impossible to reconcile intelligence with liberalism. Liberalism is a feeling not founded in logic, so anybody who has some level of intelligence will eventually figure out that liberal ideas are ridiculously stupid. Elon Musk has tried to make liberal ideas work. He was successful young and enjoyed the company of idealistic young people. He even smoked pot on the Joe Rogan podcast. But he has never been good with the Biden administration. Biden wants electric cars with massive government infrastructure. Musk has built several companies that are very independent of government influence, even if he did take government subsidies to start those companies. Ultimately, Musk has learned a hard lesson in life that the government wants to run private industry and their means to do that is always through labor unions under the protection of the Department of Labor. So the Biden administration has targeted Tesla with its wrath to protect their own investment into Ford and General Motors, hoping to use high gas prices to drive consumers to buy those dumb electric cars, the fancy golf carts. Tesla was the first, but the government wants them and Elon Musk out of the way because Musk won’t allow unions to run his shops, and a hard lesson has been learned that has caused the billionaire to look to Republicans for sanity.

This path that Musk is on, a gradual conversion over to Republican thought, isn’t new. Ronald Reagan went on a similar track. So did Donald Trump. There are lots of people who used to be Democrats who get to their 40s and 50s and life and realize that Democrats are takers, looters, and every kind of parasite that you can imagine. And they grow up and away from liberalism and become more conservative as they get older. Musk has been saying that he has stayed the same but that the political spectrum has moved radically to the left, which is true to a certain extent. The political left we see today is what I have been saying for decades was always beneath the surface.

But additionally, there comes a time when you realize that doing business with Democrats is impossible unless you give over everything you own to their view of collectivism. With Musk doing so well with Tesla and SpaceX, it’s clear that he will not be able to control those companies and still continue to vote as a Democrat. The illusion that Democrats are anything but professional looters in the world comes to anybody who lives long enough to reconcile reality. You hear a lot of Democrats who become Republicans. But you don’t see a lot of Republicans turning into Democrats. When you look at an electoral map of America, there aren’t many Democrat blue areas. There are massive groups of dependents made that way due to Democrat socialism, but people generally don’t choose to penalize themselves with liberal ideas. That is another reason why Democrats are always looking for young people and illegal immigrants to keep their political base intact. Democrats need people without much life experience or understanding of the American way of life to buy into their collectivist political philosophies because they lose many of their members to Republicans, especially later in life. For Democrats, the political game is just smoke and mirrors. 

Musk’s journey was inevitable. Traditional conservatives may not want to let Musk have a seat at the table due to his beliefs in transhumanism and non-Biblical thoughts. But in the world of ideas, all conservatives have some basic concepts in common, the understanding that government doesn’t make jobs. It simply loots off what others do create. For Musk, there is no way to go to Mars and have a human race that moves into space to live. No socialist community on Mars will be successful, so when you look at things like that, the only way to fulfill Elon Musk’s dreams of going to space and living on Mars is to embrace capitalism aggressively because there is no other way to start a prosperous society or to maintain it without capitalism. All the variations of Karl Marx’s philosophy were always rooted in failure, which is to say all of the modern Democrat party and anybody in the world who calls themselves a progressive. Many people go to college and learn a liberal education. They do all the dumb liberal stuff like party too much and listen to all the wrong kinds of music. They try to dedicate their lives to altruism. But once those people start having families and those families grow up, it becomes quite apparent to most intelligent people that Democrats are the wrong way to go, and they gradually turn into Republicans. I would go so far as to say that you cannot call yourself smart and not be a Republican. It’s not a matter of team politics; it’s simple logic. A person’s journey along a political spectrum is driven by what works in the world and what doesn’t. 

The contrasts between a Trump presidency and now the Biden mess will produce many more Elon Musk types who used to walk the fence between liberals and conservatives. I never liked the murky middle because it allows the looters of the world to hide among the good and hard working. Liberals are like the water boy on a football team that wins the Super Bowl. They get to be part of a winning team without doing much work at actually producing a win. Liberals suck the life out of everything they do, and when you build great companies like Elon Musk has, who are doing great things in the world, the problem moves from cosmetic lip service to liberalism to downright hatred.   Especially when you are the first to actually make electric cars to make all the environmental climate change fanatics happy, only to be shoved out of the market because the local labor union isn’t running the management of your company, once you realize how the game is played and what Democrats actually stand for, there is no way a reasonable person could call themselves one. I watched Donald Trump go through the same basic trajectory in his life. When he was doing The Apprentice for NBC, he was much like Musk, playing on the liberal side of things. But Trump married a conservative woman who pulled him in the right direction, and over time, during his marriage, he had no choice but to move toward the Republican Party. Many people were like Trump and Musk; they might be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. However, life has a way of demanding that fiscal and social policy must be aligned; there is no way to cheat the system. You can’t behave like a liberal at a dinner party and still run great companies, or a great country, or even raise a good family. You have to be conservative to do things well in life, which means that those who want to do well must become Republicans. Elon Musk is a smart guy and, late in life, has figured out the obvious. So it’s no miracle that he’s planning to vote Republican. And behind him are a whole lot of other people too, who have come to the same conclusions. They always do.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

One of the Biggest Challenges in Politics: Political groupies

I’m not the guy to talk to about cooking meat on the grill or sports statistics. Small talk to me is like getting stuck in the mud, and I hate it. And every time there is a holiday where typically there is a lot of small talk, I’m miserable in those circumstances. Normal stuff is the most boring kind of stuff to how I think about things. I appreciate it for the “life stuff” that it is, but I personally don’t like doing it.   What I do like talking about is how to save the world. If it’s a big all-encompassing topic, well, then I do like to talk about it. And because of that trait, I tend to know many people who are trying to save the world from their own particular view of it. That puts me in contact with many people who spend their time in leadership positions, especially in politics. As people who know me most understand, I have very specific rules for leadership that I apply to the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week for everything. There isn’t a minute in any day where I’m not thinking about leadership and how it can be used to make the world a better place, professionally, politically, or privately. Each week I speak to many hundreds of people, all of them in some leadership role. And there is a particular problem that they all have that never really gets talked about, no matter if the position is a political one or a professional capacity. The issues are always the same. I call their specific problem the “political groupies” that often loom in the background and seek to live through a leader because, for whatever reasons, they don’t feel comfortable in those roles themselves. Still, they want the prestige of such roles for lots of personal reasons. 

One of the hardest things for a politician to do is make that transition from an ordinary person to a public persona. To move from campaign mode into an actual leadership role without tossing away all the promises that were made to the public. Many political figures assume that they are two different things and that what goes on in campaigns isn’t practical for the actual leadership once the work begins. They end up split in many ways between campaign mode, which includes fundraising, and the business of consensus building to get votes. What ends up giving politicians a bad name is when they find that transition impossible to negotiate.

On the one hand, they have to put on a show for their donors, the people who actually go to the polls to vote, and the daily grind of whatever job they are doing. It reminds me a lot of a rock band where the sexy stuff is on stage where all the action happens, but most of the time, the business of writing music, getting good at performing on stage, and life between the gigs can be monotonous. Rock bands that are most famous often turn to drugs and other forms of personal abuse to reconcile their emotional swings. Politics is a lot of the same kind of challenge, but it usually doesn’t get viewed that way, which maybe it should. Building up the brand of a public persona is part of political life. And not losing yourself in that role is very difficult for most people. At best, it’s hard. Especially when there are people who come along with the political figures, and they help with the campaigns, they put out yard signs, donate money, and work behind the scenes in ways that may be helpful, but the emotional aspects of those friendships are often like an anchor to the public official. Anchors are great if you want to stand still in the middle of the ocean. But they aren’t so good if you need to move fast and dynamically react to the world. 

In all forms of leadership, I have a policy of hands-off. I will seek out leaders, but once they are in a position to lead, I give them full autonomy. The worst thing that could be done to such people is to undermine them with micromanagement. They need to think for themselves. For instance, out of those hundreds of people who I speak to every week, I do not give them my opinion on what I think they should or should not be doing. I will offer advice if they want it, but part of the reason you want to help put leaders in place is so they can lead. And micromanaging is not leading. Micromanaging is trying to live through other people because there is something in the micromanager that wants the glory of leadership without the responsibility of actually doing it. I call those types of people political groupies. They are like the groupies that you find in rock bands; they like to tell people in the audience that they are with the band, that they know what song they will play next, and in that way, they might get to be famous too, without the burden of actually being on stage and the pressure that comes with it. Many political figures have to learn that interacting with people in the audience is different. They don’t want someone who will respond to social media; they expect some representation of the brand that was created during the campaign to represent their interests at all times and having too personal of a relationship with the world violates the unsaid aspects of leadership that are so important. Being too accessible destroys the illusions of leadership that most people want to have. And what the groupies often do that is unintentional is that they act as a bridge between the theatrical role of the leadership position and the normal meat grilling audience who are always looking for leadership in everything they do in life. 

I personally like to help leadership birth its way into existence through people. If there are doctors out there who want to deliver babies into the world, I would best see myself who is the doctor who delivers leadership. But once they are born, I do not make it my mission to tell those lives how to live. To tell them how to be leaders. To do so is to erode away the validity of their own existence and rob them of the joys that do come from leadership. Often it’s not the various lobbyists who end up causing so much corruption among political figures; it’s the friends and tag-alongs who come with a candidate who holds back the fruits of leadership most because its impossible to take them on the complete journey, especially when it comes to building up the personal brand of the leader and maintaining that brand through all public interactions. It’s a balancing act that doesn’t get a lot of attention under any psychological scrutiny, but it is one of the most common frustrations that occur in political leadership roles. It’s a manageable condition, and there are ways that everyone can come away as part of the success story. And it’s worth doing when it all comes together. But it isn’t easy by a long shot. 

Rich Hoffman

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A Report on the World Economic Forum 2022: They have bad cards and can’t hide the guilt of their crimes

To review this year’s World Economic Forum, from the Desecrators of Davos socialists, scum bags, and global tyrants, I would best sum it up by the harassment that the WEF police showed when they went after Jack Posobiec shortly after a podcast to the WarRoom on day one. Klaus Schwab and the gang didn’t like having Jack outside their Davos meeting, reporting the event to millions of people with the kind of anti-globalist discussion from the WarRoom. They are quite open to sharing what they are talking about at the World Economic Forum on YouTube. But they want to talk to the world, but they don’t want the world to talk back. Jack was fine after they accosted him and his crew, and he continued to report on the agenda events for the rest of the week, even going an hour or so to Geneva to report on the World Health Organization and the Biden deal to give away sovereignty to them in order to cover the next made up pandemic. There was a lot to consider in all these events, but many are wondering what it all means to them. So after watching all the coverage the way I do each year, I will have to say that this year was a bit different. The attempted arrest of Jack Posobiec sort of summed it all up; Klaus and the gang are worried. Their game was off this year in a big way, and they were undoubtedly feeling the pressure. And they don’t do well under pressure. 

I tend to think of all things in life like a poker game, and these guys had bad cards, and they weren’t doing a good job of hiding it. If you read Klaus Schwab’s books, you will quickly know that he’s likely insane. His views were formed in the vacuum of intellectual debate. All the people who go to Davos to participate in the Forum he organizes lean to the extreme political left. They find security among themselves in their schemes for global domination. But those schemes fall apart quickly when opposition confronts them because their ideas are not very well fleshed out. Klaus Schwab and the other Desecrators of Davos have been doing this kind of thing for a long time. But they have made their global moves over the last few years, and for the first time, the masses know about them. A year ago, there weren’t many people in the world who could even tell you who Klaus Schwab even was. But now, after a couple of books, Woke, Inc, and Glenn Beck’s The Great Reset, now many millions of people around the world are onto what the World Economic Forum has been up to, and they are now paying attention in ways that they never have before. And that was best reflected by the WarRoom coverage hosted by Jack Posobiec. Socialist countries, which all of Europe essentially is, don’t like the idea of freedom of the press or even any form of free speech. They want to be the world’s managers and want the world to be sheep. They want control, domination, and a very powerful administrative state. And there is no plan B. 

The Desecrators of Davos are not ready for prime time. They may own the Biden administration, which they clearly control. But that administration is not respected by the people of America, and that was not part of their plan, and they are not sure what to do with it. After watching many hours of Davos coverage, the sum of all the parts was that they didn’t know what to do next but to complain about conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine types pushing back against the Bill Gates agenda, who was there to speak his part of the story in very unconvincing ways. And what was most alarming, given the radicalism of Bill Gates, was that he wasn’t the craziest one on the panel. The big administrative state agenda that the members of the Forum abundantly communicated functioned like academics theorizing in a classroom of their peers, without understanding how they were going to sell it to any kind of public. It’s like that scenario where you take someone on a date, you take them to bed, but the next day it’s like, “what now? Do we get married? Do we buy a house? Do we have kids? Or do we just sleep together, which is a pretty pointless relationship?” All the effort from the Davos people was in getting to bed with each other without a plan on what would happen the next day. And they certainly didn’t want any American media there to report just how ill-prepared they were.  

They are pretty far into the process to be so ill-prepared, which brings us back to poker. They have gone all-in with some really bad cards hoping to bluff their way into a victory. But many in the world have held their cards, especially in the United States. The Desecrators of Davos are certainly behind the election fraud schemes in America; Mark Zuckerberg, this time, paid the money to steal the election through mules shown in the movie 2000 Mules. He’s one of the Davos types. And Bill Gates made his move by buying up the media to push the dream of the administrative state; the vaccine mandates to cure a virus that they made in the Wuhan lab with the help of the American Department of Defense. There are a lot of very bad characters who got caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

The only reason that none of them have gone to jail yet is that they have so much money. Collectively, they have bought the political system in America and other countries, and they own the media like a cheap whore in a sweaty brothel in Nevada. As long as the drinks keep flowing, the whores will love you. The moment any of that stops, the whores will move on to a new love. But what they did to the world to give the administrative state more power over the sovereignty of all global people was well planned, evil, and ruthless. But it was also done in a vacuum of thought that does not hold up well at all in real-life scenarios. Clearly, the Desecrators of Davos people thought that Joe Biden would be accepted in America as an alternative to Trump and that they’d gain control of the Beltway in America, but that’s not happening. And they don’t know what to do about it. The world called their bluff, and now they are holding their weak cards sheepishly, not sure what to do next. Personally, I think it’s pretty funny. These people have ruined countless lives; they’ve killed people, especially in what they did with Covid and the suppression of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine to stop the global pandemic they created for the purpose of all these global takeover plans. Laughing at them is perfectly healthy as a reaction to how they’ve played the game. But to know how to deal with them based on what we are seeing, they are not as scary as they appear. They are holding a losing hand, and they know it. So, it’s up to us to clean their clock and make an example of them. We are justified to do it, and it’s the only way to deal with their intentions against America so as to alter their behavior for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

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The World Economic Forum is Just a Front for Treason and Sedition: Using election fraud to rule the world the way drug trafficking in America has shown how

There have been mass attempts to obtain money in the easiest fashion in every age, leading to criminal life. It’s far easier to take money from people than to just earn it. And that is certainly the case in this internet world where you can fly anywhere in under a day. When we are all so easily connected by technology, it shouldn’t be a surprise that criminals would find a latest scheme to conduct criminal activity, which is clearly the case with The World Economic Forum in Davos. I watched all the coverage, and what you have with them is an administrative state out of control and using the tapestries of process management to conduct massive financial theft across the world with the same justifications that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid robbed stagecoaches in the Old West. The intent to capture the world’s governments under the umbrella of a massive international mob in the fashion of Al Capone’s from Chicago is unmistakable. From the Desecrators of Davos crowd, we are dealing with a massive international mob disguised behind names of good intentions, such as what Klaus Schwab is operating in Davos, for the simple goal of wealth confiscation and personal enrichment based on radical leftist ideology. These criminals sat in front of the camera and broadcast to the world during the last week of May 2022 just how they planned to commit treason and sedition against the most powerful country in the world openly and without fear of any recourse because they had a secret that they are utilizing to ensure their success, election fraud. 

It’s not a mystery; their method has now been well studied. The Desecrators of Davos types have watched how drugs were illegally trafficked in the United States, and they have devised a way to perform the same kind of activity when it comes to election fraud. In the 2020 election, Facebook, a member of these World Economic Forum criminals, paid for the mules who stole that election. And the people who don’t want to talk about it are just like the media and politicians who silently allowed Al Capone to operate his famous mob. In modern times, many people just want to live their lives. They want to take their kids to sports events and maybe an occasional movie. They don’t want to think about all the illegal drugs flowing into the country and what impact that might have on society in general. They’d rather look away from all that ugliness. Well, the Desecrators of Davos types have watched this behavior and have now exploited it for their global theft of the world’s wealth. They are quite well aware that what they are doing in Davos will infringe on the national sovereignties of the world’s nations. But they are pushing for a borderless world that they control, so they don’t care about crimes like treason and sedition because they are already invested in the change state. Rather, their plan is clearly to steal elections around the world and to take power away from the people’s vote to enact their plans, and they plan to get away with it because of what they have witnessed in the drug trade in America. 

In the movie 2000 Mules, it’s ballot trafficking that was happening. Facebook is a Desecrators of Davos member. Bill Gates is too. So is George Soros. They all want to overthrow traditional America and acquire power for their globalist intentions. So, of course, they were involved in making a virus that would be unleashed worldwide by their methods. They own the media so they could control the coverage of what was reported, what the methods were in dealing with the crises that they were creating for the eventual goal of creating chaos to overturn election laws and steal the results, as they clearly did in 2020 to get rid of the people’s pick.

The whole effort was conducted in the same manner as has proven successful with drug trafficking. And everyone knows how drug trafficking occurs. The CIA knows who the drug lords are, where their mansions in Mexico are, and how the drugs flow into America. Who buys it, who uses it, and for what purpose. Every now and then, they arrest some poor fool to give the public the illusion that anybody really cares about illegal drugs. But the truth is that everyone is in on the action, the American government, the drug lords, the cartels, and the mules that haul all the drugs to cities across America. It has worked so well that the Desecrators of Davos have used the same methods now to steal elections. And now that we have seen this activity, because of the overwhelming proof from the 2020 elections, it’s likely that this election fraud by these globalists has been going on for decades. Much of our current congress likely were illegally picked by election fraud, which raises all kinds of trouble for the legality of everything they have been doing as a legislative body. 

The crimes have been committed because the Desecrators of Davos know that people don’t want to see or hear about it. They may not like it, but they consider themselves too small to do anything about it. These are the problems of big governments, not the kind of thing some little ol’ nobody from small-town USA can stand up to. So knowing that’s how people are, the Desecrators of Davos have sought to take over the governments of the world and to run them from Davos, through the roots of finance, and to conduct massive crimes against humanity on a scale that is beyond the reach of most people. And that’s how they have gotten away with these crimes, and crimes they certainly are. Crimes that are punishable by death penalty. And over time, as they have found that their ballot-stuffing crimes got them the results they desired, they have become bolder in how they go about their business, which has left behind plenty of evidence for us to act on if only we had to courage to do so. But their gamble is that nobody will, just like nobody stands up to the illegal drug trade. People would rather do just about anything in the world than confront vast evils right in front of our faces. And that’s why it keeps happening. Good people are certainly in the majority, but they don’t want to look at the evil a minority is conducting because they are too busy and too scared to confront it. So, of course, there will always be some latest version of international criminal who will exploit that trait for their lazy gains of wealth, so they can have the ornaments of money, the things that money can buy, without doing the work of actually earning the money. It’s much easier to just steal the wealth of America rather than work to compete with it to be the next superpower. From the point of view of this new criminal class, the Desecrators of Davos, they would rather destroy the only superpower left, rather than compete with it, and that in the aftermath of that destruction, they could rule the chaos behind charitable foundations and feel good think tanks, which is, in essence, all the World Economic Forum really is, a front for treason and sedition that is in full support of open criminal conduct on a vast scale. And they have no fear of being caught because of what they have learned from the American drug trade. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Hypocrisy of Democrats and Global Progressives: They love to kill kids as babies until they want to use death as a way to get gun control

It’s not even about the obviously disturbed kid who shot up young students and a teacher in a school in Uvalde, Texas. Salvador Ramos was an obviously disturbed 18-year-old kid who shot his grandmother in the face and then went on a rampage to the nearby school for all kinds of bad reasons, which we’re learning more and more about by the day. It is about whether an administrative state in the form of government can stop violence like this from happening. While it is my argument that they are the cause of it. And to disguise their complicity, they seek gun control to hide their obvious social failures. Ramos was a product of progressive society; immigration is undoubtedly part of his story especially living right on the border with Mexico and Texas. He had turned toward the “EMO” life as described by others. There isn’t much talk about a stable parental structure for him, certainly not a strong father figure. And he was projecting warning signs toward violence that the authorities, who are supposedly watching every one of us all the time with every keystroke on a computer, failed to pick up on. It almost looks as if progressive politics wanted this kid to snap, so they could exploit the carnage to advance their agenda. Ramas bought his guns right after his 18th birthday, put pictures of them online, and sent messages directly to a recipient talking about what he wanted to do with them. The FBI was watching, and they should have picked him up. Yet they didn’t. They either wanted him to commit the acts, or they were just stupid and lazy. Or a combination of both. The mass killing was a complete creation and failure of progressive politics, the John Dewey view of the world. 

But only within a few hours of the murders Joe Biden and many from his political caucus were exploiting the violence to support their gun-grabbing agenda as if they really thought that this tragedy was justification for advancing their long-established plans, the disarmament of society in general, so that they could rule everyone through an administrative state with even more power. Looking at the situation clearly, if the administrative state was at fault for this shooting, which it is, then why would anybody in their right mind give them more control? It was an absurd notion, yet we saw Beto O’Rourke attempt to do that very thing, pushing for gun control legislation which the communist left desperately wanted so they could implement their Marxist plans for America without even hiding it. Smartly, President Trump will give his speech to the NRA on Friday anyway, as he should. This exacerbated the gun grabbers even more because Americans see the game, as I’ve talked about many times before. They are losing feeling to these mass casualty events because they understand that the government is far more dangerous to their lives than the crazy Salvador Ramos types. So, they aren’t responding to the wall-to-wall news coverage. They are buying more guns, and they still support the NRA, even more after these tragedies, not less. So when Joe Biden gave his little speech talking about how “they” need to stand up to the gun lobby, he’s essentially forgetting who the gun lobby is. It’s not some administrative state competing with them for power; it’s the people who are really in charge who have decided that the government is more of a risk than the next government-produced lunatic.

You can see the hypocrisy in the abortion argument; the same people who are pointing to the murdered young kids in a school are advocating for the murder of kids just 9 or 10 years younger while they are babies in a mother’s womb. For some reason, murder while a child is in the birthing process is a mother’s right to choose, but when progressives advocating for a strengthened administrative state want to value life, they use school shootings to push for removing guns from society. The liberal television commentator Whoopi Goldberg actually went on a rant about confiscating all the assault weapons of Americans as if that were an option. Without considering that by doing so, we would surrender our lives over to be managed by lunatics like her? Meanwhile, there are mass shootings every day in Chicago, and nobody seems to care. There are cries to defund the police and restrict their ability to establish law and order. Mexico’s drug cartels have been empowered like never before to bring murderous drugs into America to eradicate our population with intoxication and mayhem. Nobody cares about the lives destroyed by drugs from the illegal cartel trade or the many murders and beheadings that occur along our border to maintain their “turf.” All of those are creations of a progressive administrative state. Yet, the assumption is that we are all so stupid that we might be pulled into a sad story of even more incompetence, the failure of that system to teach Ramas properly. Instead of becoming a productive member of society as a member of the immigrant community, he became an emotionally fragile killer. And gun control legislation will do what exactly, Whoopi? 

America is a society of guns; they represent protection not just from gangs of thugs and delusional killers but from the administrative state’s failures that are currently grabbing for power in maniacal ways. And no amount of emotion will change how Americans view that situation. Other places in the world may have gone along with the gun control scheme, but they have miserably paid the price. Most notably in places like New Zealand and Australia during the lockdowns from Covid, where the police state grew into all the frightening realizations of a dystopian novel. When Joe Biden asked the question as to why these school shootings are only happening in America and no place else, well, that’s because America hasn’t been stupid enough to give the government that much power. After all, as we can see throughout the world, they will abuse it. Other countries, like China, have killed off their political rivals, and people know not to stand up to authority; otherwise, they will be destroyed. Other countries also don’t have such open cultural standards as we do in America.

No place on earth does so many nationalities interact with each other with all kinds of religions so well. There are always bound to be tensions, but most countries don’t have close to the type of diversity that America does culturally. So there are shootings that happen, and there is violence. But in our media culture that reports every bug killed crossing the road, other countries in the world have control of their media conduct, and the world never hears about the killings, the political sabotage, and the many different ways that violence is conducted upon the citizens. For instance, they don’t have their version of Salvador Ramos in China because they would have locked him up the first time he put on a dress and posted it online. He would have just “disappeared” from society. And that is the kind of world that progressive Democrats like Joe Biden want in America with gun confiscations. And the sick part about it is that they only care about the lives lost of children when it gives them some political victory. But not before. Otherwise, they are the party of death, and they produce people like Salvador Ramos by the bucketloads. And they will kill again, and often. But those killers are nowhere near of a threat as the blunders of the centralized administrative state.   Americans are onto it, and they aren’t falling for the scam.

Rich Hoffman

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The Power of the MAGA Movement: Government can’t hide their crimes like they used to

It’s safe to save that Dr. Oz won his primary against the challengers because of the Trump endorsement. I thought David McCormick was the better candidate for that senate seat in Pennsylvania, but President Trump picked the tv star, probably more out of sentiment than practicality. Otherwise, Dr. Oz wouldn’t have had a chance, and now no matter what happens with the election count, people will always remember that he won. The same can be said of the David Purdue situation in Georgia, with all the early voting and interest from MAGA, even as the establishment forces have lined up for their own version of the Alamo, going all-in on backing Kemp to keep the election fraud there under wraps. What is astonishing to many is the power of the MAGA movement, which the Biden administration has finally realized isn’t going away, so they have been attacking it increasingly. None of the political insiders thought Trump picks would be doing this well into the primary season. They desperately hope for a loss that can embarrass the movement and chip away at Trump’s endorsement power. But the action itself is far more complicated than Trump. Trump didn’t make the movement; the movement made Trump. I have been following the freedom movement all of my life. Specifically, the Tea Party days directly merged into this change state with Trump at its head. But I could additionally point back to the late 80s going into that 1992 election. I campaigned for Ross Perot back then, so this pushback against establishment politics isn’t new. It’s been around for a while, and no matter what we call it, MAGA, or Mega MAGA, or King Maga, or whatever, acceptance of global institutionalism has been on the chopping block for most of the last century. It is culminating to this point in history. 

In many ways, the crimes we have seen in government which have everyone on edge, were always going on. But the pressure of Trump and the MAGA movement itself has created these unforced errors. We always knew Hillary was breaking the law with her emails. We knew she was trying to sabotage the election of 2016 with the Russia hoax and her disciples in the liberalized media. For many years they denied it, but now it’s coming out in court. The same is happening with election fraud. Criminals tend to deny, deny, deny, even when caught. Our prisons are filled with people declaring their innocence, even though most were convicted with hard evidence. We have trusted politicians too much, and they have evolved into an oligarch class, and things got out of control. And to keep the other crimes they have been caught in suppressed, they have had to commit even more crimes, to the point we are in now where all the ugliness is out in the open for all to see, and we can still see them saying, “nothing to see here.” As the world burns behind them. The latest crime is this adherence to the green agenda religion with deliberate sabotage of the American infrastructure to destroy food supplies and drive up energy costs.   The whole scheme is a last-ditch effort to destroy the American economy before there is another election where they will lose their leverage by controlling all the houses of congress. 

Never underestimate what the bad guys are willing to do to hide their massive crimes. I will remind everyone that they have openly killed people and destroyed their lives to hatch their plans, specifically with Covid. They will try the same thing before this upcoming election, especially as they see the kind of candidates that still support Trump this far from the 2020 election. What the political world sees coming from the MAGA movement is terrifying to them, like any criminal would if they knew the cops were about to catch them.   They will fight with everything they have in the tank to avoid another election in America where the people actually speak. They have been caught stealing the 2020 election, and obviously, many others and people are waking up to it, and the pressure is terrifying to them. It’s so scary that the pressure is causing them to make a lot of forced errors, leaving us scratching our heads at how stupid much of it is. But when you see them reading from the playbook in such desperation, it’s obvious how guilty they have always been. The crimes are coming in so fast now that people just can’t process them fast enough. The testimony by Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, was a major dagger into her guilt. But it goes much further than that. And to cover up each of these crimes, most of the Beltway culture is looking more and more guilty, meaning their coverups have to be more ostentatious by the week, even the sell-out Republicans like Mitch McConnell. He is really struggling to find his place in this new MAGA universe.

But I would say that it’s not new. Trump could come and go, but the desire by voters would be the same. I remember passing out 10,000 Perot promotions on Fountain Square in Cincinnati during lunch in 1992, just four years after Reagan left office, and the country was only so-so on George Bush, the elder. The Karl Rove types loved Bush because he stood for the two or three issues that they thought represented conservative politics, support of businesses, and a stance against abortion. But the need for good conservative, “American” politics was so much deeper than that. People always wanted a party that represented America first. It just took many decades of evolution to get it. The extremes of the Obama insurgency shaped the parameters into usefulness. It shocked people into supporting their own shock and awe president, the TV star and casino owner, Donald Trump.   It would be a similar personality in the future, but the rules of conduct are the same. America first, and to fly the flag proudly. That movement is not going away, and for those in conventional political circles, things are never going back to what they thought they were. The MAGA movement is growing by the day, and with each failure by the current government. The supply chain failures, high gas prices, and woke politics are all things that Americans will not accept. And they aren’t going to accept the new lockdowns that the government is planning to stop the fall election with the Monkey pox outbreak or whatever else they manufacture as a bioweapon in some Chinese lab.

People have been burnt by this recent American government and the world’s governments, and they want freedom from their stupidity. The more the governments hang on to loot off the efforts of the good, the more resentment there will be. That is why the Trump endorsements are doing so well. There are a few here and there that Trump reached.   But the effectiveness cannot be denied. Yet it goes way beyond him as a political figure. The big-government types and overbearing institutionalists have not yet figured it out. No matter what they do, people will not be compliant with an out-of-control criminal government. The only path they will accept is justice, which will be a painful future for many. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Root Cause of all Political Problems: Playing the cards to win, not letting the cards play you

One of the reasons I had to talk about superstition in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, is because one of the failures of Lean manufacturing, which has become the industry standard in process improvement across the world, is that it fails to recognize the most important detriment to all process failures, human behavior. Rather than deal with the detriments of human behavior, Lean seeks to create processes that remove human variables and build group consensus around those resolutions. Because the main problem with human behavior is that in the East, and even in Europe, workforces are much more compliant naturally due to their long histories with kings and overbearing governments. But in America, a different kind of human being emerged. And we can easily see those differences in the type of card games that we play. I specifically use the differences between Tarot cards and poker cards to accentuate the point often to clarify the differences in thought. And this is spectacularly important in our present time specifically because globalists have assumed, as many have with Lean manufacturing, that all people are the same. If the same rules were imposed upon them, then a universal kind of sameness could emerge and could then be easily controlled. But that has turned out to be vastly untrue, and the failure which follows is what we are seeing playing out in our present time. 

Lean manufacturing, as it turns out, which is a problem I have always had with it, is that it was a kind of pre-ESG score way to bring eastern thoughts to western cultures and then launch a global approach of sameness to all industries. I have taught Lean for over 30 years and have always run into the same problem; American cultures tend to push back on it while those in Europe and Asia tend to be much more accommodating. This has been a mystery to all involved because they failed to consider the most important aspect of human behavior and how they transact with their peers. So in my book, I break it down in ways that people can understand, which essentially comes down to tolerance for superstition in a culture and how those beliefs manifest into a business climate or a political one. In the book, I give a history of superstition across the world and talk about the use of horoscopes and Tarot cards to predict the future as some fortune teller might professionally do around a crystal ball. The thought was that people were helpless to the greater scheme of things and could seek help in the stars or in the spirit world of card reading to better navigate through the complexities of everyday life. When a string of luck occurs in business, even the most resolute executive might say, “knock on wood,” hoping not to jinx a project into failure when all has been going well. Behind such thoughts is the fear that humans are not in control of their destiny and that they must subjugate themselves to some “greater good” to function at even basic tasks in life. 

But in New Orleans, during western expansion, the card games of Europe evolved into something much more conducive to the lifestyles of Americans. Poker was invented, and over the next hundred years, the very American game of Texas Hold Em’ emerged and is extremely popular presently. Poker tournaments are common on sports programming such as ESPN, and every casino runs a Texas Hold Em’ game. Likely, they are running dozens of them. Meanwhile, the fortune-tellers are always on the outskirts of such activity at the fairgrounds and sidewalk attractions which offer a different kind of game for the more faint at heart, Tarot card readings. It is often interesting to go to a casino and witness the types of people who play poker and the kind who line up to have their fortunes told to them by someone else. The point of the matter is that the poker players can win the game even if they have a bad hand. The poker players play the cards, whereas the Tarot card reader allows the cards to play them. The fortune is in the cards, but the game is played to win in poker even if the cards are bad. Both are card games, but their rules of conduct are magnificently different to reflect the cultures that play them. 

In the movie Titanic, still one of the most successful movies ever made, this idea of making one’s own luck was a centerpiece of the story. Many women loved the love story between Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet; they could relate to the overbearing mother, the “too perfect” fiancée who was projected to be a great and wealthy business leader. It was, in essence, an East meets West story, where the business leader was a person who made their “own luck,” which he actually says at the end of the movie as his projected wife leaves him for the unfocused exploits of the hero played by DeCaprio.  Only to find herself floating on a door in the freezing north Atlantic after the Titanic sank and her lover sacrificed himself so that she could live. The story’s villain was one who self-determined his reality while the heroes surrendered themselves to circumstance. We see those same politics playing out daily in our news cycles, in our business process improvements, and certainly within our own families. But what the American poker players figured out was critical to the truth of the universe.

Even when you are losing, you can still win, and poker was invented to reflect that new way of looking at things from the perspective of an American, which much of the world admires, but secretly resents because they don’t have the courage for it. It is much safer to have the cards tell them how to live, consult a horoscope, and look to the stars for guidance. But to the American, not all of them, but to the bold ones who figure it out, every moment of every day is an opportunity. Even bad luck can be turned into fortune if you know how to play the cards right. But failure often happens because people let the cards play them. They don’t live their lives in a way where they play the cards. That is why Lean manufacturing always falls short, and companies end up throwing vast amounts of money at process improvements when they should be dealing with the psychology of interpersonal relationship failures. This is why Republicans and Democrats essentially can never work together because they have entirely different ways of dealing with the same problem. One is passive, and one is very active. And this is also why the MAGA movement is growing, why people elected a casino owner with a supermodel wife to the White House twice, and why much of the swamp hated them for it. Politics wants to read the Tarot cards. Trump supporters want to play to win. And those approaches will never go together. The problem was never one of simply political belief. Instead, it all comes down to superstitions and how to manage them. Do we let the cards play us, or do we play the cards? In America, we play the cards. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business