Oskar Eustis and his Poor Understanding of History: The director of New York’s Julius Ceaser gets everything wrong

Oskar Eustis as the “artistic director” of the controversial Julius Ceaser play at the Shakespeare in the Park in New York City doesn’t even understand what kind of country America is, let alone have a proper commentary on translating the 400 year old play to contemporary subject matter. He’s the guy who thought it smart to dress up Julius Ceaser as a modern-day Donald Trump and have the character murdered on stage by a “diverse” senate filled with women, people of color and many others stabbed to death by a mob. We are a republic Oskar, not a stupid, mind numb democracy. This play has nothing to do with America—in fact our mode of government was an invention to step away from this kind of mob driven drivel. Shakespeare’s Julius Ceaser play is about revenge, murder and political conspiracy—and all that plot driven nonsense—but its relevancy to Donald Trump for which you made him the lead character in this modern rendition—with Trump Tower leering on the skyline in full view of the audience is an attempt to taint the waters of the ignorant into poking their unsophisticated asses into open insurrection—and it isn’t forgivable.

I feel like I say this all the time about way too many subjects but I know something about William Shakespeare. My favorite of his plays is Titus Andronicus which is a character I understand completely. I love the way it reads and to date Julie Taymor has done the best job of taking the play to film with Anthony Hopkins doing a phenomenal job as Titus. Many creative people have applied their hand to Shakespeare and for good reason, the material is rich and it forces actors to really dig deep in understanding theater from a long ago time in a language that is almost completely foreign to us now. So it was an insult to me to hear how this latest New York modern rendition of Julius Ceaser was abusing its artistic power and trying to explain it away once Bank of America pulled out as a sponsor for wistfully putting Donald Trump into the contemporary role of “protagonist” brutally murdered by a bunch of conniving senators. You don’t have to look too far to understand that the play’s director in this case is rooting for the Chuck Schumers of the world to plot the same kind of assassination in modern politics and that his grasp on this modern history is as shallow as a dry lake bed in Nevada.

When Oskar Eustis said in his remarks on his play that “democracy depends on the conflict of different points of view, nobody owns the truth, we all own the culture,” he displayed a predilection toward insanity that I found quite alarming. People clapped because they figured he was an art guy who knows more than they do about these matters, but honestly the lack of understanding displayed by Eustis of this material is shocking. It is because democracy is unreliable that we even have a republic in America—and the analysis that William Shakespeare was constantly obsessed with about the Roman republic failures in his plays are explorations in mob violence for the sake of theater and the compelling subject matter it evokes. The Donald Trump presidency is actually an evolution beyond this kind of animalistic chaos. Trump is not power-hungry in the way that Julius Ceaser was and he is not a person who would ever be in a position to allow a mob of conniving senators access to him in a way they could commit murder. Trump is much more strategic, and a lot smarter than people think he is. I would warn people not to assume that they can “outthink” the Trump—which is one of the appealing aspects of his presidency for which people like me voted for him. I don’t want a Shakespearian White House for a change. I want an evolution beyond it—and I have found it in Trump.

https://publictheater.org/Tickets/Calendar/PlayDetailsCollection/SITP/Julius-Caesar/

We are not all equal in a democratic America. Some of us work a lot harder than others and thus we need the representation of a republic to prevent the mob from running the show—because the lazy, the drug obsessed, and the sexually manipulative need to be kept at a distance from the legislative process as much as possible—and the hardest working among us should be the ones running things. We can only determine value through merit so as far as owning the truth—it doesn’t all belong to us equally. And regarding the political left, democracy has already defeated the progressive offerings philosophically and they don’t like it and have turned toward these violent threats to stay relevant in the world. Oskar Eustis can play word gymnastics all he wants in an attempt to take the edge off what he did—which was an open plea for the modern senate to assassinate Donald Trump. Eustis knew that most people wouldn’t understand the words spoken in the play and that most people haven’t worked hard to gain the meanings of Shakespeare’s language. But dress up Ceaser in Donald Trump looking suits and make his wife sound just like Melania Trump and even the dumbest people in the audience will understand and that will be what they remember. And at the pot parties before and after the big show—which always go on with creative people the stoned losers hope that out there in the audience is a James Hodgkinson who might be a committed enough leftist with nothing to lose in life who might sacrifice themselves for the cause of “democracy” otherwise known as “mob rule.” Don’t kid yourself in thinking that this kind of talk is not happening. Listen to what leftists say in public—what they say when the cameras are not on is much worse.

I found it particularly insulting that Oskar Eustis on the front page of their website actually said “Act Three, Scene One of Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR takes place on the Ides of March, 44 B.C. By the time that scene is over, democracy will have vanished from the face of the earth for almost two millennia, until some English colonists on the eastern seaboard of North America start throwing tea into Boston Harbor.” This open appeal toward the conservative movement to connect his play with the efforts of the American Revolution were disgusting—and again it’s not democracy that we’re analyzing, it’s a republic—a representative republic that requires the participation of the engaged and wise and allows the fools and addicts to beg for money on the sidewalk as “unequal” participants in history. There is quite a difference between the players on the field of a sporting event and those who just sit in the stands and watch. Those who participate in our republic are on the field whether they vote, or become part of the mechanisms of government. The mob is in the stands cheering or booing depending on how things go—but they are not equal participants. People who smoke dope and study 400-year old plays about violence and the darkest of human emotions are not equal to the law student who spends 18 hours a day preparing their mind for a big case and will eventually become a senator perhaps after a successful career over many years. They are not equal people.

Additionally I would offer that Donald Trump is a superior offering to anything that William Shakespeare ever conceived in his plays. Understanding Donald Trump’s White House is beyond the grasp of people like Oskar Eustis and his thin understanding of history. We are looking at an evolutionary design for which history will record and will be thankful for over the coming millennia. To put Trump into the shoes of Julius Caesar is to try to take a full-grown adult and put baby shoes on them—Trump is far more evolved than anything Rome ever created as an emperor. The very stupid of our society may not understand how or why yet because history is being written with each moment that we breathe—but Trump is an idea that will change history for the better. All Eustis could see as a director of a play was a way to try to hold those animalistic concepts of human nature to a White House that is moving well beyond the reach of the political left and their failed ideas. All they have is the threat of violence to attempt to stay relevant in this tragedy of modern politics. They are not equal in this American republic because their liberal concepts for our reality have been rejected in the theater of debate and all they have left is to attempt to redefine the definitions of fairness and the recollections of history to suit their current crises—and to hope that by calling our American system a democracy that enough dumb people will believe them in an effort to get out the vote and ignite their base for the 2018 midterms between the haze of marijuana smoke and a drug induced orgy of dirty, smelly, tattooed covered liberals laced with body piercings and a lack of deodorant forgotten due to their spending the day bitching about Donald Trump instead of getting a job and jumping on the many opportunities this administration has created for them to be more successful. They like most liberals would rather complain, and plot murder so that they could keep their welfare checks and government jobs intact hoping beyond hope that Karl Marx will find his way into the philosophy of American politics before all the old hippies die off. But in America its Adam Smith who set the stage and it’s not Julius Ceaser who runs our Republic—its Donald Trump, and he is a creation beyond the reach of classic literature. That book is being written before our eyes for the first time in history—and it’s much more exciting than anything the human race has ever created before.

Rich Hoffman

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Melania Trump is the key to Trusting the President: Jeff Sessions and a new kind of Washington operative

As Jeff Sessions testified before the senate on 6/13/2017 it was clear that politically we have certainly turned a corner in America. And it didn’t begin with the Sessions testimony—that was simply a reflection of a political shift that was noticeable to anyone looking—it started with the Comey testimony of the previous week, which turned out to be a huge belly flop for the political insurgents against the incoming Trump administration. Now looking back over the last five days I am quite proud of the CNN piece that I was a part of after the Comey testimony. (CLICK HERE TO REVIEW) We got it right while the rest of the nation was still working through what they had heard and that is directly reflective to our perspective at the front of the train. Trump didn’t slow down through the media surge against him hoping that Comey would reveal something damaging to the new president—and by Monday he had what CNN called the weirdest Cabinet meeting ever, where Trump’s picks were in the same room at the same time for the first time since he took office.

The statists of the old political structure—those who have made a swamp out of Washington D.C. hated the Trump Cabinet press conference. Trump broke all the rules by stating the accomplishments of his administration thus far, then allowing his Cabinet to speak one by one going around the big table in the White House. Obviously most of his picks were unique in that they were like a dream team of political movers and shakers. In the past most of those appointments would have been political hacks given jobs because of campaign contributions and favors otherwise owed. But not this one—with the exception of Mitch McConnel’s wife—these were professionals, experts in their particular fields who were bringing a competency to Washington D.C. that just hasn’t been seen before. Trump had outlasted the hardest part of the storm his political rivals could throw at him in just five months and the sun was starting to peak out.

Supposedly Trump and Jeff Sessions have been at each other’s throats and the new Attorney General was about to be terminated. But after the Cabinet meeting where Sessions spoke and Trump was engaged with his members individually, then after watching the Sessions testimony, it is obvious that we are dealing with a new caliber of political activity that radiates competency in ways previously undefined. It won’t take long for this administration to simply outpace the Washington swamp creatures and rise about the murky waters for which all these lackluster political activists have made expensive livings for themselves at being entirely average. No longer, and that’s where things are culminating in the Sessions testimony—an event he easily breezed through—are average results going to be tolerated.

That returns my mind to the night of that CNN piece that a group of southern Ohio Trump supporters—myself included—provided. I took a lot of notes on the Comey testimony and I felt I had a bead on what was happening, but my opinions were dramatically different than the story CNN was trying to frame. I knew when I gave my statements that it provoked outrage from the political left because they had been hoping that the Comey testimony would put the last nail in the coffin of the Trump presidency. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Comey showed himself to be less reliable than we were led to believe and there were aspects to his testimony that pointed toward very evil actions—evil in the sense that Comey was deceiving himself of the boundaries of right and wrong. That much was clear when he revealed himself as one of the intelligence leakers we’ve all been hearing so much about. Once that happened the obstruction of justice criteria that leftist political insurgents were trying to establish now turned back toward the Hillary Clinton and Lorretta Lynch case explored and dismissed in 2016. Now there was all kinds of fresh news to add—if these anti-Trump people held the same standard they were imposing on Donald Trump to Lorretta Lynch and Clinton—then there were major problems for those two, and for Comey. They had wrecked their own case.

My soundbite given to CNN played all weekend and into the events leading up to the Sessions testimony, and as I look back on it, I am proud to have been so far out in front of the story with my gut instinct. It’s not easy to go against the grain with something like that and to say things that might be used against you later. The general feeling is that Trump is a liar and that Comey is Boy Scout honest when in fact the opposite is true. Trump is reckless with his Twitter and his statements not because he’s a liar, but is innocently honest the way a young person might be who hasn’t yet been burned into extreme caution. Comey on the other hand was calculated, manipulative and even deceitful and hiding all this behind a façade of goodness. CNN wanted to find something wrong with Trump so they took what Comey said at face value when they shouldn’t have. They obviously thought me and the other Trump supporters with me were lunatics who supported Trump blindly. After all, how could anybody say that Trump isn’t a liar given all the accusations leveled against him.

The key to trusting Trump is in his business record of success, and his marriage to Melania. If he were so inclined to deceitful practices, I am convinced that she would pressure him into a correction which makes her marriage to him vitally important and a major difference between the Donald Trump of old, and this new one who is president. Melania is Trump’s hobby and he obviously loves her very much. And she keeps him honest because she doesn’t put up with much of anything. She is a good person and good people just don’t put up with bad people in their lives unless they allow themselves to be broken—and Melania is not a broken person in any fashion. Trump wouldn’t lie about the Russian investigation because she wouldn’t put up with it. But Comey is a collectivist—he’s a person who obviously doesn’t care about merit, but about preserving the swamp—and he would do anything to protect it—including lying. I don’t know his sweet little wife—the person he said he regretted not having dinner with that night he was invited to the White House to dine with Trump—but she obviously doesn’t hold Comey to the same kind of authenticity as Melania does Trump. So I have no problem looking at Comey and considering that he lied—because I think he did. Sessions on the other hand wanted to clear the air and willingly testified, and guilty people don’t tend to rush toward the truth, or the acquisition of it. And if Trump was “guilty” of all these things, he wouldn’t be Tweeting and creating a written record of the exchanges. Yes, this is truly new territory—we have not been here as a nation—ever.

After watching Jeff Sessions in his senate testimony and comparing it to Eric Holder and Lorretta Lynch it is obvious that we are dealing with a better caliber of people coming from this new White House. Then watching how the political left acted when Jeff Sessions and many others in Trump’s Cabinet showed so much respect and passion as members of the Trump team we are seeing something very different—and I think the real credit goes back to Melania Trump. I think it is she who makes the President a better man—better than he ever has been before. And at this stage in his life I think he is extraordinarily trustworthy—and his fearless actions show it. Trust worthy people trust other people—which Trump trusted Sessions to do a good job at the senate so he left for Wisconsin to do his job as president—which says a lot about how Trump operates as a manager. With Melania she is not only a beautiful woman—physically, but she’s got it on the inside too—and that has the President’s heart. So as CNN asked me, do you think Comey lied, or do I think Trump lied—I of course believe Trump and not Comey. Why—because Melania is married to Trump and Comey is sketchy. Therefore, Trump is the guy I trust and it’s obvious that I’m not alone. Finally that administration is turning the corner and the left is losing ground—and now we’ll get to see something truly good coming from Washington D.C. And it couldn’t have arrived a moment too soon.

Rich Hoffman

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Theory H Utilization: Thinking correctly about Trump’s “workplace development” week

Since this has been “workplace development” week for the Donald Trump White House it would be proper for me to contribute a few cents to the value of this discussion. As our economy functions from ever-increasing unemployment numbers—which is a wonderful thing—many people out there in the position to hire workers get stressed out in how to acquire new talent. Just a few months ago when discussing supply chain challenges downstream from me, I suggested that by opening up a second and third shift that they could dramatically increase their productive output. So the question came back to me–how would we go about doing that? I looked at them for a moment mystified that they really didn’t comprehend how to do something so simple—and the more I speak to people all across America, they are really lost as to how to acquire new talent and how to get proper productive output out of all 24 hours of a day. It just happens that this is another one of my specialties and given this week’s White House emphasis, I’ll share a few things to help those most in need given the urgency created by such a booming economy such as what we now have—thanks to President Trump.

I get each week dozens and dozens of offers from job recruiters who offer to help solve a company’s recruiting needs—because honestly this is one of those things that most companies are terrible at. It’s hard to know what kind of people to hire and how to build teams out of those people once you’ve hired them. As I’ve stated before, some of the past occupational fields that I’ve been inclined to besides archaeology—which is a study of human cultures, so it’s related to these modern enterprises, was psychiatry. I’ve always been interested in what makes human beings tick, so when it comes to interviewing and recruiting the right people for the right job-it’s always been something that comes naturally for me. Then team building with those individuals brings another level of challenge because people often resent being placed together in ways that are not authentic to their experiences—so given all those dynamics, most employers just throw up their hands and hope that other people can be hired to handle those problems for them—the way an attorney might handle all the legal issues. However, I would say that recruiting is the most important thing a company does aside from figuring out what their product is and how to deliver it to the marketplace.

There are a lot of these “Theory X” people out there who have been taught for two generations that the best way to work with people is with this kind of authoritarian relationship where essentially workforces are communist camps full of Marxists and whatever the “superior” says is what the mass collective must do for the health of the company. I have sat stunned in many meetings where people who call themselves conservatives politically have this archaic relationship with their workers who actually believe that people should give up their individual rights for the good of the company they work for—and that this is somehow productive for the end use intentions of the organization. Not at all. Theory X motivations get a rebellious work force that will tell you one thing to your face, but they’ll do everything they can to drag ass something without constant cattle prodding and discipline to evoke productive results. People who are obsessed with Theory X are terrible at managing multi-shift production needs.

Theory X

Theory X is based on pessimistic assumptions of the average worker. This management style supposes that the average employee has little to no ambition, shies away from work or responsibilities, and is individual-goal oriented. Generally, Theory X style managers believe their employees are less intelligent than the managers are, lazier than the managers are, or work solely for a sustainable income. Due to these assumptions, Theory X concludes the average workforce is more efficient under “hands-on” approach to management.^[1] The ‘Theory X’ manager believes that all actions should be traced and the responsible individual given a direct reward or a reprimand according to the action’s outcomes. This managerial style is more effective when used in a workforce that is not intrinsically motivated to perform. It is usually exercised in professions where promotion is infrequent, unlikely or even impossible and where workers perform repetitive tasks.^[2]

According to Douglas McGregor, there are two opposing approaches to implementing Theory X: the “hard” approach and the “soft” approach. The hard approach depends on close supervision, intimidation, and imminent punishment. This approach can potentially yield a hostile, minimally cooperative work force that could harbor resentment towards management. The soft approach is the literal opposite, characterized by leniency and less strictly regulated rules in hopes for high workplace morale and therefore cooperative employees. Implementing a system that is too soft could result in an entitled, low-output workforce. McGregor believes both ends of the spectrum are too extreme for efficient real world application.^[3] Instead, McGregor feels that somewhere between the two approaches would be the most effective implementation of Theory X.

Overall, Theory X generally proves to be most effective in terms of consistency of work. Although managers and supervisors are in almost complete control of the work, this produces a more systematic and uniform product or work flow. Theory X can also benefit a work place that is more suited towards an assembly line or manual labor type of occupation.^[4] Utilizing theory X in these types of work conditions allow the employee to specialize in a particular area allowing the company to mass produce more quantity and higher quality work, which in turns brings more profit.

Theory Y

“Theory Y is almost in complete contrast to that of Theory X”. Theory Y managers make assumptions that people in the work force are internally motivated, enjoy their labor in the company, and work to better themselves without a direct “reward” in return.^[5] Theory Y employees are considered to be one of the most valuable assets to the company, and truly drive the internal workings of the corporation.^[6] Also, Theory Y states that these particular employees thrive on challenges that they may face, and relish on bettering their personal performance.^[2] Workers additionally tend to take full responsibility for their work and do not require the need of constant supervision in order to create a quality and higher standard product.^[4]

Because of the drastic change compared to the “Theory X” way of directing, “Theory Y” managers gravitate towards relating to the worker on a more personal level, as opposed to a more conductive and teaching based relationship.^[5] As a result, Theory Y followers may have a better relationship with their higher-ups, as well as potentially having a healthier atmosphere in the work place. Managers in this theory tend to use a democratic type of leadership because workers will be working in a way that does not need supervision the most.^[4]

In comparison to “Theory X”, “Theory Y” adds more of a democratic and free feel in the work force allowing the employee to design, construct, and publish their works in a timely manner in co-ordinance to their work load and projects. A study was done to analyze different management styles over professors at a Turkish University. This study found that the highly supervised Theory X management affected the research performance of the academics negatively. In general, the study suggests that the professional setting and research based work that professors perform are best-managed with Theory Y styles.^[5]

While “Theory Y” may seem optimal, it does have some drawbacks. While there is a more personal and individualistic feel, this does leave room for error in terms of consistency and uniformity.^[3] The workplace lacks unvarying rules and practices, and this can result in an inconsistent product which could potentially be detrimental to the quality standards and strict guidelines of a given company.^[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y

I’m not particularly in love with Theory Y either, because of the last paragraph of the explanation above, but it is far superior in the modern marketplace—especially in this climate where unemployment is low and workers have a lot of options to work with. So new inventions are needed and that’s what I spend most of my time working on professionally, such as what we might call a Theory H, for “Hoffman.” Employees take on a job for many reasons, primarily so that they can make a living—they exchange their time for money—which they naturally resent at an instinctual level. But, an opportunity to do a job that has structure and purpose bring with it a currency that often isn’t acknowledged in economic measuring patterns. So I would suggest that while hiring, hire the best people by determining in the interview if they are working just for a paycheck, or if that is just one aspect of their desire for a job. If there are other elements to their job seeking desires, such as “getting out of the house to have their own thing,” or they are hungry to build a life for themselves as a young person, if you can see a light on behind their eyes there is usually something you can work with if you are willing to coach them along. I wouldn’t say that a democratic process is the optimal one because as everyone who reads me knows, the collective is not superior to the individual, but you can’t have a bunch of individuals running around doing whatever they want either. So you have to get individuals to bring their magic to the table without killing their ambition with too many collective considerations. As a manager you have to pick and choose what you’re points of emphasis will be, unlike the Theory X person who acts like a communist dictator and tries to make a job into a work camp in Siberia. Once you’ve defined your critical path points the individuals you’ve hired will go to great measures to help you get where you want to go—because all people like to be a part of something successful. So let them share in that success and most of your employment needs will be solved. It’s not always about money with most people, often it’s about having the opportunity to feel pride in the work they do and not have that pride robbed from them by a Theory X tyrant.

It is one of the great privileges in life to be able to offer a job to someone. They get a chance to do well for their families and you get contributors to a vision that is the engine to productivity in the nation’s GDP. Each employee should be treated as an asset with life potential with whatever company they happen to work for. Team building comes naturally out of setting the proper objectives for a workforce so that they can be a part of a winning opportunity. Once they see that they will often do great things to achieve a victory and be a part of a winning team. It is not enough to ask them to be a part of a team and to sacrifice their individuality to the group enterprise. They must want to win for their own selfish desires. When they do that the team does win, so when recruiting, hire people hungry to win at life. Then, and only then can productive exploits on second, third and weekend shifts be properly explored with all the new opportunities coming forth from this new Trump White House—the hiring process is only scary to the Theory X people. They need to retrain themselves to think properly in this modern economy. The recruiters out there exist essentially to help all the out-of-date Theory X types—but that’s not necessary if you understand who you are bringing in and give them the opportunity to be successful. If give that chance—most people will thrive if they still have that glimmer in their eye left over from childhood that still has hope that they can be a part of something that’s great so they can sleep well at night knowing that they aren’t just on a job—but are a part of something really magnificent. It doesn’t matter if the product is just making straws for Burger King or if you are making spaceships for commercial flight—greatness is in doing extraordinary things with everyday events and once you establish that, everything else takes care of itself.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Jim Comey Should go to Jail: How the former FBI director lied and how

Given the nature of the subject and the amount of time I personally gave to it last week this is sort of a three-part response to the Comey testimony provided on June 8^th 2017 to the senate. (Click here to review the previous entries.) So for this let me answer the question that was given to me by CNN and explain my reasons—the question of course was whether or not I thought James Comey—former director of the FBI, should go to jail. In my 20 second answer, I couldn’t give the kind of answer I wanted because of the necessary theatrics of television so here it is in writing. Yes, James Comey should go to jail for lying under oath and for subversion of our republic. I’m sure he was lying, and I’m sure he held back information deliberately which is in many cases equivalent to lying and he is for all practical purposes a villain. Here’s why.

There was something that really bothered me about the way James Comey prepared his statements before the testimony, and the way he referred to tangible observations in such a lurid way. As I said to CNN, Comey’s written testimony along with the delivery of additional information to the senate reminded me of the early James Bond novels from Ian Flemming–of a much more disgraceful and reckless British agent than we saw in the films with Sean Connery and Roger Moore. The flair of Comey’s writing style reminded me not of a long time FBI agent—but actually that of a pent-up author wanting desperately to mater in the world just a few years before turning 60 years of age. My comments below come from the experience of being an employer myself and working with people the same age as James Comey—and in reading voluminous amounts of books over the years—particularly the work of Ian Fleming. I know all too well that when you hire fire and discipline around a thousand employees over a period of time some of them by nature will not agree with you. Sometimes they will work against you, and at some point in time will think you are the most evil person in the world because they can’t get you to see things their way—and they find themselves on the outside looking in—which often hurts their feelings. There are people out there who think I’m the most mean and evil person in the world. Does that make them correct? Of course not, but from their perspective their opinion is all they care about. And this is what we are talking about with Comey—an ex-employee who gambled and lost his job and is now on the outside and it hurts him. His testimony says all the things we need to know. If you know what to look for Comey spelled it all out before the hearing even took place by what he had written down, then illustrated gloriously during his sworn statements.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-jcomey-060817.pdf?platform=hootsuite

Again, this is experience on my part that I offer this breakdown, but Comey opened the door to it by his own testimony. Because he did that we have to account for the way he thinks and what his motives were based on the instinct of experience. For instance, below are a few of the Comey written comments that I found particularly damning for him so let me talk about them one at a time which will then be summarized to properly articulate my conclusion of why Comey should go to jail. Here is the first:

The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.

That’s not what the IC was doing on their January 6^th meeting with Trump where Comey cleared the room to report the unverified salacious and unverified material to Trump. They were showing the new president what they had on him and were warning him of information they “could” possess if needed for their own preservation. They were guilty of trying to create the kind of leverage that Comey complained about later which indicates that they were prone to thinking this way themselves—as a point of reference. The IC (intelligence community) was trying to throw Trump a bone so that they could win him over for their further employment. When Trump failed to feel threatened by this attempt, the members of the IC were deeply concerned as they left Trump Tower that day and it was at this point that the leaks from the IC began to flow freely to the press.

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past. I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) – once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016. In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions. I can recall nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in four months – three in person and six on the phone.

By his own admission Comey never did this with any other president prior, but the meeting rattled Comey to such an extent that he felt he better start now because it was always his intention after January 6^th to rid the Beltway of this Trump threat. That was the same type of behavior that an employee who knows they are about to be fired does in an attempt to save their job, they begin gathering written recollections to use in human resources later. Comey lacking personal courage reverted to a passive aggressive approach, which was writing everything down. Comey understood early that Trump had doubts about him and his leadership in the FBI so he began to keep notes that he could use later to extort his futher employment.

My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch. A few moments later, the President said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.

Here Comey is hoping to use his experience as an FBI agent and director to overcome any doubt about what he’s saying about Trump. This detail about his personal dinner with Trump in the Green Room of the White House is particularly revealing. First Comey wants to show that he has a story to tell and is trying to attract agents for a big book deal, or even a Hollywood movie based on his experiences. The liberals of the Beltway who know film producers likely put the bug in his ear which he was receptive to after that January 8^th meeting where Comey started writing things down. The salacious details here say a lot about Comey’s motives because he goes into almost screenplay detail—which has nothing to do with facts the way you’d expect an FBI director to illicit. Instead he relied on his feelings which are more aligned with the way a novelist would write. People forget that Ian Flemming, the great British writer and creator of James Bond was a British Naval Intelligence Division agent before he was a writer and if you go back and read his first book, Casino Royal, it actually sounds a lot like the way Comey writes in his interactions with Trump. Since Comey himself offered that “instinct” is admissible as evidence for the deduction of reason in this case, then I feel quite comfortable in concluding that Comey decided he was going to be a writer after his FBI career and Trump was going to be his villain that he’d write about. He’d be the toast of the swamp as his friends around the Beltway would honor him for all time as the Boy Scout who saved them from the lunatic businessman from New York during a short-lived presidency. The more he thought about it, the more alluring the thought became until it became so obvious that Trump could see it on his face. Prior to that January 27^th dinner meeting, Comey had hidden his fantasy—but Trump could detect it and it changed the way that Trump thought about Comey as director of the FBI.

On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of the President. He sat behind the desk and a group of us sat in a semi-circle of about six chairs facing him on the other side of the desk. The Vice President, Deputy Director of the CIA, Director of the National CounterTerrorism Center, Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, and I were in the semi-circle of chairs. I was directly facing the President, sitting between the Deputy CIA Director and the Director of NCTC. There were quite a few others in the room, sitting behind us on couches and chairs. The President signaled the end of the briefing by thanking the group and telling them all that he wanted to speak to me alone. I stayed in my chair. As the participants started to leave the Oval Office, the Attorney General lingered by my chair, but the President thanked him and said he wanted to speak only with me. The last person to leave was Jared Kushner, who also stood by my chair and exchanged pleasantries with me. The President then excused him, saying he wanted to speak with me. When the door by the grandfather clock closed, and we were alone, the President began by saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” Flynn had resigned 5 the previous day. The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President. He added that he had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify. The President then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information – a concern I shared and still share. After he had spoken for a few minutes about leaks, Reince Priebus leaned in through the door by the grandfather clock and I could see a group of people waiting behind him. The President waved at him to close the door, saying he would be done shortly. The door closed. The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied only that “he is a good guy.” (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at FBI.) I did not say I would “let this go.” The President returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Mr. Priebus and the Vice President. I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership. I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December. I did not understand the President to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. I could be wrong, but I took him to be focusing on what had just happened with Flynn’s departure and the controversy around his account of his phone calls. Regardless, it was very concerning, given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency.

Even going to the trouble to mention the grandfather clock in this segment of Comey’s testimony is more of an attempt to paint a picture of the moment more than just reporting the facts. This only reiterates what I said about Comey wanting to be a novelist because the clock has nothing to do with the facts of the matter. The point of this entire segment is to paint Comey as the sole survivor of a treacherous cloud of villainy. Comey knew that his Beltway friends would soak all this up so he added extra detail for the sake of drama. In the contents of the discussion its obvious Trump wanted to protect his friend Michael Flynn from further embarrassment as the guy had just resigned a few days prior. There was no conspiracy or ill intent on the part of the president—since “instinct” is now admissible as evidence. What is particularly revealing here is the part where Comey tries to portray himself completely in control by saying “I did not say I would ‘let this go.” The president returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock”—and so on and so on. Listening to Comey speak in writing he was very much in control and was the protagonist of his own adventure, but from what he stated in his testimony he added that he was terrified of this one on one with Trump and he felt compelled that the weight of the office was upon him to stop the Russian investigation.

Essentially Comey decided some time before the election of 2016 that regardless of what happened he was going to seek money and fame in the private sector which likely shaped the way he handled the Hillary Clinton case. If he had prosecuted her—like he should have, the agents and movie makers would have held it against him. So days before the election when things were tight between Trump and Clinton he tried to take the light off her and help her out a few percentage points—because he wanted his book deal. It would have paid a lot more than he made as an FBI director and he’d gain fame for he and his family—along with his professor friends who leak stories to The New York Times. From Comey’s perspective of trying to make a little money for his family he’s a hero—he’s the protagonist standing up to the president in the Oval Office like a Boy Scout honest, clean and full of pride in Amerca. But in reality he was just another swamp monster working against the American people, actively subverting justice to keep a political party in power and when none of that worked he became one of the big leakers to the media in an attempt to bring down a properly elected American president violating his employment agreement with the FBI and the natural trust his position carried with it as head of the intelligence community.

Comey lied because he took it upon himself to become an activist, he wrote down information on government computers to be used as a weapon—no wonder he let Hillary Clinton go—but he did not state these intentions which were clearly present. Instead he painted himself as a bastion of the law who would uphold truth, justice and the American way. In reality he was just another cowering bureaucrat trying to hide in the swamp and ride out his years as he propped himself up as a future writer in the private sector. He lied because he did not state his intentions correctly for why he actually became a leaker. He said it was to preserve justice—but in reality it was to take down a president he didn’t like from the beginning and he wanted to be a hero to the left. He also lied in saying that he wasn’t political. His actions were very political and more than justified his termination without any further drama. But we all know how that turned out. Comey placed himself on a pedestal hoping to play at being the sacrificial lamb for the good of the ”Beltway.” But what he revealed of himself was that he was an activist for the preservation of the status quo and a leaker of information gathered in the Oval Office to be spread upon a salacious press in the way a plot from House of Cards might have a hard time believing. Yet that is precisely what happened. That is why Comey should go to jail. He abused the trust of his office. He sought to bring down an American president’s administration, and he misrepresented himself under sworn testimony. And he wrote down the evidence forcing us all to act on it.

And that’s that.

Rich Hoffman

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The Accuracy of Shooting from the Hip: A Cowboy Fast Draw update

I don’t really feel like writing about another terrorist attack, or the stupidity of Democrats. In America, especially among the shooting sports, we have a means of dealing with both and that insanity is completely avoidable. I’m talking about the Cowboy Way which is an evolved philosophy of conduct born from the notion of individual freedom and property rights defense—and its very unique to the world. By day, I get the opportunity professionally to deal with a variety of international cultures and through my love of mythology I have a means of gaining more understanding than the typical person visiting an airport in Tokyo might experience. For a good culture to survive or even thrive, you have to know what you are—and in America at the heart of our fundamental philosophy is the Cowboy Way. To be a part of it, or to understand it in some fundamental way, becoming involved in a shooting sport of some kind will usually evoke the basic elements. That is why for the last two years I have been learning a new skill—Cowboy Fast Draw. Well, it has taken a little time and a lot of investment but I’m getting ready to do a little competition shooting so I was taking some video of my form to slow down and analyze, and I thought I’d share that video so that my readers can have an understanding of something I think is important. I’ve set up a target range for Cowboy Fast Draw in my garage and it’s where I go to dump away stress and to fine tune a mild obsession for me in the realm of speed and accuracy. How fast can a person really shoot and hit a target in the micro seconds of judgment? Before I elaborate, here is a bit of my practice session from Friday evening this past week. I like the results, but in all honesty, I’m pushing to be twice as fast as what is seen in this video. These shots are in the .450 to .470 range—which is pretty good. But not where I want to be. However, what matters most is the experience of developing the Cowboy Way through this art and that is truly something very special.

Working with the western arts for over 25 years as a bull whip artist I often ran into these quick draw guys and I always enjoyed watching them. But time and the initial investment to get started were certainly barriers of entry. There are a number of different fast draw organizations out there and most of them were pretty loose and hadn’t really done anything to advance the sport in a way that was respectable. That is until I learned more specifically about the CFDA, (Cowboy Fast Draw Association). They had their act together and from what I could tell was doing great things in advancing the concept of the Cowboy Way.

Around this time of getting started in Cowboy Fast Draw I was involved in two international cultures professionally, one in Japan where the samurai is still very important to their business climate. And the other was in Europe where the virtues of the Crusades and King Author’s adventures as a knight of the Round Table are the soil that all their roots emerge from. I couldn’t help but think that for America to really mature into its own thing—which is essentially where we are—we needed to embrace our own philosophic—warrior past and roll it into our business culture. In a tremendous way, Hollywood had already done that and our society flourished enormously during the 1930s to the 1960s when movie and television westerns were most of what Hollywood put out. A lot of the movies made in this period I was surprised to learn were shown on television in Europe and Japan as they were fascinated with the idea of the American cowboy and the values which poured forth from it. Recently while staying in England for an extended period I counted at least five television channels that were showing American westerns during a Saturday afternoon—and they were old westerns. Nothing produced within the last five decades.

Additionally I was coming under a lot of criticism for my very reckless ways of doing things—or what appeared to slow minded people as reckless. I often get accused for “shooting from the hip” as if that were some kind of bad thing by rivals. This is in reference to my tendency to make decisions on my own—without a lot of group involvement, and to make those decisions quickly. I don’t sleep on much but instead usually draw and fire at that moment. To me it doesn’t seem so fast, but that’s because I’m already thinking in a very fast way so what might seem like forever to me is very fast to the people watching from the outside. So I got involved in Cowboy Fast Draw for other reasons too, and that was to prove that you could draw and fire from the hip quickly and accurately and that it wasn’t so reckless—but rather quite precise.

The safe thing for me would be to not get involved in this type of thing. After all, I had been one of the best bull whip artists in the world and I had often used my experience with that endeavor to explain many complicated business concepts—such as putting out the flame on a candle with the crack of a whip like I did for the SB5 Bill before Governor Kasich went to the dark side and was still trying to do good work in Ohio, to demonstrate how to cut fat out of the budget with precision. To hit a specific target with the tip of a bull whip is difficult and not many people in the world can do it—but I can and I could use that calling card forever and nobody would blame me. Taking up Cowboy Fast Draw and joining a sport that already has so many lightening fast people competing in it doesn’t make much sense to most because it’s harder to be unique in such a field, if that is what you are going for in life. Yet for me it’s about the things that happen in a fraction of a second that sends my mind ablaze with wonder, and obsession.

I hit a major milestone with some of my professional work a few years back and came into some expendable cash so that’s when I bought my fast draw rig and my new Ruger Vaquero. The very first thing I did, because I had been thinking of it for over twenty years, was find a fast draw organization that I could join up with and master the art. That’s when I noticed that the Cowboy Fast Draw Association really had everything figured out—the targeting system you could buy from them and it came all ready to set up and use and the ammunition was easy to get. The wax bullets I get for a good price from CFDA and the shotgun primers I get at Cabela’s about every few weeks in boxes of 1000. To get good at something like Cowboy Fast Draw you have to practice a lot and to do that you have to get the economics lined up correctly. The way they have things set up in the Cowboy Fast Draw Association it costs about .06 per shot. To get to where you see me in the video above I have fired about 10,000 rounds at the target shown which is about $600 of investment in ammunition which might sound like a lot, but for shooting it really isn’t. It’s almost as cheap as BB gun shooting, but Cowboy Fast Draw is much better. By the time I get to my next 10,000 shots, I will likely get my times down by .100 of a second. Perhaps by the next 50,000 shots, I may even do better than that. If you watch the video in slow motion taken from many angles, the areas for improvement are the time reacting to the light and the time from drawing the gun and actually pulling the trigger. We are all taught that the way to shoot is to aim with the targeting bead carefully so the tendency to get the gun out in front of you is very instinctual. But to get the fast times you really need to fire right out of the holster. When I bought that holster I commissioned it from Bob Mernickle who makes holsters specifically to the stringent rules of the Cowboy Fast Draw Association just to be safe, and I have to say that it is my favorite thing in the world. When I come home from a hard day, nothing feels better than putting on my fast draw rig and practicing a little fast draw. There really isn’t anything better in the world than the smell of gun smoke, Hoppes gun cleaner, and finely worked leather to the sounds of talk radio giving you the news of the day. I’ve had a very good life and I have owned many things that made me very happy, but my fast draw rig and the Ruger Vaquero that rest in it is the best thing I’ve ever owned. There is great symbolic meaning which is very important to me patriotically as well as philosophically that come with them.

Until I shot that video the other day I wasn’t sure how I was doing. I didn’t worry about the form or how it looked; I just practiced with an eye on being able to compete within a few years. I talked about it here when I started and I have been having fun with it. I was pretty happy with the video I saw. Everything happens so fast that it’s difficult to tell what is going on until you slow things down for analysis. But so far so good, and I share it just in case some of my readers out there want to use it as an entry point into the sport for themselves. It’s an all American past time and just the function of it is important to the philosophic development of the Cowboy Way which is something everyone would do well to learn—especially young people. Other cultures—especially the Japanese, certainly are proud of their artistic warrior arts which put their societies on the map of relevancy. In America, gunfighting is a martial art of our own invention and I think it’s time we embrace it—formally, not just in old movies. Cowboy Fast Draw is a great way to do that. You can practice at your own home relatively cheaply and it really gets you close to the spirit of America. For me, it’s that quest to show how accurate a person can be shooting from the hip. As those who have been so critical of my way of thinking about most all things, the proof that it’s possible is obvious. But I’m not done yet.

Rich Hoffman

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The Good Work of Sean Hannity: Why Buck Sexton is wrong about the Seth Rich murder

Sean Hannity has been doing good work at Fox News for a long time. But I have noticed a huge difference in him over the last few years as he has become more involved in martial arts—his reporting naturally has been more fearless. As a person he is functioning from a position where he’s just not afraid of the mass pain that the collectivist lefties use through peer pressure to manipulate things in their favor and that has put Sean Hannity out in front while some of the old big dogs like Bill O’Reilly have fallen to the ankle bitters. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I wish for everyone to study some “martial art” so that you can make your life as fearless as possible. Nobody should make decisions out of fear so by having some way to defend yourself against those who wish to use force to drive your opinions—you can be free of their intentions and do justice to the truth if you learn something in the martial art professions.

Why do they not go after @nbc hosts or @CNN hosts? Serious questions will now be raised on funding, tax status, and political agenda. https://t.co/CLODSzUotY

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017

In my life I have not only had martial art experience as taught in the eastern philosophies, but I have been a bull whip expert for my entire adult life and I have used it often to keep villains away from my existence. It has been very useful. And these days my Ruger Vaquero along with my fast draw rig is my very best friend in life. I’m older now and can afford a hobby like fast draw shooting and I love it. But in the back of my mind it is just another form of “martial art.” It is nice to know that if someone has a gun pointed at me and my gun is still in a concealed position—that I can draw and fire before they can even react to my movement. Those kinds of things allow people to be straight with each other and use honor to govern their interactions—and I think every human being alive everywhere in the world should experience such things. By learning something that can defend you and your family from the force of others, you inspire the world to be more honest. And that is what I see different in Sean Hannity as opposed to virtually everyone in the news business. He has only gotten better over time and I think it’s because of his dedication to martial arts which then carry over into other aspects of his professional life.

As he is doing great work in defending President Trump, Julian Assange and the conservative movement in general, the political thugs out there are trying to knock him off the air the way they did Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes—by attacking the advertisers. Sean being keen on martial arts thought has learned how to block and while reporting on the explosive Seth Rich story, managed to get out in front of those efforts by reminding everyone what the left is up to behind the scenes which is great. If I were running Fox News now that they have screwed up with what they did with Bill O’Reilly losing the 8 PM time slot to Racheal Maddow of all people—I’d put Hannity at 8 PM, Tucker at 9, then that Five show at 10. The Five just doesn’t do it for me in that prime spot. As I’ve said before, I don’t want to hear from the political left. I get that during the Bret Baier news hour—I don’t want that during the prime-time hours.

I can say that now that O’Reilly is off at Fox I watch Lou Dobbs at 7 during dinner then go into my shop to work on reloads and shooting practice until Hannity comes on at 10. I listen to Bill O’Reilly on his podcasts during this time so I’m not watching Fox—which is why they are now losing to the other networks. I’m sure there are many others who feel the way I do. I don’t want to listen to a bunch of lefties. I have a special place for them in my day, but once that’s over—I’m done. For entertainment purposes, I want to be around my own kind of people not hearing the wasted efforts of the progressive left who hate everything and have taken an alliance with the very nature of evil in this world.

Spoke to many advertisers. They are being inundated with Emails to stop advertising on my show. This is Soros/Clinton/Brock liberal fascism https://t.co/WRCzfWVs9N

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017

Mediamatters is hoping advertisers will give into the pressure and they will silence freedom of speech. Liberals, do you support this effort https://t.co/TtknEQnvTa

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017

Sean Hannity is really the last man standing and his coverage of Seth Rich has been phenomenal. The DNC has real trouble, they are down on fund-raising, they have no candidates who aren’t socialist losers and their future is bleak. I think they know the only way they can stay relevant is to drive people like Sean from the airwaves so they can completely control the message and if any of their own step out of line, they kill them—which is what I think happened to Seth Rich. They are a desperate party with a lost message that this new President Trump is going to outshine and they know it. They are like mobsters and back when Seth Rich was killed, they thought they were going to win the election and maintain control—and that they’d get by with it the same way Hillary got by with her email crimes—or Donna Brazil got by with cheating during the debates. Cheating and killing is what they do—and they do it so that when you are dealing with them that you fear for your own life and will yield to their demands if you want to continue living. Let’s face it, that’s what the Democratic Party stands for.

I was doing some cowboy reloads for my .45 Vaquero after Bill O’Reilly was done and was listening to Buck Sexton whom I like well enough on The Blaze. He’s pretty good with Trump coverage so I catch him here and there but I couldn’t disagree with him more over the Seth Rich case where he doesn’t think there is any fire to the smoke. I know Sexton has experience in “intelligence” but from my experience in actually knowing “hit men” I am sure that the DNC put out the request and that it was executed to the specificity of their desires. In my teen years—a long time ago—but not enough to not be relevant to this discussion—I was friends with three hit men. None of them were friends together but they all knew each other and me through a special relationship with a very respected judge in Southern Ohio. They killed people and the judge knew about it and all the members of the various political parties knew what was going on. The press knew it, the business owners knew about it and the old Cincinnati Bengal players that I hung out with knew it. We all knew what these guys did and if your name came up on their request list, they’d come after you.

Interesting Real Time can make incest so called "jokes" about Ivanka and Colbert can make vile comments about @POTUS @MMFA SILENT #hypocrisy

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017

These hit men were really just normal guys except that they liked to kill people and they needed the law enforcement buy-in to do their work. As a 17-year-old I had several dinners at a big round table where one or two of these guys were there along with the judge and other important people and they all spoke on a first name bases knowing what their roles were. The reason I was there was because they liked me and I had a personality where I liked to compete and they respected that. I endeavored to have more nerve than those guys so they enjoyed teaching me things. In many cases they had destroyed their personal families by living on the edge so their relationship with me made them feel like they had some value to their lives. I married my wife two years later, which was good for me, and I don’t think that any of those guys lived five years beyond that. Life in the fast lane usually ends much quicker, and I doubt they had any regrets. But Buck Sexton’s premise that the DNC wouldn’t put out a hit for fear of going to jail—that was grossly naive. I’ll give Buck a little credit, he’s probably a very nice person, but he’s certainly, obviously naive to evil—which surprises me given his previous profession. But let me say this, I have no doubt the DNC would want to kill anybody who was trying to wreck their plans of putting Hillary Clinton into the White House. Their very existence depended on it—which we now can see clearly. And they had law enforcement on their side—look at the many crimes Eric Holder covered up—and Lorretta Lynch at the Justice Department. The times that the “fifth” was invoked by Obama era bureaucrats—and executive privilege. I’ve seen such hits ordered and I was there when the strategies for implementation were created—with the help of lawyers and the justice system. So I 100% believe the DNC functioning at the highest levels of government would be using hit men to eliminate trouble.

But understand this, the use of force is meant to change behavior so whether we are talking about actual killings such as in the Seth Rich case, or the assassination of a talk show host on Fox News like Sean Hannity, the intention is the same—to use force to change behavior. With O’Reilly out of the way all guns are pointed at Sean Hannity—and in spite of that Sean is doing some of the best work I’ve ever seen out of him. I attribute that not to any special skill that he’s newly developed except for the tendency to trust that he can defend himself against anything. The key I think for Sean Hannity in this really tough time is that he knows he can defend himself against anything—which then disarms that political left and the villains who sit at big tables and order hits on people to shut them down. One thing about those “hit men,” the truth of the matter was that they weren’t like the James Bond villains you see in the movies. They weren’t very sophisticated. They were just people who lacked a certain amount of natural fear and they would do things that most people wouldn’t even think of. If you caught them off guard they could be beaten pretty easily. The only real power that they had was in intimidation, but if you weren’t scared of them—they lost a remarkable amount of power quickly. After all, anybody can shoot somebody in the back—it doesn’t take anything special. And if you can take that option away from them, they really have nothing to work with.

To all my friends. TODAY, George Soros, & Hillary Clinton supported Mediamatters is targeting all of my advertisers to try and get me fired

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017

Sean Hannity is a well defended person, he’s a concealed carry holder in New York City and now he’s rather proficient at martial arts. He knows how to take a punch and to deflect the energy into a good offense which is much more powerful than most people think. And having that position, he’s prepared to do a great many things at Fox if they’ll stick with him. We are fighting pure evil here and some of that evil is finding its way into the Fox management by way of fear, fear of the wrath of the murderous DNC—a dying American political party out of ideas—and bullets. As we speak they are losing their friends at the justice department and in the courts and soon they won’t be able to have those round table discussions because the judges will be loyal to Trump, not Hillary. Now that they are afraid for a change, we conservatives must to be willing to take the eye and the heart out of them forever—to step on their neck while we have them down and pop that head completely off. And we must do it out of respect for justice. Knowing the difference is the key to everything and you can learn it by knowing a proper martial art, whether it is traditional melee combat or gun fighting. These days I prefer the gun fighting. For most of my adult life it’s been the melee stuff. But having something helps keep fear from your mind because you know you can handle anything they throw at you. And that is the way to truly disarm evil.

Rich Hoffman

CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Washington Post Declares War Against America: Being the “Last Man Standing”

This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2017

I knew we were going to arrive at this “pivot point” for several years now. It just wasn’t clear how we’d get here. But even so, the results are astonishing–so far down the rabbit hole of liberal control America has been on as a country. Probably the most obvious shot across the stern of conservativism has been the removal of two major prime time shows for which perceived Trump supporters might enjoy, The O’Reilly Factor and the ABC comedy, Last Man Standing. The obvious move by the heads of both networks was to unplug the Trump base from nurturing information in the form of entertainment for the exclusive objective of converting them to liberals—which isn’t going to happen. I have until very recently never seen Last Man Standing but now that it’s been cancelled I’ve caught clips of it and was astonished that it was even on a Disney owned network. However, the behavior of The New York Post and The New York Times regarding President Trump has been over the top. Each day of this past week, since the firing of James Comey and the passage of the Obamacare repeal in the House has emerged stories from those two papers designed to tie up the cogs of government preventing Donald Trump from achieving anything more—and I thought it astonishing—even for these liberal radicals. Because each of their stories involved really nothing of any substance, yet the wall to wall coverage didn’t fit the accusations. Then there is this constant talk of impeachment. Really? After what we’ve become used to under the Obama White House these idiots in the liberal media actually think that type of thing will take root? If the media wants to talk about impeachment then they should look at their lack of action on the items discussed at this link then understand why nothing under Trump is going anywhere. He hasn’t even been in office long enough to merit such discussion—yet this media thinks it can pick and choose law to support their political agenda and that makes them not just a nuisance, but dangerous.

_{http://www.wnd.com/2017/05/25-impeachable-obama-scandals-far-more-serious-than-comey-firing/}

If liberals think that by removing Tim Allen and Bill O’Reilly from television is going to defang the conservative movement, they are grossly misinformed—and I suppose that is what is most shocking to me. I mean, listening to their very small issues for which The Washington Post is making so much rhetorical comment when they were completely silent in regards to actual known crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the motivations behind their actions are obvious. They are in insurgent mode seeking to destroy and reshape The United States into some third-rate country and they expect to do it in full view of people like me—and that’s just not going to happen.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the constant reports from that same media about the possibility of North Korea shutting down the American power grid for months or years with cyber-attacks—which I don’t think is possible, but you never know. If such a thing would happen who would survive in America, the Berkley kids protesting everything in favor of communism or the rugged American individualists that Tim Allen played on television—the demographic type for which the show reached out to? Within a week of a major power outage food will become a problem and people will start killing each other over it, so what would happen to that leftist utopian society under those conditions? Obviously, it would fail quickly and all these stylish moves made by our technological society would revert back to primate behavior nearly over night. All the female CEOs of media companies would soon find themselves having to reprioritize their entire existence where food acquisition would become their number one concern—not whether or not ABCs lineup involved immigrant sit-coms as opposed to white men over 40 who cling to traditional American values. All the tenets of progressive society where women have replaced men and those women have babies then turn them over to the state for their upbringing and education would fly out the window in less than a month. The people who would survive most would be the gun carrying farmers of the Midwest. Cities would fall to depravity and cesspools of murder quickly.

A society cannot credit itself as being successful or advanced if one little thing such as power loss could throw it into an unstable condition so fast. Yet the people fighting to erase the Trump Presidency want and expect to do exactly that—even down to attacking the entertainment options that such people enjoy. That dear reader is a declaration of war and I take it that way. What I’ve seen from our mainstream media is nothing less than a complete government take-over. The Deep State was always much deeper than anybody thought and they are making themselves seen really for the first time. I wanted this to happen and it was always my intention that the Trump presidency would expose these villains, but the depth of their activity has truly been shocking, which was revealed in all its glory over this past week.

So here is a little message to the people who run The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, ABC—all these leftist’s organizations—your media groups did not invent “conservatism.” Even the great westerns which Hollywood produced in its finest years did not make American society conservative. The people of this country were already that way by nature of the Constitution for which we function. The media outlets of entertainment and news back then simply provided the kind of content that those types of people wanted. What is happening now is that those same outlets believe that they are the creators, which is a mistake. “We”—the Tea Party types, the NRA members, the farmers, the steel workers, the coal miners, the cowboys and the monster truck drivers—we put Trump in office as a last chance to fix the country from the lefty insurrection. By taking away conservative news, television shows, books and movies, you think that this utopian folly of liberalism is going to take root–you have a hard lesson coming to you. Conservativism is a philosophy derived from the essential ingredients of society whereas liberalism is a utopian theory untested against reality. It exists in places like college campuses and big cities like New York where reality is often pushed away from people’s minds—but it doesn’t hold up to feeding the basics of foundation societal thinking. Liberalism is one power outage away from being extinct from all human thinking and that is the hard truth. Yet people like me—and there are millions who think the way I do—are not going to let things get to that point. Trump was our preferred answer, but we can take it to violence if that’s what leftists want. I can say this, I’m not going to put up with liberalism any more.

For years conservatives have looked the other way and been very inclusive in regard to people who think differently than they do. Even when we knew that there were crimes committed by Hillary Clinton we were angry, but we didn’t try to shut down reality the way these Washington Post writers are doing. They expect to sell themselves as respectable journalists while everyone can see that they are just conducting hack jobs. You’d have to be a complete idiot to think otherwise. Liberals may in fact be that stupid, but I certainly am not and neither are many of the conservatives I know. Conservative ideas are forged from the fires of reality—not theory. It’s one thing to be compassionate toward other people’s opinions—even if they are stupid opinions. But it’s quite another to yield to evil and turn away from the truth feeding villains to destroy our society. I’m not going to stand for that—and it doesn’t matter if Bill O’Reilly or Tim Allen are on TV to tell me so—if the Trump experiment doesn’t work—the next step is violence and the liberals won’t like that. They won’t last in that fight. Before Trump was elected I was very close to organizing my own group to restore America back to greatness any way possible—and likely the 2^nd Amendment would have been needed. Yielding to liberals is simply not on the table.

Then there’s Trump, I know enough about him to know this—in this current fight in Washington D.C., he will be the Last Man Standing, which is likely the real fear that liberals have in regard to the white wealthy males they seek to destroy in order to change America into their progressive utopia. Execs at ABC blame themselves for creating Trump, and the voters who elected him with shows like the Tim Allen comedy, but they give themselves too much assumption of power. They don’t make us, we make them. We decide if a media company is successful or fails. It used to be they didn’t always come out and say to half the nation that they hated them. They wanted people to watch their networks and read their newspapers so they kept politics as light as possible. But now, now they’ve went and done it. They’ve declared their hatred for us, they’ve not treated our guy in the White House with the respect that we at least showed their people over the many years, and now the gloves are off. And it’s an insult to those of us who really are tough, and forged from reality to be cast into a stew with these liberal idiots and have them expect that they should rule over us in any way. Even if they could manage somehow to impeach Donald Trump—what do they think would happen? That we wouldn’t take revenge for their assault? No, I figure they are lucky that they have Donald Trump—because he protects them from us. We have hope that Trump can fix things in the D.C. culture. If he can’t, then we’ll have to do it ourselves, and liberals certainly won’t like that.

Rich Hoffman

CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert Can’t Make it in the Real World: Understanding the nature of American culture and Donald Trump

This tendency of media personalities to think that by ankle biting at a president that they are protected behind some invisible barrier of orthodox is truly baffling. I didn’t think that when Obama called out people who got on his nerves like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity in the past that it was wrong, and I certainly don’t think it’s wrong for Trump to call out losers like Stephen Colbert. What makes Trump unique is that he is a president that does not desire to function behind some veil of formality. To him the presidency is just a job—it doesn’t make him as a person. Yet many like Colbert and his audience and the type of people who voted for Barack Obama in the past, want the presidency to be royalty in America and that’s just not the way we intended the position to be. I like the idea of a Thomas Jefferson who would answer the front door to the White House in his bath robe personally, or a Teddy Roosevelt who would swim nude in the Potomac. I’m not at all enchanted by the luxury of the White House so I don’t see that the presidency is above the ankle biters out there like Stephen Colbert who nightly rip on the new administration hoping to return American back toward the direction of progressivism. I like a president who is willing to fight anybody at any time under any circumstances—so I love that Trump takes on losers like Colbert the way he does.

Few people really know it, but some of these late-night comedians who are most against Trump, such as Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, are little guys. TV makes them look bigger but in real life walking around the great American Midwest these guys would easily get their asses kicked by average sized pick-up truck driving, tobacco chewers who make up most of the green space between America’s cities—and it scares them. Bill Maher knows that he can’t walk into a Waffle House at 4 AM in Tennessee and run his mouth without becoming a hood ornament. I mean the guy is only like 5’8” and Jon Stewart is even shorter than that. So these guys are truly afraid of those bulky white males who still dominate American politics. They have kiss assed their way onto television and now take pot shots at the American way of life for laughs from behind the protection of celebrity—and many of us are sick of it. They are partly why someone like Trump was elected—because we—the people who have lived in and made America what it has been—which we like—we are tired of these puny little punks, communists, lunatic feminists and many others of having a foothold under the banner of “fairness” only to have them ankle bite at us and not expect to be punched back.

We get tired of being called “white trash” or “rich white males of privilege” and all that crazy European talk about class structure which has been specific to life in the aristocratic age. That is not the way of life in America. In this country, we like a guy who was born in Queens who gambled big with some loan his father gave him and worked hard as hell to become a billionaire—and along the way took no shit from anybody and is even in the WWE Hall of Fame—as well as eventually becoming president. We like a guy or girl who can be born anywhere with any family name and become rich if they are willing to work hard enough. We know that not everyone makes it but we like having that dream of opportunity to aspire to each day. That is what America is and what people like that shrimp Bill Maher fail to understand. Stephen Colbert—a satire guy from Comedy Central who made his living making fun of Bill O’Reilly isn’t what people who eat at Lee’s Chicken in Trenton, Ohio aspire to become. But Trump is. So we love it when someone we like slams some puny punk like Colbert on television. Trump is right, it helps his base tremendously. What Colbert and Maher are doing is just mean-spirited propaganda which is very unlike what the conservative critics of Obama were doing.

Sean Hannity has put the screws to liberals for years and before him it was Rush Limbaugh both of which have been viciously attacked over just because they offer an intellectual argument against liberalism. Barack Obama naturally didn’t like it and as president he abused his power on many occasions to put an end to them if he could. Obama actually used the White House to try and crush them through regulation, media pressure, and advertiser boycotts—not directly of course, but indirectly—through other people, donors, and media types. And even if you are one of the stupid people who did vote for Obama, anybody with half a brain would have to admit the guy was very shady. Scandal followed him everywhere and that wasn’t the fault of Republicans who were always there to point it out. The scandals were so intense that he essentially destroyed the Democratic Party because congressman lost their seats, senators were voted out of office and Republicans replaced Democrats as governors all over the country. And of course there was the 2016 election where Republicans retook the White House. Trump ran a good campaign, but it was essentially that Democrats who had nobody competitive to put up as a sequel to Obama who lost the election, and they knew it. Out of all the talent they supposedly had on the liberal side of the ball from George Clooney the actor to Warren Buffett, they only managed to put up a beat up old woman in Hillary Clinton chained to countless crimes and they lost the election because of that decision. Their failure was complete with the rise of Trump.

They continue to lose because they got caught trying to take America away from the population that built it. There is nothing wrong with having an inclusive culture where people of all different nationalities and sexes can succeed together, but Democrats are out to destroy “white males” and that is something many take very personally. I know I do. When these various liberal groups come out openly for my destruction—yeah, I get a little angry about it. So when Trump pushes back on my behalf, he certainly wins my support. If people like Colbert and Maher had kept their mouths shut, it might not have been so bad. But they pressed and pressed and pressed until people had enough, and Trump was the result—and they better get used to it.

The next step of course is that if we don’t have Trump as a recourse, then things might have to get nasty. They can only stand on the stage for so long hidden behind television security before people start giving it back to them worse than they have. I think in many ways they should be thankful that they live in a nation where we have elections instead of armed insurrections because little midgets like those guys wouldn’t last long. It’s easy to talk tough on a stage in front of a friendly audience in New York and L.A. But it’s quite another to sit next to truck drivers, strippers, and hard luck old farmers at Waffle House at 4 AM and tell them you have big plans for their lives that were formulated by the United Nations two decades ago. Because those people will beat the shit out of you and feed you to the dog. That is the real America and I love it!

Rich Hoffman

CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

What Draining the Swamp Looks Like: How stupid people created it to begin with

Speaking from experience—a lot of experience—the reality of why former FBI director James Comey was even playing with the idea of investigating a mythical Russian—U.S. Presidential election tampering story in 2016 was simply to keep his job. Everyone knows that the Russians were not in a position to have any impact on the election process which put Donald Trump in the White House leaving Democrats to make up some story that might trick financial contributions to continue to come in to their party—because after all, nobody is going to give money to a bunch of idiots which the Democrats certainly are. And James Comey making many mistakes in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email problems needed to find some way to stay in power during a political shift in the White House, so he went along with this made up Russian story as a way to box in President Trump from firing him. In government where they never fire anybody for anything they don’t think normal people can see through these schemes. But in the private sector, we see it all the time and the best of us are trained to root it out. I just happen to be one of those people. James Comey was using the Democratic cover story to attempt to keep his job because he figured Trump would never make the move for fear of the optics. Unfortunately for Comey, Trump is also one of those guys, and he rooted out the hypocrisy and fired the director of the FBI anyway—as he should have all along.

When James Comey asked for “resources” to investigate the Russian story among senators last week, he was planting the seeds deeper to prevent Trump from firing him because he saw the writing on the wall. Guilty people do this kind of thing all the time so it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. What’s different is that Trump rooted it out in a way that people just aren’t used to in Washington D.C. Democrats needed a straw man in Comey to blame and ride to support their Russian story, which Comey was happy to give them to keep his job. After all Comey thought that Trump would never dare to fire a person who might be investigating him—how would that look? Just for thinking in that way Comey deserved to be fired, and Trump did the right thing—just as any good private sector manager of any kind would have done. When Trump fired Comey he took all that away from the Democrats and they are not happy about it.

This is what it sounds like to drain the swamp which James Comey was clearly one of the plugs holding back the metaphorical water. The swamp level in that K-Street culture allowed for many crazy creatures to remain hidden behind the mess, but with the water drained, there is no place for them to hide which is why they are suddenly all angry—including the liberalized mainstream media that is also part of the drain holding back all the water. But taking away the Comey blame game, the media has no place to build a story with to even support their “Russian” hacking dialog designed to carry away people’s minds from the facts at hand. The Democrats engaged in actual illegal activity, which was supported by the former president of the United State, Barack Obama. Many people should have gone to jail—even in the media—and Comey was their cover story. Now that has been ripped away and they are all naturally terrified. That’s why we voted for Trump.

I worked on the Trump campaign and I actually had a chance to meet him a few times during the primary run. I’m an excellent judge of character and can say with quite emphatically that Trump is a good person. I’m not one to drool over celebrity or power—but I can tell a lot about people by shaking their hand and looking them in the eye, and Trump ran for president for all the right reasons. Compared to me, Trump is not a conservative, but as a businessman, he understands better than most the basic functions of a capitalist society and that makes him alone qualified to be president of the United States. He had the age and financial means to make that run—and the energy so he had my vote early in the game and so far he hasn’t disappointed me in the least. Trump is doing a great job—and at the levels I would have expected from him. And in working with the campaign and knowing the people who were involved on the ground level I can say that the Russians had nothing to do with any of Trump’s success. It was the hard work of the people in the trenches who worked extremely hard on his behalf in the states critical to his win in the electoral college. There was a lot of passion for him, but very little for Hillary Clinton. After all, she was a criminal.

The big secret behind why most people seek power and influence is that they have in their minds a deep psychosis lacking self-control and they desire to alleviate that shame by ruling over others. Most of the people involved in this Comey story are those types of people, from the politicians to the media reporting these events—to the law enforcement personnel involved. In the private sector as opposed to public those most successful in the managing of people are those who understand that making products and money is more important than having the ability to mess with people’s lives as some sort of supervisor. People bad at being a boss usually fail to fight off the temptations to use the fear of one’s job to steer employees in a desired direction. For such people the role of “boss” then becomes a testament in validating power that is missing from their strategic life and greatly affects every aspect of their lives. You can see them in every industry but especially in politics where chicken shit people tend to be attracted to the power they can acquire over others on a tax payer funded expedition through the halls of nameplates. Without any merit at all by only through popularity they gain the ability by the masses to rule over others which for such insecure people is the ultimate “high.”

Trump’s entire success through the years has been the opposite of that type of insecure politician. Trump’s Apprentice show on NBC was all about success through merit instead of popularity and this is something completely foreign to James Comey who climbed the ladder at the FBI doing all the right things and saying precisely the type of chatter insecure no-nothing politicians like to hear to justify what they think is action. The media industry and Washington D.C. politics in general is full of bad boss types, people who let co-workers sleep their way into power, or will bend over on ethical guidelines to acquire more leverage to obtain more power—and that is what makes up this swamp which needs to be drained. What Trump is bringing to Washington is the type of leadership he possessed in the private sector for which he was so good at it that he became a television celebrity. But none of the other people involved from Comey, the senators and the media have any merit in their lives that allow them to provide natural leadership in what they do. They are addicted to power and know of no other definitions for which to live.

So Comey played the game the way he thought would keep his nice government job intact—but he made the wrong moves when it came to Trump. Trump saw through it where others didn’t and the FBI director lost his job because he screwed up. Comey did a bad job and he tried to hold on to power the way people who earn their jobs without merit all do—through passive-aggressive extortion. Comey hoped that by announcing he was investigating the Russian story which would appease the weak-kneed senators and media power climbers with language they understood that Trump would never dare risk the optics of firing him. But he was wrong. Trump did what Trump has done for years, he acted based on merit and Comey didn’t fit the profile of a Trump type of employee. Comey gave immunity when he didn’t need to in regard of the Clinton case, he destroyed evidence (lap tops, etc) and he tried to play both sides against the middle during an election year essentially to save his job with dirty laundry he hoped to hang over anybody’s head who won the presidency. So for all that and more, we was fired by a guy who made his living best by firing people over a forty year career in one of the hardest industries there is to be successful at. And Comey and the Democrats outraged by all this can only blame themselves.

Rich Hoffman

CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

The Unexpected Fun of Mario Kart 8: What a capitalist culture produces that’s good

If I sat and thought about it, there are a lot of things I deal with on a daily basis that I could claim drove me to depression or misery—where your expectations for things don’t match up with the real-world output. After all, that is the #1 cause of unhappiness. Such things might be some distant family member that you care about. who got a new tattoo against your wishes, or some catastrophic expensive business disappointment—which happens all the time. But I stay pretty happy all the time because of my personal means of management no matter what is going on—because I have a lot of hobbies that make me very happy. One of those things I do is video gaming where I continue to be surprised at the technical achievements that are now coming almost quarterly from the industry—the latest great surprise being the Nintendo Switch counsel. There have been 900,000 sold in the United States as of this writing and I consider myself lucky to have one of them. It wasn’t easy to get—but once we did get one it has become a good friend to me. I use it all the time and it has brought a lot of joy to my family after only a month. The new Zelda game exclusively on Nintendo is for 2017 what Uncharted 4 was to last year’s game market for the PS4. It is just a marvelous game on every front. It’s like playing in a virtual Akira Kurasawa film—just something really special.

On Friday April 28^th Mario Kart 8 was released and I didn’t realize how big of an event that was going to be. My youngest grandson was about to have his 1^st birthday party and a lot of family members were going to be there so I planned to bring along the Switch for everyone to play and of course Mario Kart is one of those great games for a crowd to play with. So I found myself at Target hoping to get a copy of the new Mario Kart 8 Deluxe that is simply a revamp of the 2014 game released on the Nintendo Wii. I thought it would be a fun game and it was a priority for me because we did have a Switch, but I wasn’t prepared for the all-out display that Target had done for the new game on the new system. Mario Kart 8 had its own display right at the cash register the way a hot new movie release might—which I thought was odd because likely very few people in the marketplace had a Nintendo Switch yet to justify such a roll-out. But Target was absolutely committed to the new Nintendo game system and they were not shy about it. I was impressed by that.

We had fun with the Mario Kart 8 game all weekend. Another of my grandchildren stayed at our house and we played it until he went to bed and then again starting at 8 AM Sunday morning until about noon when his mother picked him up. As we were saying good-bye to them I noticed she had McDonald’s Happy Meals in the front seat and on the boxes were advertisements for Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch. Like Target, McDonald’s had jumped on the whole Mario Kart 8 release with great capitalist enthusiasm and it was fun. I enjoyed with all the things going on in my life to have a delightful weekend playing with this fun new game system with my kids and grandkids sharing the enthusiasm that often comes from Nintendo products while being exposed to it everywhere I went.

Last week I went to great effort to convey why I liked the movie, The Founder so much. McDonald’s is about more than food—on many occasions in the past they have infused themselves directly into our culture—as they did recently with the Mario Kart 8 game release for the Nintendo Switch. As I say a lot, these video games are now part of our cultural heritage—they are updated story telling avenues that are in many cases replacing the effectiveness of movies and books—so I consider them significant. And specifically, these efforts by Target, McDonald’s and all retail companies associated with Nintendo and the release of Mario Kart 8—a simple kids game that is just fun for anybody to play—are all creations of capitalism and convey the optimism that pours forth from creative enterprise that exists for the pleasure of past time indulgence. That indulgence only happens in free societies led by capitalist monetary commitments.

I had to see a young lady at her office on the day that Mario Kart had been released and I was early for our meeting. So when I walked in on her she was looking sheepishly at her computer screen trying to hold back a laugh. I knew she was hiding something so I walked behind her desk and saw that she was playing Mario Kart 8 on her Nintendo Switch and she was trying to hide it from people walking by her office window. I told her I understood and she proceeded to tell me that she went out for lunch to get the new game and she couldn’t wait to play it. This was a grown woman with a pretty important job. So Mario is for anyone and there isn’t any harm in blowing off a little steam with some fun—which is why this Switch game system is so powerful–culturally.

After my visit to Target I stopped by Gamestop to see if I could find an AC adaptor for taking the Switch on the run, so I could charge it up away from the docking station connected to my television. While there the guy at the counter asked me if I had Mario Kart 8 yet—which of course I said I did because I had just bought it at Target from the big display they had there. That’s when the sales clerk said “but do you have the steering wheels?’ I was a little shocked to see him present two Mario Kart steering wheels to use while playing the fun racing game and of course I couldn’t pass them up. So It was a Mario weekend for me and I enjoyed it greatly in spite of having plenty to worry about in all other aspects of my life. Being surrounded by the influence of one game for a game console few people had yet was enjoyable. I spend a lot of time talking about cultures ancient and present—and Nintendo certainly has a place of honor in our modern myth making efforts as human beings. I couldn’t help but be impressed because there really isn’t any downside to it. It’s all a positive aspect of capitalism—you won’t find Mario Kart 8 bringing that kind of joy to places devoid of capitalism—places like Iran, Syria, Russia—Afghanistan and so on. Only healthy countries functioning from good philosophy and positive money flow can enjoy these types of things and Nintendo was doing a good job of putting their product in the hands of the most people possible which was wonderful. I’d love to see a world where kids in the middle of Africa could participate in the Mario Kart fun—but for them—they are lucky to find a stable meal because of the lack of capitalism in their countries.

Nintendo specifically is a good, clean company. All their characters are wholesome and playful. You don’t have to worry about illicit sex and mental depletion when it comes to Nintendo products. In every instance I can think of they are child-like in their approach to gaming but revere intelligence in the actual game play. Mario Kart 8 is a smart little party game—and Zelda is very deep—but they all have in common that Nintendo fun of living life without the burdens of modern adulthood drowning in expectations. Everything is optimistic—just like when we were all children—which is why many people are bringing these Nintendo Switches to work with them. I don’t get mad when I see such things because I think it makes people more productive and that this video game element to our society is taking the place of more restrictive past times that used to be utilized during lunch hour. It is a lot more productive to play Mario Kart 8 for an hour than going to BW3s and drinking a couple of beers. The Mario Kart player will be ready to solve problems and tackle challenges after lunch while the beer drinker will struggle to stay awake and engaged for the rest of the day. So I see no downside to all this capitalist excess because it helps our society in every phase, mental wellness, economic development, problem solving, enthusiasm endurance—when a simple game like Mario Kart can enhance the level of excitement when shopping at Target or buying Happy Meals at McDonald’s really—everyone wins. There is no downside.

In that regard, the Nintendo Switch has turned out to be a little bit of a miracle. In just one month it sold over 2 million units worldwide which puts it up there with the PS4 and ahead of Xbox. A few years ago Nintendo looked like it was falling off the map. After watching the Superbowl commercial for the Nintendo Switch I was highly skeptical—but now I am a huge fan. I love it. It is a perfect marriage of incredible technology and innovative product development rolled up into one beautiful package that touches many aspects of our capitalist culture which advances human thought through entertainment and philosophy. That to me is a big deal and is something to celebrate. I certainly did. After a weekend like I had with the Nintendo Switch, I felt privileged to be able to play a part in it. Not only was it fun, but it was enhancing in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible even a few months ago.

Rich Hoffman

CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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