What We Are Fighting For: Adventures that show more than curiosity

I don’t do it often, but sometimes the occasion is right, which is undoubtedly the case here.  I recently did a little article on one of my daughters who had just started a line of coffee that complimented her art business.  While doing the video for that daughter, I talked a bit about my other daughter, who, at that time, was at Loch Ness with her family doing neat things.  Out of curiosity, many people have asked me about elements of my personal life, including my kids.  They must not know what to think about the kind of children I would have raised, expecting something outlandish to come from me.  So, there is a lot of curiosity about the type of people who would come out of my family, not to take anything away from their attributes as individuals.  But to say the least, I am proud of my kids.  Life isn’t always easy, but they handle themselves well and are good people.  I expect that out of them, but given the various doubts about how to have a good family and raise good kids, there are many curious people.  While those questions have been coming in, my oldest daughter returned from her trip to Scotland with her husband and their son (one of my grandsons), and they cut together a nice video of their trip.  And when I say that, I’d say it’s not just a regular home video of their many adventures, but done with a professional flair with the idea of maybe starting a YouTube travel channel kind of show.  They travel a lot, their 7th trip of the year, and spent two solid months on the road going to various places.  Their trip to Scotland, much of it shown in the video, was several weeks in November and was interesting enough to show off here so people could see a bit about my family in a nonpolitical setting to satisfy their curiosities. 

I like my family, and if given a choice, we often travel together.  We were with her on most of the seven trips I mentioned that my oldest daughter had been on this past year.  My wife and I took a few trips, especially regarding competitive shooting schedules.  I have another daughter and more grandkids often included in these trips.  I prefer to have them all come, including their dogs, lizards, and whatever else is part of our family.  Just before the trip to Scotland, we spent the end of September together in Florida at Disney World.  Before that, I had just returned from Japan, which followed several other weeks in places like Mammoth Cave and Land Between the Lakes.  With all that I write here, it’s a small part of my life, as there is always a lot going on, and everything moves quickly.  But I think the pace and the amount of things we all do together showed well in my daughter’s video on Scotland.  My son-in-law and my grandson even excitingly contributed to the video, illustrating what a pleasant, healthy family experience should look like.  When I watched the video, it reminded me of what is essential in all these adventures.  And I was proud of them for living outside the box and showing what a good life and family look like.  Which, as a parent, is all you want for your kids. 

All my grandchildren are homeschooled by their parents, my kids.  And on these trips my oldest daughter views as homeschool experiences.  Even though they were traveling, they still had school on the road.  When they travel in their RV within the states, they often set up a class for a few hours per day in a little room while on the road.  In that way, education is always the key to travel, learning many new things, and treating every day like a field trip to an exotic location.  So literally, as my youngest daughter was doing a video with me about her new line of coffee, my oldest was at Loch Ness touching the water there, as shown in the video, which puts a bit of continuity to the various conversations where little bits of my personal life spill out for the audience to see.  All this reminded me of how inferior the public school experience is compared to what we do as a family.  It always reminded me how little we value the public education graduation experience, as my kids spent their senior years in high school in Europe.  They graduated, of course, but they left school early to get to living life, which has always been essential for me.  They never missed that public school experience, which has carried over into adulthood.  They are unique people, and I would argue they are much better prepared for life than most people coming out of the public school experience.  Additionally, my wife was an honor student in school until she met me.  When we were dating, I told her how stupid the whole school experience was, and she graduated early, just like her daughters, without going to her formal graduation with the cap and gown ceremony.  On the day she was supposed to graduate, she and I were on a road trip, traveling very fast on our own journey during a romantic getaway. 

The point here is this: people assume that my position on things, especially very conservative politics, might produce little monsters of anti-compliance. Instead, I would say my approach to parenting made very thoughtful young people who know how to get around safely in the world.  And to get up in the morning, always looking to expand their intellects.  It’s not always apparent as kids go through their biological progression, but once things settle into their thirties, you see what neat people they often grow up to be.  And in the case of my kids on that Scotland trip, I am very proud of them for being good people in a big world, showing that they are in control and not being swept away by it.  Traveling in that style is no big deal for them, and I think people would be interested in their travel channel on YouTube.  We indeed take enough trips to make it enjoyable.  That was the first time she approached the subject as a travel vlog with full commentary.  Which I thought was very good. But it reminded me of the skills it takes to live such a life and how grateful I am that we did not listen to all the noisy people who tried to get us to raise our children like all the other poor kids running on the treadmill of public school and going through the ridiculous motions of college life.  My kids shown in that video have been married for around 15 years, which often shocks people.  They are good, solid people with good jobs, a good work ethic, a nice home, and the ability to create a functional family.  And it’s nice for me to see them doing good things.  And for the curious who wonder, it’s fun for them too. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Desperation of Sheena Bellows: What the Truth Reveals

Everyone has now heard of Sheena Bellows, the Secretary of State in Maine, who is the latest to indicate a bit of legal gymnastics to keep Trump off the primary ballot.  As I have said of all these cases, this is a clear 14th Amendment overreach that ignores due process and will quickly be overturned by the Supreme Court, if not in Maine, at the Federal level.   While many have expressed anger at the actions of the Secretary of State, Bellows, I am thrilled with her decision because it proves something I have been working on waking people up to, which is the level of radicalism that many of these high-profile political decisions have.  It shows the level of activity they are willing to participate in, which many people had difficulty understanding, even as recently as the governor races in Arizona.  Who thinks the Secretary of State didn’t count her own ballots to keep Kari Lake from becoming governor so that she could become governor instead?  When the massive election fraud occurred after the 2020 election, the biggest problem wasn’t finding the evidence; it was convincing people that the evidence they were looking at was as obvious as it was presented.  People wanted to trust their public officials.  Sure, it might have been fun to criticize them from time to time, but to admit that they were so bad that they would openly steal an election and lie about such a sacred thing, “voting,” was just a bridge too far for most people.  But the perpetrators knew that before they conducted their cheating scams.  They knew they could play the trust card once because people would always give them the benefit of the doubt, so they played it in the wake of the 2020 election and, essentially, got away with it. 

It also helped that so many other liberals were involved, Democrats who were perfectly willing to cheat in an election for what they considered, the “greater good.”  For them, institutional preservation was far more important than the truth of the matter, and in 2020, as it was in 2016, and continues to be in 2024, people value personal freedom more than institutional security built off confiscated tax money.  When preserving institutions was a matter of fairness, because they had a mother who might have been a school teacher, or had a dad who worked for the government as a mindless bureaucrat in some way, and made 40% more than the private sector because of it, people gave the big government types a bit more rope of trust to wrap around their necks.  Everyone got along so long as they could cheer for a local sports team and fire off some fireworks on the 4th of July.  Admitting to election fraud was like taking away the idea of firing off fireworks at an Independence Day celebration.  It violated the agreement that people had with society, something nobody wanted to talk about, just as parents tend to conceal sex from their children for their own preservation.  Kids don’t want to hear their parents having sex.  They’ll put up with a shut door quietly locked at 9:55 PM while they are brushing their teeth.  They do not want to hear the bellowing moans of their mother in sexual bliss.  So long as those silent rules are not violated, society functions somewhat normally, and that is how election fraud was conducted in 2020, with the quietly locked doors at 9:55 PM.  But some of us were not brushing our teeth in the bathroom; we were still in the room, able to see everything.  Under those conditions, we couldn’t avoid what we saw and told others afterward. 

What is astonishing about all the cases against Trump, most obviously the case in Maine, is how ostentatious it is in what it admits.  When it comes to Sheena Bellows, there is an arrogance to the dirty deed that is equivalent to the mother of the house dragging her kids kicking and screaming down the hall to tie them in a corner so that they have to watch her have sex not just with their father, but with all the strange men from the outside sidewalk.  Because the mom feels like the best thing for the kids is to overwhelm them with her right to have that sex, even at their expense of sanity, without any thought of what that broken trust might do to the children.  By doing what she did, Bellows is relishing the power of her position to conduct such a menace.  It’s the kind of question we all might ask ourselves.  What would be the consequences of taking off all our clothes in public places and walking about?  Sure, we could do it, but we don’t because we understand how that would wreck a sense of norms critical to a functioning society.  So, we withhold our temptations and conduct ourselves politely.  But once that trust is broken, we then would label ourselves as something disreputable, such as a whore or a streaker.  Something less trustworthy.  And before this year, at many of these Secretary of State positions, even as governor, such as the case in Georgia with Kemp, people had a trust that kept discussions of theft and dishonor in hushed corners.  But now, it’s been flaunted in front of us, and there’s no turning back.

All the cases against Trump show a severe willingness to violate the public’s trust in such audacious ways that there is no way now ever to repair the relationship.  This is why I say I’m glad because this is damaging the Democrat Party forever.  And they wouldn’t have done all this if they had thought they had absolute power.  Much of what they have been doing for all these years has been a ruse built off election fraud, especially regarding control over state houses and the balance of power in the Beltway.  People ignored the locked doors at night because those in power at least respected the public enough not to make too much noise during sex so the kids wouldn’t ask questions.  But because of the desperation to hang onto power, with so many people now listening through the door at every creak of the mattress spring, there is no hiding it now.  Those who supported Trump even casually before are not deeply solidified behind them, and the ridiculousness of the entire Democrat playbook for the 2024 election has been revealed in very public ways that we’ve never seen before.  When we have talked before about just how crazy and radical people like Sheena Bellows were, nobody wanted to believe it.  But now people know.  The forced admission will have long-standing consequences.  The gamble by Democrats is that by having sex in public and embarrassing the kids, ultimately, the family would be destroyed, which is undoubtedly one of their stated goals.  To eliminate the context of “American life” and the trust that it will always be there for them.  Such blatant displays of corruption and judicial overreach are meant to insult people into self-destruction.  This plays into Trump’s promise of “Making America Great Again.”  Who doesn’t want to be part of something great instead of something disgraceful?  Ultimately, because of the ostentatious displays of corruption and political activism, that is now what the 2024 ballot is all about.  And nothing less. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Mike DeWine, has lost Trump’s Support: Why did the Ohio Governor veto HB68 and what happens now

There has been a lot of confusion about Mike DeWine from the national media after he vetoed HB 68, which would have banned gender neutrality involving minors. As a conservative governor, supposedly, people were mystified. How could he do such a thing? What was he thinking? He’s listed as a Republican, and this is a serious, Democrat issue, Rocky Horror Picture Show nonsense. Well, I must remind everyone that this is the same governor who was horrendous during COVID-19 and was one of the first and most aggressive governors for locking down our economy, following precisely what the World Health Organization wanted us to do. My nickname for him during this time was Dummy DeWine because of his excessive and radical anti-constitutional attitudes during a health crisis, which the Ohio Senate had to rip away from him because he was so abusive and would not give back the power he had taken during that artificial crises, because we now know where Covid came from. As is proven beyond reasonable doubt, COVID-19 was manufactured through gain of function research under the direction of Dr. Fauci and let loose from a lab in Wuhan, China. And Bill Gates and many others conspired with World Economic Forum characters to suppress a cure for the outbreak for all kinds of nefarious reasons. This is all established with lots of evidence in The Wuhan Cover-up by Robert F Kennedy, a fabulous book everyone should read. And Governors like DeWine played right into their hands in horrendously destructive ways. DeWine gave these tyrants power over us in a similar way that he vetoed this bill, showing that he has an excessive weakness for medical personalities who advise him of dangers that might cause people death, no matter how irrational the statement may be.

Why centralized authority never works

Ohio House Bill 68 was comprised of two acts: the “Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act,” which would ban transgender minors from receiving gender-affirming medical care, and the “Save Women’s Sports Act,” which would prevent transgender girls from taking part in girls’ and women’s sports. DeWine said at a press conference, “I truly believe that we can address several goals in House Bill 68 by administrative rules that will likely have a better chance of surviving judicial review and being adopted,” Meanwhile, the world contemplated his actions as stunning. In talking to some people on the matter in the aftermath of the veto, there are efforts to override his veto with a majority vote, which is unlikely given that the Speaker of the House is essentially a Democrat. Or that the sports ban portion of the bill can at least be saved since DeWine has now stepped into it severely. Politically, this was a dumb thing to do. But it just reminded me of the guy who shut down Ohio over COVID-19 as his very liberal Health Director, Amy Acton, essentially ruined the world as an Obama-supporting abortion activist. DeWine has a soft spot for healthcare people in a dangerous way, and some of the testimony against HB 68 talked about suicide potential for some of the kids involved. The governor loses all perspective in those conversations and develops a god complex where he considers it a fault of his personality that he can save people with government power. That is how they suckered him during COVID-19 and how progressives won him over on this gender neutrality bill that became a national story within moments of his veto. For progressives, it was a massive victory in a state that now had some of the lowest abortion laws in the country and has now legalized marijuana. And now it wouldn’t take a stand on gender neutrality, which is a major assault against the Christian right, who view the issue of gender mutilation literally as a desecration of God’s temple, the human body.

DeWine has lost Trump’s support

Since COVID-19, by some nudging of some of my friends, I have had a chance to meet Mike DeWine a bit, and I can say he’s a nice guy.  His wife makes excellent cookies.  And I do not doubt that their intentions are good.  But in essence, they are Yellow Springs hippies from one of the most liberal parts of Ohio.  At best, Mike DeWine is a Democrat, and it’s always been that way, even before COVID came along and made such a mess out of his tenure as governor in Ohio.  Many people held their noses and voted for him as governor; essentially, this is what you get.  The warning signs were all there.  DeWine has been good on gun issues over the last several years, but only because he needed to be re-elected coming out of COVID-19, and he had gotten himself into a lot of political trouble, especially with the other legislative bodies.  He was on his best behavior.  But as I’ve said to many people during all this, Mike DeWine should never be given power over the masses in any way because he can’t handle that power and will always abuse it. 

The Ohio legislature is not done with this gender neutrality issue.  While Mike DeWine was suckered by progressive testimony over emphasizing suicide among young people who are confused about their gender status, the truth is a much more systemic issue about social psychology, and leadership must be established, especially with the number of conservative losses that have now occurred during DeWine’s lame duck term, since he can’t run again and doesn’t have to appease anybody to stay in office.  But this is the danger of letting politicians have too much power because their bad judgment can destroy and harm many people.  Even if their intentions are good, that is undoubtedly true in DeWine’s case.  But his nightmares become everyone else’s reality because, through the power of government, he can become a tyrant through lousy judgment.  DeWine has suffered personal losses that he has never gotten over, which leaves him particularly vulnerable to healthcare workers and their testimonies.  As he says often, if he could save one life, then something should be done.  The trouble is, the bad guys then disguise ill intentions behind that threat, giving them emotional control over someone like DeWine, who can then ruin a state with his neurosis.  And this is all a problem because DeWine was never a conservative; he was always a wishy-washy Democrat who ran as a Republican to gain power but has always leaned toward big government solutions, no matter what they cost, to fill that empty void he has in him that has never recovered from personal tragedies.  That is how tyrants gain power and a good lesson for everyone to remember how DeWine was during Covid and now won’t take a stand on a controversial issue of gender mutilation that has as a wind in its sails an apparent evil driven by radically progressive politics and a desecration of our entire culture.  Yes, Mike DeWine is an embarrassment to Ohio and has been since the first day he was in office.  He may be a crafty politician who can tell you what you want to hear while his wife passes out cookies in the Statehouse.  But when it comes to leadership, he is a big government guy who punts policy to health tyrants who we now know tend toward maliciousness and even murder if it achieves their strategic objectives, which are more of a military assault on our culture than a concern over the suicide of confused kids who became that way due to bad parenting.  There are a lot of kids suffering under such conditions, and the best thing that would help most of them is good, solid, conservative politics.  A lot more lives would be saved if Republicans managed the world much more.  But in the world of Mike DeWine, that is too big of an idea for his tiny mind to grasp.  So he trusts the health experts, who have been the source of most of the trouble.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

War from the Unseen Realm: How the Murder of good people paves the way the Politics of the Divine Council

I was disappointed to learn that Michael Heiser, the author of The Unseen Realm, had passed away in February of 2023. I do not want to go into massive conspiracy theory territory, but the first thought that came to my mind about his very rapid and specific pancreatic cancer diagnosis was that “they” wanted to get rid of him.  And by “they,” as we often refer when speaking about things just beyond our visual spectrum, have best been captured in literature and human thought by the Hebrew word, Elohim.  I am quite a fan of Dr. Heiser’s work, his series of books on the subject I came to as I was thinking about things along the same line for several decades, essentially going back to my Sunday School days and catechism.  His books started with success, selling around 100,000 to much more by the time he died.  Not exactly the New York Times bestseller’s list, which would be regarded as mainstream, but certainly successful among Christian authors.  The shame was that he was not an old man by any measure but relatively young, at just 60 years old.  His death reminded me of what happened to Michael Landin from Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven a few decades ago, who died of almost the same thing, and it brought to my mind an eternal war that is the actual theme of the Bible, which most everyone misses.  Best thought of as the Elohim they are rebelling against Yahweh’s plans for earth and the people on it; there are real wars between them and us humans that have been there from the beginning.  Most cultures seek to appease this unseen power and the politics of the Divine Council with some form of sacrifice, especially today.  If you dig enough, you will uncover that this very attribute is the core of the Climate Change radicalism of communist desire all around the world.  And yes, these Elohim, as the Hebrew Bible calls them, do kill people with premature diseases and other ailments because they have an agenda, and they don’t like whistleblowers who alert the world as to what they are up to. 

Of course, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have their way of killing people who are in their way, most notably what they did to President Kennedy and President Nixon, as well as President Trump.  Killing can come in many forms, and over time, because of the messy press, killing has morphed more into social castigation, the preferred method of communist governments, which China has been exporting for over 40 years now using The Art of War as their deployment method which has been chronicled explicitly in the book Unrestricted Warfare if you’d like to reference it.  The CIA has their heart attack guns that can put people into cardiac arrest, making the murder look like natural causes.  Steve Bannon from the Warroom thinks that the killing of Andrew Breitbart was a natural occurrence because he had other health issues.  But I’ve always looked at it as a combo murder, a spiritual weapon that loaded him with health concerns that were then triggered by physical weapons by assassins who thought they could get rid of him and mask the whole thing as death by natural causes.  What doesn’t get talked about is how all these good people end up with these mysterious diseases that they quickly die of, while truly detrimental people live wild, crazy lives of excess, and they never get sick by anything.  It’s a pattern of behavior that is impossible to ignore if you are paying attention.

I would go further to indicate that the Elohim are a wild group of characters who exist within our understanding of quantum mechanics and are every bit as stupid, power-hungry, and malicious as anybody we know in politics or business on Earth.  The point of the more than 1500 years of history indicated in the Bible written by many people over such vast periods is to tell a story about their downfall, even if it’s fictional in its overall plot line, hopeful in its delivery.  The point of the Bible is to complete the story of the fall in the garden with the resurrection of Christ and the forgiveness of that original sin, eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as opposed to the Tree of Eternal Life.  If you read carefully, what God is saying in the Bible over the entire span of it is that he very much wants human beings to be his partners in bringing Heaven to Earth but is perpetually frustrated that they never seem to listen and instead fall for all the lessor gods of the Divine Council and their politics of Heaven that is every bit as vicious as what we see on Earth.  And it doesn’t matter if you are a four-dimensional individual like we are or a character from the fifth, sixth, or eleventh dimension; we are all competing lifeforms fighting for either the right to goodness or appeasement toward unseen forces hellbent on control over all life, everywhere.  We are not wise to think that just because a menace comes from a dimensional space outside our experience, they are working toward our benefit.  I would say they are as power-hungry and malicious as any human counterpart.  And they maintain their power like our current shadow governments, beyond our visual spectrum.  And they like it that way. 

So my first thought, based on a lot of experience in seeing the same thing happen to many other people, was that Dr. Heiser was killed for what he was reporting.  His books take a scholarly approach to the subject of The Unseen Realm as indicated from the Bible in the ways that humans could understand the perpetual war that is quite vicious and on a scale that we don’t have terms to define.  I think it’s pretty remarkable that several people, under the weight of massive political pressure of empires and time, could capture such a vision as intact as it is in the Bible.  But in truth, we are just scratching the surface, and people like Dr. Heiser were unique, making him a target of the malicious.  And when the enemy from that Unseen Realm is threatened by what people do that might alter their plans for people on earth, they do as all governments do who think they have infinite power: they seek to eliminate them.  And one way to do that is to destroy people from the inside out.  After all, the Democrat Party and cancer cells work the same way, just on different scales.  Both pretend to be one thing while they overtake healthy tissue to destroy it from within.  On a quantum level, to kill a person, you just have to turn their immune system against the body it is supposed to be defending, and soon the body dies from an invasion of diseases that are always present but are defended against to maintain a healthy body.  After all, isn’t that what we see happening with the border invasion and the general policies of Joe Biden?  It’s the same method of murder, and the perpetrators aren’t necessarily human but vessels of deceit propagated from eternity for the elimination of goodness.  And God always warned us of them and wished to fight against them since appeals to their mercy were not followed.  But before you can fight them, you must understand them, and yes, they are killers.  Malicious, unsympathetic killers and they are everywhere all the time. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Hidden Benefit of ‘Godzilla Minus One’: Understanding Budgets and Costs Imposed by organized labor and anti-capitalist Activities

There is another essential attribute of the new Godzilla film, Godzilla Minus One, at the heart of the global populist movement that is important to talk about.  Probably the most important thing in the world that has lingered always in the background and is now apparent for all to see.  In talking about how good Godzilla Minus One is, the obvious question everyone has is how could Japan produce a movie like this when the same kind of blockbuster produced by Disney in America would cost 300 million dollars.  The average moviegoer could watch Godzilla Minus One, Indiana Jones, and the Dial of Destiny and think they are of the same quality in every category: acting, special effects, music, writing, scale of production, everything.  So how was Godzilla Minus One so profitable, whereas all the current Hollywood productions or movies anywhere in the world these days, especially where the financial influence of the World Economic Forum has its hands in the production, are not able to compete?  Well, this is something I have been talking about for many decades and I said this was going to happen to the film industry for many years.  Unionized labor has destroyed the financial models of movie production, shown dramatically when a foreign film like Godzilla Minus One is shown in a movie theater along with the latest blockbusters produced by Hollywood and other markets.  Because of many market conditions unique to recovery from COVID lockdowns, theater owners are desperate to show anything that the public might want to see.  Just two or three years ago, a movie like Godzilla Minus One would not have played in a movie theater in the United States.  People would never see it, but in today’s market, where Hollywood products can’t keep up with demand, a movie like Godzilla Minus One gets a chance to be seen, which has burst down the door to an issue that can only be revealed by direct competition.   

Much of the way we are told about success in the world has been shaped by labor unions attached to the film industry, the mainstream media, and government reporting.  The ultimate solution to broken budgets and general performance everywhere in the world, no matter the product, is to make labor unions illegal, especially in government work and situations that prevent a competitive environment.  America has gone through just this sort of thing when it comes to the car industry, or most sectors of manufacturing that can’t compete with cheap foreign labor.  Well, it is not that the labor is cheap in foreign markets, but instead that the communist labor unions, all of which were formed out of elements of Marxism, have driven up the cost of labor not just in the increases in headcount but in how much each one actually costs.  When the government reports the numbers, as they do in American and European markets, of course, they will give a spin that suits them, not necessarily one that is reflected in reality.  Then, when the trade journals are either in unions themselves or are very sympathetic, the coverage has been how much studios spend on movies to make, not on their quality.  This has certainly been the case with Disney where to satisfy their radical employee base, all connected to labor unions, the approach has been to just outrun the costs, which have crippled them in 2023.  When it costs 500 million dollars to get a blockbuster out the door and into a theater, disaster is not far behind.  For a lot of these Hollywood productions, a movie budget to satisfy all the labor demands that you see at the end credits of every motion picture, 200-300 million on actually making the movie, then another 200 million in marketing to feed the machine, a film has to make a billion dollars at the box office to get into a profit category, and that just isn’t realistic, as Disney has discovered in 2023. 

Then, to make matters worse, these Disney movies have been loaded with content people don’t want to see.  The filmmaking has been lazy, and the product is lackluster when it gets to the screen.  It shows when all the people making the movie are only in it to get paid.  A film like Godzilla Minus One was created by hungry filmmakers full of passion, evident in what ended up on the screen, shocking many people.  But this is the exact reason why government reforms never happen and why budgets get wrecked in all production environments where Marxist labor unions have driven up costs and taken away the ambition of good merit from the products they produce, such as in public education in America that has become useless to most people for all the same reasons.  The labor costs too much and doesn’t do enough of what it’s supposed to.  When labor unions take over the management of an endeavor, they determine the pay rate and how many people need to be involved in the process, which then blows up all the financial attributes.  In a situation like this, where a side-by-side comparison isn’t usually available, the problem becomes apparent in the movie industry.  But this same rot is in just about every endeavor that involves money and financing, even in American intelligence agencies.  I will have some serious horror stories to provide about the CDC and how President Reagan was thinking of cutting the entire department, giving rise to Dr. Fauci’s radicalism.  Most bad things happen when lazy people seek funding not based on performance but emotion, such as fear of a new virus that can be manufactured in a lab and released from Wuhan, China.  That’s a topic all its own. 

The trick in hiding all this from the public has been to control the narrative, and the labor unions have been attached to most of the reporting.  But in 2023, because the declining Hollywood product has most abused theater owners, they have had to turn to direct competition to survive, which has set up this obvious matchup.  The same occurred when the Japanese entered the car market, and the Big Three in America found they could not compete in cost and quality because unionized labor took away competitive factors that could keep the costs down for the consumer.  Most of the problems in the world, including the CRs that Speaker Johnson is trying to work through Congress to keep the government open, are due to the outrageous costs of supporting all those expensive government employees.  Even the funding of Ukraine, which has been a topic, is to spend billions of dollars to pay for the massive administrative state government there to support this globalist employment structure.  All of them are failing under their weight; what they do for the world isn’t worth the money it costs to keep them.  Populism is rising everywhere because people would rather see Godzilla Minus One than the latest holiday offering by Disney and the other major studios.  The labor unions seek to destroy competition to justify their outrageous costs and sluggish performance.  But because of their actions, they have forced competition to overtake them to satisfy the market demands of a hungry public that wants to see a good movie, buy a nice car, or have a government that works for them and doesn’t get in the way of what society needs.  I know we are in a time when union supporters are moving toward Trump, and Trump is pro-union, and it’s not as much of a political issue for Republicans as it has been or should be.  But when you want to know why things are so expensive, why so many useless people perform the work, and how they keep their jobs underperforming constantly, the source is the Marxist labor unions that have embedded themselves in the process.  Where they aren’t, the quality and profit improve dramatically.  And if we are ever going to drain the swamp, the government unions will have to be made illegal.  And any future budget controls taken out of their hands, from the local public school to the control of the FBI and CIA.  Organized labor has destroyed them all. 

Rich Hoffman

The Strategy of Making People Look Crazy: Or to drive them crazy in the process

There’s another arraignment at 9 AM on December 18th for Darbi Boddy, just for going to Lakota school board meetings as an elected representative.  You can see how ridiculous the case against her has been by Judge Lyon’s recent filing, trying to drive the point further for his client Isaac Adi from any public criticism, which is utterly ridiculous.  The first arraignment was to have occurred just after Thanksgiving 2023, but the judge, as all judges in Butler County, would have to because of the power of Isaac’s attorney, who is a long-standing common pleas judge, had to be delayed.  The Ohio Supreme Court then had to appoint a neutral judge.  So, of course, we are dealing with legal gymnastics that assumes that an abuse of legal authority comes by hiring a judge to process a case in which we are to believe that Darbi Boddy is such a threat to the Lakota school board that Isaac is terrified and is seeking help from the courts.  As ridiculous as all that is, Darbi is facing a potential of 6 months in jail and in the thousands of dollars in fines, not to mention the extraordinary legal fees.  Darbi’s first attorney has stepped aside and now there is a new one as this case continues to drag on for what would appear to be frivolous reasons on the surface.  But I’ve seen this tactic before, and it has a deeper meaning, as dumb as that reason might be.  It’s a strategy I have seen happen to men and women over many decades, primarily women.  I’m surprised Judge Lyons would participate as he has spent time around me and shown interest in constitutional individualism.  But then again, there are many like him over the years who have simply wanted to fit in, and in the dark places of their minds, resent individualists like Darbi Boddy so much, that they turn to the mechanisms of collectivism to exert a social control that drew them to the acquisition of power in the first place. 

There is nothing about the Darbi Boddy case that is legally correct, it’s a clear abuse of authority that started with attorneys for Lakota schools pulling the strings behind the scenes to get rid of Darbi as a school board member, for lots of reasons.  Most involve having a puppet school board easily controlled for upcoming labor negotiations with the teacher’s union.  Darbi, like President Trump, is a threat to that old order. Her prosecution is a clear message not to mess with these public unions, judges’ networks of brotherhoods, and bar associations.  There is a reason that weak people seek comfort in brotherhoods; it’s for the power they feel they can only get from group assimilation.  So what we have going on all over the country, especially at Lakota schools, is individualism against collectivism and the merits of those philosophies to public government.  But this didn’t all start with Darbi in 2023; this action against her is a common strategy and has occurred frequently over the years. It has occurred in over 20 women I have known.  Many started just like Darbi Boddy, young and in their 40s, raising children, attending church, finding the world’s evils repugnant, and wanting to do something about it.  But in the process of the fight against that system, the common strategy of collectively based villainous characters is to attempt to capture the definition of sanity and use it to make their opponents look insane or to drive them insane with the audacity of evil that is presented to them.  So far, Darbi Boddy has held up well over the last few years.  But adding all this up over a decade or two takes its toll, and the results are usually terrible.

I don’t think she would mind, but I normally keep these things quiet; I would call Judge Edelsten a friend, she is the person who had trouble in the Butler County courts that involved lots of legal issues with many of the same judges that are involved in the Darbi Boddy case, which is why she comes to my mind.  And she won her cases, just as Darbi should win all of hers.  But the cost to her has been enormous, and the system participants have built it that way.  The best way to explain what happens to these women, again men too, such as Roger Reynolds, the former auditor of Butler County, or Thomas Hall, the current Representative in Ohio, is that there is a network that protects itself from vivacious characters that drew them to power in the first place.  But specifically with women, some of them are now in their 70s and have been fighting the same corruption for over thirty years, and it wears them out.  They end up with their kids grown and hateful; their husbands usually end up running off with other women, women who are less politically active and much easier to make happy, and they end up alone, bitter, and angry.  And people like these Butler County judges know that their cases have little legal merit, but their control over the law can drive people crazy.  A good example would be when a man is looking to cheat on his wife with another woman, and he attempts to portray the effort by telling everyone how crazy his wife is so that he can justify the abandonment of his marital vows.  When collectivists attack individuals, they always turn toward manipulating public opinion so they can show themselves as the victim, which is the entire legal strategy behind the Darbi Boddy legal cases.  It’s the system looking to divorce Darbi by making her look like the crazy wife.  And if she’s not crazy today, fighting a corrupt system might make her and her friends turn out that way.

That’s not to say that fighting back against the system is a worthless gesture.  I would point to what’s happening in American politics with Trump against the never-Trumper movement as an example of this behavior over many years catching up to them.  Sure, there have been a lot of casualties. Some of the women I mentioned are now very bitter old ladies who never tasted justice even though technically they won in court.  The sheer evil of the systems they fight rots them from the inside out.  But along the way, the exposure of this vast evil has turned the public against it.  So, no matter how far down the well the Butler County courts attempt to attach themselves to yet another example of judicial activism to take out a political opponent using a corrupt court system to do it, the public is turning away from those kinds of abuses of power, because they are tired of it.  They see what has been going on all along.  I tell those older women that I’m thinking of, as their kids have grown up, to hate them for their crusades of justice, and for what, to eventually win a victory in the court of public opinion several decades later, that it was all worth it.  Their men would have left them for younger women anyway.  And kids often must learn life lessons from the totality of a life, not just the little kid years where a mom was a good mom because they gave them a popsicle from the freezer while watching their favorite show on television.  As Darbi Boddy is experiencing in real-time, most collective-based organizations, whether it’s the Lakota school board, the local attorneys, the judges, the political RINOs, or the Freemasonry network, that all the people join those memberships to gain power over their fear of individual merit.  Which is the root cause of much of what’s wrong in the world.  And in the end, the victory is worth it.  Even if it costs a lot to get there. 

Rich Hoffman

2024 is Time for Harvest: Separating Good from Evil

As romantic of a notion as conspiracies might be, and they are, ultimately, many of the dark rituals to come from the following of astrology were related to the acquisition of food, such as knowing when it was time for harvest and preparing for the upcoming winter. And specifically to food supply, the production of wheat, and its use in the human diet. We forget these days just how stressful it was to wake up every day and figure out where your food would come from because food is an assumption for us in these modern times. It’s easy for us and in all varieties. But for thousands of years, right up until around 100 years ago, food was a very stressful problem, even for the rich and famous. So nurturing a good crop of wheat to the harvest was a significant undertaking, and it’s why such societies were able to make judgments of good and bad more directly because, literally, their food supply depended on value judgments just to survive. This is what the Parable of the Weeds is all about in Matthew 13:24-29 when Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.” Jesus essentially said to let the weeds grow with the wheat and not try to pull them up together; otherwise, you will destroy your crop in the process. Jesus was talking about tares, which are weeds, and specifically darnel, which looks like wheat during the early stages of growth. In this case, the best way to save your crop would be to separate the weeds from the crop at harvest time, not necessarily during the growth of the good wheat. And under such a metaphor, we can look at our times and say, “It’s time for the harvest.”

Can’t let the weeds sink roots

We have allowed a lot of weeds to grow in our culture, largely out of compassion, because we live in a time when perhaps we thought we could let everything grow together. That we could co-exist with evil and that demands on our survival would not be challenged. But that was incorrect. Instead, we have allowed many weeds to take over our gardens of life and now we cannot separate good and evil so easily. Like the darnel, evil looked a lot like good, and now their roots have intertwined together as parasites threatening to kill the host crop if we were to attempt to remove those weeds as they have been growing. And like the darnel, the weeds looked like the wheat we wanted, so we left it alone to grow, unmolested. This is the problem with having a society that does not cast value judgments on the wicked and estranged intellect. Letting a multitude of terrible menaces grow into a healthy society has destroyed our culture and stunted its growth outrageously. Of course, we took it for granted because we have lost touch with the necessity of using value judgments for survival. We have entertained this fantasy that we could all get along if only we respected each other’s place in the garden. Yet in so doing, we have only harmed what’s good and allowed what’s evil to perpetuate and grow in strength, leaving our only means of dealing with such a problem to a hope that everything might survive until a harvest.

We have a lot of darnel in our society

I would point to the year 2024 and the re-election of Trump as the harvest time of our present generation.  Of course, the weeds who have been surviving as parasites of the good will have great anxiety as the intentions of the harvest are revealed, the separation of the wheat from the weeds.  The darnel of our culture, which is vast and in many forms, knows that their time as parasites is ending, and they are naturally terrified.  After all, they are a lifeform too, and they were created to be parasites living off the good, to disguise themselves to even look like the wheat of our desire so that we might not know what they are until it’s too late.  Until they are in our schools teaching children to be transexual maniacs and sexually obsessed losers.  Until our national deficit is over 34 trillion dollars, with 1 trillion added in the last business quarter of 2023.  That drugs would be sought after to numb our minds from the terrors we see, that hidden tyrannies hidden in our technology would give us no peace in seclusion.  The war against good and evil would turn everything we thought we could trust into a pitched-fork devil of ill intent.  Everywhere we look, we see weeds, and it’s so bad that we can no longer tell what is good for us or bad.  We can’t know the wheat for the weeds because, at this point, everything looks the same.  We have not tended to our gardens; we have let the weeds deceive us into thinking they were wheat, and we allow them to grow and wrap their roots around the roots of our good crop, daring us to pull them and, in so doing, to destroy everything we value.

But it’s harvest time, time to pull up everything, wheat and all.  It will be a messy process, but our fields must be cleared in the aftermath.  At that time, the darnel can be removed from the wheat, and we can distinguish value from the parasites.  Because we have yet to separate the weeds from our garden early in the process, the field has become overgrown, and there are more weeds than wheat.  So we have quite a mess to deal with.  But once the job is done, we have a clear field, and we have determined the wheat from the darnel, separating the good from the bad, we’ll have a chance to start over.  We nurture our crops by keeping the weeds out of our garden before they wrap their roots around what we value.  Always after harvest, when we see our clean fields and a healthy food supply, can perspective begin to bring sanity to our concerns.  And when it does, we must protect our wheat from infancy and not let evil wrap around our values to feed off them for its sustenance.  The weeds must be pulled before they can ever take root.  That is why we must tend our gardens and have value judgments on the good and the bad.  We must get rid of the bad before it matures into a parasite that is dangerous to the things we value, such as a food supply.  It is also in understanding such parables that evil wants to eradicate the Bible from a culture so that we can’t tell the difference, allowing evil to grow unmolested.  Such an idea was always a bad one, and during this time of harvest, one that we should never neglect again.  The Bible is full of such wisdom and has contributed to all productive human cultures.  And we’d be wise to listen before it’s too late.  

Rich Hoffman

An Amazon.com Pricebreak: A guidebook to capitalism to step out of the darkest period of American history

There is no shame in being good at what you do

I have had many of these over the last five years: super-secret meetings with people in the back of some restaurant or shooting range where people want to talk. Only this one was 30 or so people who were fans of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and they wanted a little private class on the subject matter. I get the secrecy; I think of it as enslaved people learning to read during the Underground Railroad Period. People want to learn how to improve themselves in a world that doesn’t want them to accomplish such a task. These people were Chamber of Commerce types and were concerned about other people knowing they were meeting with me because it was a social taboo. But I was happy to attend the event and give a talk, which everyone enjoyed. But during the Q&A section at the end I learned something from the class, that my book was being offered on Amazon.com for $4.59, which is practically giving it away. Normally, most of the sales that I see come from the publisher’s website, is $16.99. When I get the sales report, it usually has a long list with all kinds of prices shown, and some of the lower numbers I had thought were likely Kindle downloads. So, I didn’t pay much attention to them. But at this little seminar, a fan told me about it, and sure enough, the book was listed by Amazon at that very low price, so low that it’s likely cheaper than what it cost to make the book. Yet I wasn’t surprised upon hearing this; it didn’t make me angry. I think it was meant to make me angry, to be very insulting to me. But my reaction is one that I’ll share here: if you can get the book for a cheaper price, then I’m happy to let you know about it.

A pretty good price

I personally like Amazon; I get a lot of books through them. I also am a frequent visitor to bookstores all over southern Ohio, going as far north as Dayton and Columbus regularly to get books that I don’t want to wait for to arrive in the mail. I read three or four per week on average, so it’s a major priority for me to have access to new books. For books that I must have that afternoon, I go and get them at an actual bookstore, the old-fashioned way. And I prefer hard copies of books because I don’t like the bad guys out there to know what I’m reading or looking at on the internet, because I am watched by just about everyone who wastes time watching people. And the algorithms set against me are outrageously difficult, for getting visibility. I frequently get offers from IT people wanting to “fix” my foundation links because my Google score is so low that people searching for me don’t find me on the top picks because of all the blacklisting I am listed under. I typically say no to all those offers because most of them are likely the same people doing the damage, and they’d love for me to make it easier for them to rob the stagecoach. Amazon does not like me politically, and they’d love to make me feel that I’m at the bottom of a well nobody could hear me from. That is a common strategy for them, so I never expected a fair shake from Amazon. They offer the book because they are a prominent bookseller and want to say they offer such books. Even if they hate that people want to read from someone like me. So I put them out of my mind and never really took the time to see what they were selling my book for, or to check reviews because they set algorithms on their server against me that obviously were not encouraging. So, I put my mind elsewhere. The sales listings tell a different story, so much so that I didn’t even notice the Amazon pricing.

There will be a major shift in the economy over the next decade

The book has been out for a few years now, so I don’t read it every day. When I wrote it, I had been thinking about the contents for a while, but after Biden was put in the White House and Trump wasn’t there anymore, admittingly, I needed to take a break from the world for a few weeks. My wife and I took our RV out into the desert of New Mexico to escape Biden and the COVID protocols that were such a dark period in American history. I knew the economy would take a hit and that corporations had been seduced by this World Economic Forum view of the world and would need a guidebook out of their wokeness. So I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, applying my favorite sport, fast draw, with a genuine love of history. I enjoyed touring all the John Chism and Billy the Kid sites in Lincoln County during the winter of 2021, which had a lot of snow on the ground, even in that part of the world. It was a very revelatory experience for me, and it shows up in the book, which, looking back on it after a few years, is very good. Like I said, I read a lot. I have just finished a few books by Johan Norberg which I think are great, but they aren’t as good in my mind as my own book. Not just because it’s my book but because the contents are revolutionary compared to the large amounts of Marxism that have taken hold in all corporations around the world. I wrote the Gunfighter’s Guide to give people a weapon to fight against that trend, which turned out great.

A large worldview helps see things more clearly

The book as I thought it would be, has been a slow burn. It’s not one of those books that makes a splash and then fizzles out. When I wrote it, I was thinking of a book I love called The Machine That Changed the World, which is about Lean Manufacturing and is filled with many assumptions about a Marxist world without ever naming the beast. I wanted to write an antithesis to that which businesses could use to improve their situations without destroying their essential character. I have read many hundreds of business books, and most of them make it a point to declare their hatred and unfairness of capitalism, which is quite obvious in the Lean Manufacturing movement, which seeks to centralize power to the people and is antagonistic toward management, which is consistent with the labor union view of the world, which is always socialist in origin. In 2020, with Trump out of the office and the world on lockdowns, corporations thought the best strategy was to play along to get along. But after three years of the Biden economy now, people are looking for answers, and many of those answers only come from a source like mine, who has made it a point to declare the answers in spite of the social poison that wants all such voices to hide for their lives under a rock somewhere. My point was never to hide but to engage the enemy as they present themselves, like a gunfighter. Fight the villains in a dusty street and gun them down metaphorically for their intentional destruction of the world. And to be proud of it in the process. As I gave my presentation to that audience, I couldn’t help but reflect on how good the book was. I’m very proud of it; it has helped people who have read it and applied it. I don’t just reflect on the times of the gunfighters during American expansion but also look to the future with AI and improved technology. It’s more of an attitude than a reverence. But the world for the next few decades is going to move much more toward capitalism and away from socialism, and already many corporate leaders see the writing on the wall. And they were looking for a translation, so we were all meeting secretly, not for my sake, but for theirs. But if I learn of a price break everyone can take advantage of to get the book, I’m happy to share it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings in the least. I like seeing people getting it, finding inspiration, and achieving success. That is, after all, the best compliment I can get and why I wrote the book in the first place, for people to enjoy and be helped by. So the more people who have it, the better it is in my mind. And at that price, it makes it very easy for people. I can’t promise that the price will stay that way, but when I hear of a price break, I certainly will pass it along.

Diversity, equity and inclusion was always going to fail in business because it’s not rooted in real social value

Rich Hoffman

The 400 Fools in San Francisco: Capitalism is Destroying Communism, and Xi Jinping knows it

It’s not at all surprising that there were 400 fools who attended the Xi Jinping summit at San Francisco with Joe Biden. Most corporations, as I have been telling everyone for years, have communist leanings, and for the many lazy executives in them, the trend of globalism was in their favor. A stable business climate controlled by the centralized state allowed them to look like smart people, without actually having to be very smart. To win in that game, you had to cozy up to the regime, do what they tell you like trained seals, and you’d be successful, or at least appear that way. That whole competition thing is not for those timid people. Capitalism is scary because so long as the communists were in charge, they could always say, “They told me to do it,” when the shareholders started to complain about lost revenue. So I don’t view the people in San Francisco pandering to Xi to be particularly important. Sure, some of the richest people in the world were there. Elon Musk was there to grovel in front of the communist dictator, but I didn’t see what a lot of people did in the meeting. Rather, I saw the end of a dying regime, in China, playing out the plans of many decades coming to a fizzle that wasn’t very spectacular. All the concepts of globalism were falling apart across the world, and China was trying to appear to their home country as if they had conquered the United States, and the fulfillment of their objectives had come to fruition. That is how the entire visit would play on state-run television in China. A groveling Joe Biden pandering to the power of the communist party. The red flags of communism lined the streets of one of the great American cities. Communism had conquered the West and the people there were subjugating themselves to its incredible power.

The electronic voting machines have lots of problems.

Joe Biden’s behavior wasn’t surprising either. After all, he would not be president if not for Xi Jinping. China currently put Biden in office and the direct payments were part of the discussion. The Biden crime family had become wealthy over the years, selling access to their elected offices, and China knew what they were doing when they put the hapless old man in the White House to get rid of Trump. They didn’t like Trump’s trade deals, so they showed the power of China by inserting a complete buffoon in Trump’s place, displaying control over American elections and the people’s pick. China was almost daring anybody to do anything about what they did in 2020, first by releasing COVID-19 to lock down the world, then at the end of the year, the part they played to rig the election. For those who have not been paying attention, the electronic voting machine case is finally starting to get some traction. As I said in 2020, these cases often take years to put together, and part of the crime was to outpace the slow American legal system. That was part of the election theft, to move faster than the courts could process and China was clearly in on it. They have a lot to explain, about direct tampering with voting machine results and how Covid escaped from a Wuhan lab in the first place. But the voting machines were not the only form of election fraud. Just a big part of it. How does anybody think that people like Xi Jinping stay in power? Not by honest elections, that’s for sure. People don’t want to believe that rigged elections have been part of the American system, but the evidence is obvious that it has. And that China has played a significant role, even to the point of showing off, which Xi was doing in San Francisco.

I think it’s highly possible Trump will win every state.

But it’s not what it appears to be. China’s primary concern was that the world was turning away from them and that a serious decoupling effort was underway to separate the two economies, not to strengthen the relationship. And by inviting those 400 fools, tech leaders we always hear about in the news, CEOs from BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and Apple might do something to stop the trend. But they were part of the problem, and they had their issues in a free market society. Most of the damage they had conducted in the social awareness vacuum. And those days are over. People know what Larry Fink has done with his buddies at the World Economic Forum, and the pitchforks are out in America. There is going to be hell to pay in more ways than one in the coming years, and the protection of big-state communism won’t be able to hide them. Supply chains in America are realizing the liability of partnerships with China, with all the games on exports that go on, the trouble in dealing with communist labor unions on the West Coast that strike every five seconds and slow down the loading and unloading of cargo to and from China. Let’s just say that the labor advantages of dealing with China are no longer as enticing. They may have a lot of hard-working people that don’t blow up your budget, but the politics of dealing with China is ridiculously cumbersome, and slow. And people are moving on, finding other ways of dealing with supply chain necessities.

Game over for global communism

Which is what I saw in the body language of Xi.  I saw a worried dictator who knew the game was up.  Trump obviously saw it, too, in comments that followed.  Trump knows he’s going to have to deal with Xi as president soon, so he is already setting up the negotiating table for leverage.  But Xi knows this is the last year of Chinese rule.  The election fraud had given them a lovely puppet, but the American people didn’t follow him, leaving everyone exposed in the process and leaving those 400 fools in attendance with eggs on their faces.  A furious world is headed their way.  Election fraud won’t be so easy this time around.  Of course, they will try because they have no other way of winning.  They had been planning this communist push for years, and this was all they were getting out of it.  Global communism had failed and people were turning away everywhere, especially in the United States, and state visits like this in San Francisco were not going to fix everything, because it was all smoke and mirrors, to begin with.  Sure, they showed the world they could put Joe Biden in office and control the American political system with honey pots and payoffs.  But what did they get for it?  The American people were not bending their knees to the communists, and they had no intention of ever doing it.  And the big American corporations showed they had little power over people’s fundamental beliefs.  It was a disaster, a nightmare for them.  And it was their last gasp before the tables turned, and the world got a lot harder for all of them.  Because communism is dead, free markets would force validity, making all the corporations that had bought into the communist plot vulnerable to destruction.  And so it went; the show in San Francisco fell flat and sputtered to a close with the grim reality of what is to become of all of them.  And they deserve everything they have coming. 

Rich Hoffman

‘The Capitalist Manifesto’ by Johan Norberg: Admitting to the only economic system that helps people the most

The change of view of economic fundamentals from the political left

After reading Johan Norberg’s book The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World, I’ll admit to a substantial flood of satisfaction. I mean this wasn’t Ayn Rand, it was a kind of Ikea view of capitalism, but the message was quite clear. I’ve read other books by Johan Norberg and he’s pretty good for what I’d consider a lefty. He’s conservative by European standards, but in America, we have very different ideas of what a liberal is. But to Johan, a liberal means less restriction in market economies in a region that has always been about tyranny, the tyranny of the church, the tyranny of some maniacal king, or secret societies trying to undo everything in the background. The lunatic Karl Marx conceived in Europe the birthplace of socialism and communism. I would never have read the book if I hadn’t seen Elon Musk recommend it. I’m not a fan of Elon Musk. I want him to do well with SpaceX. He makes a good car, but he’s not my idea of a good leader. But he is the richest person in the world, and I have thought it interesting to watch him grow his political perspective to accommodate his needs to move humanity into space and set up a colony on Mars. He has learned quite ostentatiously that a socialist Biden government with Barack Obama still whispering in his ear is never going to get Musk where he wants SpaceX to go. It takes too long to obtain permits, and the Department of Labor constantly harasses him because Musk doesn’t allow unionized labor to manage his manufacturing facilities. So Musk has evolved over time and seems to have fully embraced capitalism now in ways that are pace setting. There are a lot of very interesting observations in The Capitalist Manifesto that are quite delicious and well worth talking about. I think it may be one of the most important books of 2023, and it is undoubtedly impactful to the world’s current circumstances.

A very important book

I’ve been talking about this kind of stuff for many years so the change in tone is not lost on me.  What The Capitalist Manifesto is by Norberg is a confession intended for liberals to read that undoes over a century of lunacy in following Karl Marx.  This is not a book intended for the MAGA crowd in America but the many socialists and communists around the world who still are trying to work The Communist Manifesto into political sustainability.  I remember how vicious that media, in general, was when I worked with the producers of the movie Atlas Shrugged to get the message out about their film version of the Ayn Rand books that were famous around the world but were labeled conspiracy theories of the radical right.  So this Johan Norberg confession is no small matter.  It wasn’t written for me or the fans of Ayn Rand, it was written to the college liberal, the Keynesian economist and the diabolical politician getting rich off the Swamp and all its globalist mechanisms.  Norberg has figured out something that the political left has been very slow to admit to: socialism of any kind doesn’t work.  And it was never going to work, and that capitalism, by free people, the freer, the better, is the key to unlocking the powers of any economy.  This is a CATO Institute view of the world that offers a flood of statistics to show just how much better the world is because of capitalism than it is under any other kind of authoritarian approach.  Norberg presents a dizzying display of real-world examples that everyone needs to come to grips with because we now have enough data to make some sobering judgments.

The Capitalist Manifesto was Norberg trying to explain to global liberals that if they want globalism and if they’re going to fight populism, they had better embrace capitalism and do it quickly.  He’s certainly no fan of President Trump, who he sees as a threat to the global order because he’s a nationalist who wants to close the borders of America to outside influence, to turn in instead of migrating out.  But the impact of financial systems driven by political sentiments couldn’t be more obvious.  This book was a white flag from the radical leftist points of view that capitalism was the only solution to global problems such as poverty.  There is no other economic approach that has improved the lives of so many, and as if to solidify critical opinion about capitalism, Johan Norberg cites many instances where Bernie Sanders and Karl Marx himself admitted that capitalism is the best and only way to approach economic theory.  And to argue against any notion that centralized planning does anything but harm people economically and is a background contributor to many of life’s many miseries.  This was a book attempting to capture the MAGA message of free markets in America and stamp liberalism to it as if it was their idea all along.  Again, Norberg has kind of an Ikea view of the world; I wouldn’t call Sweden a bastion of capitalism.  They only look that way because the rest of Europe has the heavy fog of communism and socialism hanging over it in such a devastating way.  America has an expectation of freedom that Europe does not have.  But to even say the word “capitalism” in Europe is taboo, similar to saying that your father has a mistress or that mom is wearing red panties under her white dress to church.  Nobody has been willing to admit these secrets in public until now. 

As I closed the book, I realized I had just read something that would set the tone for the next several decades.  It was a victory in many ways that the enemies of the world understood that they would never win against capitalism.  And that even liberal-minded people like Musk and Norberg, who are poster children for the World Economic Forum, or at least had been until the realities of populism rising around the world forced them to look in the mirror and give up on Marxism wholesale.  The Capitalist Manifesto is not an American book.  I tried to buy a copy at my local Barnes and Noble, but they didn’t have it.  The book ships out of the United Kingdom, so we’re not discussing an American product trying to explain capitalism’s values to the world.  This is coming from a European perspective, where socialism was born and raised to the detriment of most of the world.  Johan Norberg understands that only capitalism has worked to solve many of the problems that Democrats and their many versions regionally are concerned with.  The only way to help people is to find a way to put more money in their pockets that doesn’t involve the government stealing it from people who have made money and giving it to people who were too lazy to work for it.  I can’t recommend this book enough; it’s an avalanche of admissions that culture must embrace.  And within its pages, we can see the future, where liberals are finally going to get on the side of conservatives because they must.  They may even try to steal capitalism as their own, which would be expected of them.  But whatever the case, the world will change for the better as a result, and things will look a whole lot different economically, in a good way, in the decades to come because of the admissions in this book. 

Rich Hoffman