Tag: Rich Hoffman

Failure is Never an Option: Trump is right, bad companies blame the tariffs, not themselves

I’m glad President Trump said it, its true, badly run companies are using the tariff war with China as an excuse for their poor performance. I agree with him. That is usually the case any time an organization is caught performing bad, they will use any excuse to hide their own behavior. In public school systems they always blame the unfunded mandates of the state, or the allocation of the state money, but what is usually the case, its their lazy union employees who are the cause of poor performance and the unwillingness of the school boards to fight them. In the private sector the same kind of blame game goes on, only in business there are constant exercises in management review that exploits the real problems. Not all companies, in fact most companies, are not well run so price increases due to the China trade war or long lead times from suppliers is an easy target for losers to blame for their own problems. So, it was good to see that we finally have a president who has run businesses, and understands how things really work, instead of some out of touch politician who believes everything advisors tell him.

Good management is to close gaps when it is obvious that they need to be closed, such as in the trade deficit with China. For all the bellyaching that is made about how bad the trade war is hurting farmers in America, Trump has moved $16 billion collected from the realignment of the new tariffs on Chinese goods and sent them straight to the farmers since they have been targeted by China. And as Trump pointed out, there are many more billions of dollars that we are collecting now that we weren’t before, so the farmer issue in losing to China isn’t even a consideration. And neither are the complaints where price increases are being blamed by the tariffs. As far as revenue collection, the United States is making money. As far as supply chain management, companies always knew the risks of doing business with a communist country, and they should have had contingency plans. That they didn’t says a lot about the kind of companies that they are, lazy and unprepared, so the tariffs are an easy target for the incompetent.

Almost before the trade war started between Trump and China I heard business insiders starting to blame the poor condition of their supply chains as an excuse to either push out lead times or jack up their prices. But if they were actually a well-run company, they would have already thought about those things, even a year out and they would not be affected by a trade war with China. Blaming the tariffs for anything is the first sign of people who don’t know better, and are bad managers of the elements of their life which interact with business. Before Trump came along nobody said such obvious things so we should all be grateful that Trump is willing to take on big communist currency manipulators like China but also the big companies in America who love to hide their out of control management on politics. Most of the time, the fault is theirs and theirs alone.

Every organization that runs a budget, whether it is the large government schools of nearly every community in North America or a large corporation like Apple, they are expected by reality to produce and to do so well. The challenges that come along whether its unfunded mandates or the supply of metals are tasks that all management is supposed to deal with. Nobody wants to hear excuses; they just want results and that is ultimately the value that companies bring to their markets. An excuse is not a value, it is simply a means to explain away failure. But from my perspective, and this has always been the case, failure is never an option.

I was very encouraged the other day; I was at a stop light and a large tractor trailer pulled up alongside me. On the trailer was a company motto stating, “failure is not an option.” I thought to myself, there is a great company. Any company or organization that puts that as part of their branding is at least trying to avoid the blame game of failure that is part of their business. Someone is always failing them, the question is, will they accept that failure or overcome the imposition? A company that does not accept failure but simply moves on from it is one that is trying to be successful. But a company that says, our business is hurt by the tariffs with China, or the interest rates that are at play, or we are having a hard time hiring people because everyone is on oxycontin these days, those are all loser statements. They may have roots in reality but accepting them for poor performance is detrimental to any organizational behavior.

A great football team doesn’t stop trying to win if their star player goes down, or if the referees call a bad game against them. Those things might actually cause a team to lose, but blaming those elements are loser statements. Accepting that failure is the first step in losing and any company that blames things for their poor performance is acting as a loser, and not taking the steps that success requires. To win at anything overcoming barriers to success are expected. If a company doesn’t have the talent to do so, or the will to do it, then failure may happen. To explain their inadequacy to their share holders and other carriers of the public trust, they might blame tariffs or supply problems. But in all honesty, it was their job all along to overcome whatever opposition to success that there was, and to win the game, whatever it may have been. When people say that “it’s not whether you win or lose, its how you play the game,” they are partially right. How you play the game is all important in whether or not you will experience success. But even in that popular statement are the seeds for failure planted. It implies that even if you lose, if you played a good game, then you are off the hook. Bad companies have become very good at looking like they are playing the game well with lots of nice charts and excuses, but ultimately it is how you play the game, and whether you win or not. Nobody likes second place. Everyone loves a winner. The goal is always to win and to overcome impediments.

Excuses are for those who are lazy or stupid, incompetent or up to no good. I often decry labor unions because they are often to blame for a company’s lack of management, or the organization as a whole of something like a public school where the inmates run the asylum. Management at these places often throw their hands up and say things like, we failed because none of the union workers wanted to work the weekend, or we had a strike and couldn’t bring in raw materials. But what they are really saying is that they have no control of their business and weren’t thinking far enough ahead to have contingency plans. Such companies are blaming the tariffs for their poor performance and they make Trump a target for their failure, but in all reality, they own that failure. And nobody else.

Rich Hoffman

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The Latest Mass Shooter Seth Ator: Where liberalism has failed, they always call for gun control

It took nearly 24 hours after another gunman identified the 36 years old Texan Seth Ator as the Odessa mass shooter which led to many conspiracy theories right after the tragedy. What was different from this event was that the killer was pulled over by police and shot at as they approached his vehicle. It wasn’t necessarily a preplanned massacre as others have been, while using an AR platformed weapon to invoke mass destruction on innocent people. This time the guy was just doing his thing and when he was engaged by law enforcement that broke up whatever activity he was doing, it set him off into a volatile rage that turned deadly quick.

It was sad that immediately after there were already calls for gun control, and this time it was a bit different also. Anti-gun people revealed more what their intentions were, since it was obvious that Seth Ator had a bit of a criminal record. Just like with health care it was the Obama part of it that was sold with the intention of going to a public option and complete socialist takeover. Well, the red flag laws that have been proposed, as well as the background checks are just the beginning. Gun grabbers and solid political leftists want guns removed from society. They quickly were using this case as one where open carry wouldn’t have worked, and tried immediately to apply the shooters “white guy” status to support their attempts at gun control. Its all been part of their overall story, angry white guys are dangerous, racist and that they created America and all that needs to be erased from history. But to do that, of course they have to take away the guns because that’s what keeps such a rebellion from happening.

However, as I have said, and from what we know is directly applicable to this case, failed parental structures are what is causing these mass shootings, the values these kids are not getting in their families is far more destructive than any other element. Then as has been the case with every shooter lately, we are still learning about this one, but drugs both legal and illegal have played a part in altering the consciousness of the attackers. All those elements are foundations of liberal policy in the failed experiments of replacing the family with government and the results are exploding on our streets now that many of the basic foundations of proper behavior have been eroded away into this anarchy movement that we see everywhere these days.

There were early reports that this guy was on meth and was an Antifa member which I stated wouldn’t have surprised me at all. To be honest, at 36 he’s a little old for Antifa terrorism, but it would be closer to a reality than to say he was a good Christian kid from Odessa that just freaked out one day and killed a bunch of people at a traffic stop. Liberals want to remove guns from our society because they have made kids like this killer with their social policies and they are determined to use every tragedy that occurs to attack America’s gun culture, and they truly expect everyone to just take it, and go along with implied guilt for things they had nothing to do with. But the left did. As is typical of all these recent shooters, Ator came from a divorced home. While divorce has been around for a while, it only became common in our society over the last few decades. There was a stigma against it in the 70s and 80s. If a woman became pregnant prior to that period, you got married and you forced yourself to live happily ever after so that you could grow a family. And when you got older and couldn’t stand each other anymore, you still stayed married because it was the right thing to do for the kids. Because kids psychologically need parental structure, no matter how much they rebel. They need the structure of a father and a mother, and when that is replaced with something else, such as a government welfare check, a student loan program, or any form of handout that replaces a father as head of a family, we see trouble in the products of that family, the children.

Not that every young person who has a dad that lives across town and must watch their parents date other people and spend Thanksgivings with their new boyfriends and girlfriends, they don’t go out and shoot a bunch of people just for the hell of it. But it is a problem among a large portion of our population, just as heavy marijuana use is an indicator of psychotic behavior in a minority of their users. Not everyone who smokes pot becomes a killer just as not everyone growing up without a dad does, but it is certainly an indicator of future violent behavior.

I will be the first to say that the kind of world I want to live in, where we openly carry our guns, everywhere, that such a society would require the best of what our culture could produce. People in such a society would be well educated, would not abuse drugs and alcohol, and would come from solid families with loving backgrounds. The only reason we don’t have such a society is because left leaning activists want all the bad things, broken families, reckless—inconsequential sex, drug abuse, and an ignorant population. And to have those things, they don’t want guns so everyone can kill each other. They want the deviant behavior and they don’t want consequences. That is the real issue and no law proposed could fix that.

The anti-police stance of Antifa likely did have more to do with Seth Ator opening fire on the police as they approached his vehicle after a traffic stop. The solution for the political left is to take away all guns so that Seth Ator wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do such a thing. But of course the ignorance of that proposal is that it does nothing to correct the desire to shoot a cop in the first place. After the initial attack against the police, Ator drove around killing random people, but there clearly wasn’t a plan. It was behavior driven and the elements that created that behavior that was the real cause. If it wasn’t guns, it would have been something else. Killers and lunatics will use anything to invoke a menace on a population if they are unhappy, which is why guns are needed to keep such things from getting out of control. In an open carry environment, he would have been shot by a good guy with a gun sooner, but this was different because he was in a car driving around before people could really get a sense of what was going on.

Without question these shootings are more political than demanding a legal mandate because no law proposed, background checks, red flag laws, or even illegal drug enforcement will change these occurrences. They are the results of liberalism injected into an otherwise conservative society and the conflict that is the natural biproduct. At the very least in this case was the lack of a biological family that was stable and secure. Mom and dad were divorced, and some people just can’t handle that. Their anger may project outward to innocent members of society, but the root cause is the broken family and the disappointments of a child that was robbed of that basic security. We would do better to make divorce illegal than guns. But to admit such a thing, liberals would have to admit that their social experiment of removing dads from homes and attacking the core values of American life has been a failure. And they certainly won’t do that. They’d rather blame guns.

Rich Hoffman

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There is a Storm Coming: Lakota better have a boat

I think the best thing that could happen is that Julie Shaffer would lose her seat to a new school board candidate in this upcoming fall 2019 election. Jim Hahn is a potential for that, he’s running and is a business guy, and if the Lakota school board could pick him up and keep Todd Parnell, and Lynda O’Conner, there would finally be a three vote conservative presence that could avert the current levy plans that are in place for attempts beginning as early as 2020. If there is another tax attempt, I will say right now that I am all on board to resume the fight against it, and I understand that others are also interested. A gentle message to Lakota and all the real estate agents that spawn off the school system, there is a storm coming, so I hope you have built a boat, because the next levy attempt will be a bloodbath. The liberal activities of Brad Lovell Kelley Casper and of course Julie Shaffer along with the very disappointing sentiments that have evolved from the new superintendent Matt Miller, they have squandered a very good opportunity, a great budget with declining enrollment that has even further inflated the payroll for teachers who clearly aren’t worth the money, and they have been caught in gross mismanagement. The two conservative school board members have shown a bit of hope in properly managing the district, but the school board itself hasn’t gone far enough—the liberal activism is still a problem in the management of the government school.

I have no love for Julie Shaffer, we have a history together. When she couldn’t defeat my arguments back in 2012 she had to turn to identity politics to separate the No Lakota Levy group I represented for their 2013 attempt which they ended up winning by a very narrow margin. But it wasn’t Lakota who did anything to turn the tide, it was Sheriff Jones who wanted to put armed cops in the schools to protect them from mass shooters, or the potential. As it turned out, just as I said it would be, the whole thing was a scam, the money from the levy wasn’t used to cover cops or even security. Lakota did do those things, but ultimately the money was only to give teachers raises for their very high wages. My argument back then was that it didn’t bother me that Lakota had several teachers with six figure salaries, but that through collective bargaining the labor union wanted everyone to have those extraordinary salaries and back then the average wage was over 70K per year. We always hear stories about how low teachers are paid, well that’s not the case at Lakota, the teachers are well paid and the union props them all up and makes it nearly impossible to fire problem employees like the recent drama witnessed by the ex-Lakota employee, the transgender activist Emily Osterling. She sued the district for her proposed termination, and she won a settlement of $175,000 which the tax payers had to cough up ultimately.

Lakota is in my back yard so I want them to do well, but only until they become a pain in the ass in asking for too much money. I am proud of Lakota as long as they aren’t asking for money and by looking at their annual budget of over $220 million per year it is clear that the school board has not managed the money correctly. Now to their defense, the collective bargaining agreements by the union make normal value stream assessments nearly impossible. It takes three solid votes to really manage a district when there are five board members. It has taken a long time to get the two good ones that we have now and a lot of pushing and shoving. I have been asked many, many times to take on the job, but for my part, I have no desire to negotiate with a labor union all the time and I think the education system should be completely dismantled and recreated with a school choice competitive option. So its not a job for me, but we do need smart people who understand value creation to do the job. In that regard, there is an option in Jim Hahn.

However, the union vote will come out for their own preservation and they will vote this November for Julie Shaffer, so it will be a tough climb for Jim Hahn. He’s going to need some help and a good turnout. The union will not want him on the school board because they are against anything that does not stop the upward mismanagement of financial resources that are set to run out by 2023. Most of that $220 million budget is all in teacher salaries and that is just ridiculous. In an age where kids are learning more from hand held devices such as smart phones and personal computers, physical teachers are going the way of the drive-in. The test results just do not show that a teacher in the classroom make or break much in a student’s life. Most of the feel good stories are propaganda by the unions which young people are prone to be sucked in to, but are shallow in credibility at best. Just take a look at the Lakota website and their reported financials. They are short on substance but are flashy with surface points and comparisons to other districts who are every bit as much of a disaster as they are—because they are all driven by unionized employees hungry for inflated wages and as little work to do as possible.

The bloodbath that I am promising will be simple value stream analysis of what Lakota really does for our community, which is very little. The high school football games are only important to the students and their families, the other 100,000 people who live in the Lakota school system could care less and people like me without kids in the school system go through our daily days not even noticing the school buildings or their occupants. Life is busy and there is a lot for people like me to do that has nothing to do with the school system, and people like me are in the majority. All it takes is to get them to show up to vote, and they can easily out vote the union radicals which is why it takes Lakota an average of three levy attempts to get a tax increase passed. And to do that they have to resort to guerrilla warfare, not the goodness of people’s hearts. I would personally rather have the bloodbath rather than harm future business growth in our region with another Lakota tax increase, and argued that way, the way all businesses are measured, the story is quite clear. Lakota is not a value to our community, but a hindrance and the product they produce is failing and will continue to fail until the unions no longer run the government schools. That is, unless a third conservative is elected to the school board, and the budget crises that is coming can be averted. The value of the district won’t change but the bad reputation that will put Lakota through a lot of pain could be averted. And I would think that to be a good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota Wants Another Tax Increase to Pay for their Progressive, Radical, anti-American Teachers: The lawsuit of Emily Osterling

A little bird landed on my shoulder recently to tell me that my local school system of Lakota was thinking about attempting another tax increase on property owners after years of declining enrollment, and poor performance, and it sent my blood into a boil. My position on school levies is pretty clear, especially these days. When I’ve been against them before it was largely a cost thing, public schools were just too much of a burden in their communities and they weighed them down needlessly. But now, we have seen that not even the extraordinary costs were even worth the trouble as the kids coming out of these schools are just a mess. Little birds have a way of always coming back and what’s more, its not just one, no matter how much time passes. What they whisper is the kind of things that are truly things to be angry at, because the audacity is something to behold, because if you really do care about kids and their futures, which I do, then this public school scam of sucking so much money out of tax revenue for poor management by the school boards is something that we all must deal with.

For instance, that same school board which is proposing to put another tax increase on the ballot perhaps as early as 2020 also is trying to get transgender policies enacted for the sheer progressive intention of social theatrics. A school like Lakota which is one of the largest in Ohio and has many thousands of students, only has a handful of students who would lay claim to any kind of transgender policy. While a person like me would argue that transgender anything has nothing to do with education and is purely a creation of the progressive political movement, accommodations are made at Lakota for that very specific minority. So there is no need for costly modifications or even the wasted effort by management (the school board) to embark on any kind of transgender diatribe. It’s not even something that a school board should be discussing in relation to budgetary considerations. In any kind of world that type of cause and effect proposal is completely non value added to the end use customer, the children and their families and really is at the heart of all public schools. They simply don’t produce anything of any real value to the world and have worn out their welcome.

In business, it is common no matter what the size for management to ponder how to squeeze cost out of everything so that a company can make money and survive. One of the ways that is done is to determine what elements of a company create value for their end use customer while putting all the other efforts to a category of waste to be eliminated from their processes. When a school system like Lakota is in the mode of thinking that transgender issues are a value to their end use customer, the tax paying public, then there is a big problem and it becomes an even bigger problem when they consider any proposal that increases taxes on a future ballot.

I am clearly aware of the Emily Osterling case who sued Lakota for transgender issues which cost $175,000, $75,000 coming directly out of board funds. Osterling was a long time teacher, one of those employees that I have said for years was overpaid for the kind of work that she was doing. The school board had determined that her activism into transgender rights was cutting into her actual duties, so the activist was put on administrative leave. The school board was trying to do the right thing and get rid of a troubling, and expensive employee that was pushing off progressive causes onto a learning environment that was supposed to be teaching kids. A few years prior in a close vote that Julie Shaffer was pushing on creating a transgender policy at Lakota the issue was narrowly defeated not in a small part due to the two conservatives that sit on the Lakota school board in Lynda O’Connor and Todd Parnell. The progressive activist Osterling wouldn’t let the matter stand and continued to push the agenda which eventually forced the board to settle with her such an extraordinary sum of money over something that most people can agree was not a value to the end use customer, the students and their tax paying parents.

And that is where the real problem is, that the employees of Lakota and every other public school are runaway activists intent to perpetually run up their labor costs and to ultimately turn our children into progressive advocates of liberalism and launch them into a life of confusion and turmoil. On the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati Osterling cited that her administrative leave in September of 2018 to begin termination proceedings based on “flimsy and retaliatory allegations” was somehow out of step with the actual needs of the community, and it is in those kinds of employees that jack up the extraordinary costs of the employees at Lakota which cause the need for ever more tax money to be wasted on them for the basic luxury as acting as glorified babysitters.

Osterling was a prominent Lakota teacher’s union official and a National Education Association board member, and co-chair of the NEA’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender caucus—otherwise as an employee, she was a nightmare—expensive and underperforming toward what the value of an education to children really needed. As part of the settlement Osterling had to submit a letter of resignation on March 26th of 2019. The problem is, she is just one employee at Lakota which has many hundreds just like her, only not quite as vocal. Even when it was obvious that Osterling had to go, it took moving mountains to get her out, and it was expensive.

I didn’t say much on the matter because I felt the school board, at least a few of them, was doing a good job. Julie Shaffer continues to be the entry point for activism allowing people like Osterling to feel they even have a platform to speak from. My history with Julie goes back a long time, our debates can still be found by Googling them which were aired on WLW radio some years back. Of course when she and her board members back then couldn’t win a school levy three times in a row because they couldn’t make a good argument for the money the board was wasting, she turned to identity politics to try and bring great harm to me personally which remains to this day an issue of contention. I offered to put the matter to rest by supporting a tax increase which I knew Lakota wanted to propose soon, but only if they allowed teachers to arm themselves in the classrooms to protect against a mass shooting. Of course, they ignored my proposal which pulled my support of any levy off the table. I’m willing to pay teachers to get gun training and to protect kids from bad people, but I’m not willing to support progressive union activists like Emily Osterling. The school isn’t there for the employees, its there for the kids, pure and simple.

Due to the lack of management, again, not by all the school board members, but there is still a three to two vote against logic in Lakota. If that ratio could be turned around, and activists like Julie Shaffer who obviously has serious problems and is aligned with the radical elements of the employment base, money management might occur. But under the current leadership, Lakota plans to consider another tax increase soon and we’ll be back to all the same old tricks and nonsense again. I don’t think any of us want that. I don’t want expensive employees and lawsuits that are non value added to the end use customer working at Lakota. I thought it was wise for the board to try to get rid of her, which they did eventually. But when members of the board are encouraging the Emily Osterling types along, that expense is on them, not the taxpayer.

Rich Hoffman

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I Think of Sean Hannity as a Long Haired Hippie: Republicans need to stick together and vote in the upcoming election

One thing is for sure. I think of Sean Hannity as kind of a middle of the road guy, he loves his police, he loves his military, and he loves teachers and like President Trump, is willing to continue to give those government workers infinite amounts of money and to call it patriotic. That’s not me. That is where the debate is, its not in the difference between Democrats and Republicans. The discussions in the form of management by elected officials is varying degrees of conservatism where big government types like Sean Hannity and Donald Trump have battles over resource management with people like me who think that every assumption should be challenged and squeezed for all its worth. And now that we are in election season its time that we have that hard discussion and put the best people in place to help manage our government with the least resources that we can find. It’s not that I don’t support people like Trump in the presidency or Hannity on his Fox News show, but there are things they say and do from time to time, largely because they both come out of a very progressive state and city in New York, that make me cringe with exposure to liberalism. If we really want to solve the problems of our age, there are going to be some fights, and to waste time on those fights, the right people need to be fighting, not some liberal losers who shouldn’t even be part of the discussion.

I’m talking about the various school board races that are up this year, and the various township and state races that ultimately shape the government of our states. We’ve had plenty of experiments with social causes and engineering by now to determine that our colleges, public schools and cities in general that are all run by Democrats have spiraled out of control and are placing those institutions on the brink of disaster. And in addressing those issues conservatives won’t go far enough in just taking up positions behind Trump and Sean Hannity, or Bill Cunningham in Cincinnati for that matter. They all talk a good game that is certainly better than any Democrat, but ultimately, they still want big government in the form of schoolteachers and police that inflate their community budgets and drive up taxes, without ever really asking whether or not those employees are worth it.

It’s not the teacher who teaches but it’s the state that decides what and how they teach that is the danger. If a teacher utters conservative values, they tend to be ridiculed by their unions and will find themselves out of step with the state. But if they preach abortion support, gay rights and otherwise calamitous despotism toward American ideas, then they are often rewarded as “teacher of the year” and paid to continue such activism which of course their students copy as one of their first worldly experiences. The system obviously hasn’t worked, the products of our modern times can show that clearly, so it should provoke us to act with each new election. There is no promise that our votes will give us 100% of a clone of our own values, but it is a lot better than nothing. And nothing is what happens when conservatives aren’t elected because liberals get their unchallenged activists into the city councils and school boards and spend our tax money as if there is no tomorrow, because often they don’t intend there to be.

I have lots of disagreements with conservatives, but I have yet to speak to them in person and find a person I don’t like. I have met President Trump and I love the guy. There are a lot of things that he has done in life and still does and thinks that I would never do, but overall, I can find more in common with him than not. I think we both love the American flag and can build a relationship off that as a foundation. The same with Sean Hannity. He comes across to me like some long-haired hippie who loves police way too much. I agree that our society is better off with cops than without them, but I don’t think we should trust them without question the way he advocates. Cops lie like any employee does and they need to be managed by exception not through collective bargaining, because they aren’t all equally valuable, just like schoolteachers. We need to have the discussion of their value and to do that we need the right kind of people to have those discussions. Democrats have proven that they just aren’t capable.

So it is up to us to have these various discussions and to sift out the good from the bad and sometimes that means that people’s feelings will get hurt a little bit when they find out that they aren’t valuable just for showing up for work, but are measured in how effective they do their jobs. Giving a blank check of approval to any sector of our economy is just foolish and some Republicans are foolish. Yet the discussion we have about value needs to happen with them, not the people who have screwed up everything for the last thirty to forty years. In every election we need to pick the best people we can get to help manage our political affairs. We may not like everything about them, we may even have some differences with them, especially regarding school boards. But we need to vote for them and help them get into a position to have a discussion at some point. Talking to a liberal on a school board is just a waste of time. They need to be replaced with every decent conservative that we can find so that we can have a debate. Currently no debate is possible, we get unfunded mandates from the state, nobody challenges them and due to their helplessness, they create liberal cultures within our schools where the next generation gets brainwashed into Democrat thinking. And that has turned out to be terrible for our children.

My advice to you dear reader is to treat this election with some seriousness. There is some sanity that is returning to the political system, largely for Trump to take the credit, but its time to raise the bar to a level that Democrats can’t live up to, and that needs to happen for the benefit of us all. We can no longer afford to keep that lowered bar down where they can participate just so we can call everything equal. We need to focus on actually doing something and electing good people to do good jobs in their elected positions. It is not bad to have disagreements with people, what is bad is that no common ground can be found because the political values are so extreme that basic conversation cannot even take place and the battlefields are yielded to Democrats just to avoid dealing with them because they are such a pain in the neck. Support Republicans and other conservatives even if they are to the left of where you are. Having a debate with them is better than a debate with someone who isn’t even from the same planet. And that is how you must look at these types of elections.

Rich Hoffman
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Why Government Health Care is Bad: Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay $572 Million to fight opioids in Oklahoma

There are many more lawsuits ahead for Johnson & Johnson, one particular in Ohio coming in October that will likely end the same way as the one in Oklahoma did which granted $572 million in damages to help the state pay for its opioid crises. Of course, Johnson & Johnson will appeal and will try to settle out of court as many cases as they can. But what cannot be appealed or staved off in any way is the cause of the opioid crises itself, which is essentially the entire medical industry from the local doctor and pharmacy to the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies that thrive of death and pain. Now that there is a roadmap to prosecute a company like Johnson & Johnson for their role and marketing dangerous pain killers to the public, then neglecting to mention the terrible side effects just so they could sell mass quantities of the drugs, many more states will start to get similar judgements and if the high courts grant payment and reject the appeals, then many of these big companies are done for. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing.

This is the big problem when government and corporations get together against the public good and don’t allow capitalist competition to rule the day. People must understand that the argument over health care isn’t to make people better, it’s to fight over who will get paid off of people’s pain. When there is profit in pain, this is the kind of effect everyone can expect. The solution of course to medical insurance is to have less people sick, for our medical system to repair people, not to prolong their death just so that they can be prescribed medicine to ease their pain. At the heart of the opioid crises is a problem that is the foundation of our entire civilization, are we going to go forward and evolve or will we just decline into dust and be one silly little page in history. The crux of the debate is upon us and it is the result of this latest drug company lawsuit.

Unfortunately, while many of us crave personal freedom about what television shows we want to watch, what cars we drive, who we marry, what schools we go to, what we like to eat on a Friday night, we surrender our lives to doctors almost entirely. We assume they know best because we were taught in school that they did, and we take their advice on everything, how to live our lives, whether or not we can work or be on disability, or what drugs we will put into our bodies which could change everything about us. As a matter of fact, every mass shooter recently had one thing in common besides broken homes, they all were on anti-depressant medicine—which of course taken with marijuana and alcohol can have devastating effects on sanity. But doctors enjoy the free vacations to Hawaii and other exotic places because their name appears as drug dealers from the local Walgreens and they get rewarded for writing the prescriptions. And so long as the trust in doctors is there and they desire to profit off the sick, we will always have this problem.

Personally, I avoid any kind of drug, even when I’m sick. The desire to alleviate pain is to attempt to shut out part of living. If something is painful it needs to be fixed and if you just numb the pain, you will never fix the problem. The purpose of pain is to solve it, not to suppress it. Instead of an insurance industry that pays for all these drugs to suppress pain, our focus should be to get people healthy to the point where they don’t have pain because they aren’t sick. But the massive imprint of the big pharms that drive up the cost of insurance and medical care in general is far too great and the only way to get out from under them is to essentially put them out of business in the way that Oklahoma and Ohio are striving to do. The amount of money at stake in the medical industry is staggering, to the point where $572 million is really just a small fee to pay. Johnson & Johnson would rather not pay it, but that alone isn’t enough to alter their operations. And there are far too many politicians who, like the doctors that prescribe the medicine, profit off of people’s pain.

For all the same reasons that there are political factions who are against President Trump’s attempts to make friends with North Korea or Iran, and to fight China with trade wars, that is because those factions represent those who profit off the suffering caused by the conflict. You don’t have to look very hard to see that dear reader. It’s as obvious as a sunrise in a cloudless, desert sky. The opioid crises was caused for all the same reasons, because there is profit in pain and death, and short term, small minded people would gladly trade in their immortality for a beach house in Florida for twenty years of their gradually diseased life. There is no Republican health care plan that could be unleashed so long as this is the state of the medical industry, to profit off of pain and to drag out the effects of death to give pharmaceuticals a market longer into the lifespan of the average person. It’s not the quality of life that health insurance is seeking to cover, it’s to maintain dependency so the drug companies can flourish, which is why they support politicians who argue for universal health care.

Human beings are just biological machines, there is nothing about them that cannot be fixed or maintained at a certain healthy level. If they were healthy once, they could be healthy again. But our medical industry is not interested in healthy people who do not need them. They need the sick, and ever dying. It is a short-sighted profit path for the partnership between government and corporations and has nothing to do with capitalism. The entire system plays to the worst of human nature, to remain short sighted, and to avoid pain suppressing problems instead of solving them.

If Trump had not been elected president these fights wouldn’t be happening. It is in the lack of a government health care solution that there are any signs in any courts to even consider taking on big pharma, because the lobby money is lucrative. But Trump has changed politics and politicians are seeing the benefits of the long view as opposed to the short and science is finally starting to put courage in the minds of the sick. More and more people are realizing that they don’t have to listen to their doctor, that maybe if they stay healthy, that they can avoid the doctor all together. And when that happens a real freedom can be realized that most people never thought possible. But to have it they can’t be on drugs and under the influence of a medical system that wants to ride them, not to set them free. When we talk about government health care what we are talking about is prolonging this problem and when we talk about suing big pharma, we are actually seeking to free ourselves from their influence. And that is a great thing that couldn’t come fast enough. Then once it does, we can really get started as a species because if there is anything that is truly holding us all back it’s the nonsense about life and death and sickness and health. We can do better and if big pharma goes down, we can have something much, much better.

Rich Hoffman

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D23 and Star Wars: Liberal ideas are rejected everywhere, especially in a galaxy far, far away

It’s important because it involves so many parts of our culture, but as I occasionally do write about Star Wars it is interesting to watch as how its meaning has changed for people over time. Personally, when people ask me how I’m able to do so much on such a range of things, it’s because I use mythology to grasp concepts so that there is room for ideas to be conceived and to grow. I would compare it to a bowl to hold something like popcorn in, the bigger the bowl, the more ideas you can hold. Mythology is how the human race holds ideas that it can then grasp and work with, and the bigger the ideas, the better functioning the society. In a lot of ways young people have more than ever lots of vehicles to invest ideas into, not just the movies that we all grew up on, but video games, a lot of literature, and all the streaming services that are available such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. And to make those streaming services flourish there has to be a lot of content and Hollywood, as I have been saying for years, is struggling to produce. We live in one of the most creative times in human history, but we have more than ever also witnessed how liberalism in general in a culture of mass competition for ideas shows the trends of society and nothing more vividly displays that trend like Star Wars, because it is at least a cultural measure that everyone can pretty much agree is a standard mythology of our culture. Not everyone likes it, but it manages to touch most people in some way or another making a great platform for analysis.

So to catch everyone up on where Star Wars is, there is a movie coming out this December, it’s the last film of the nine part series that has been going on for 40 years. It’s an important key to whether or not Star Wars survives into the future because as of now, it only has nostalgic value. Young people don’t necessarily like it on its own, its more something that they can share with their parents and grandparents, so the brand is struggling. Watching all the D23 news from Disney over this past weekend there is a lot to look forward to from arguably the largest media company in the world. But the evidence that as a very progressive company that has lost their way into making new and fresh ideas is obvious. Disney as a company is living off their legacy properties and what they’ve done many years ago, not what they have been able to do lately. With the exception of the Marvel movies, there hasn’t been anything fresh from Disney for years as they have taken for granted that people will buy into their products even though they are spewing with progressive political causes, such as race diversity, sex issues such as feminism, and elements of gay rights that most people just aren’t comfortable with. Disney as a company has tried to hide their massive appetite for capitalism behind progressive causes and it has hurt them tremendously—because they weren’t honest about it. They would have been better off to proclaim that they are happy to make money and not ashamed of it one bit instead of trying to sell themselves off as progressive activists laboring for every liberal cause known to mankind. Not so much at the stock exchange rate yet, but that is coming just as I stated years ago after the first new age Star Wars film came out, that Disney has really screwed up the multi billion dollar franchise leaving them desperate to fix it, which is what they are promising to do on several fronts starting with the new film coming out this December in addition to several live action television shows coming to their new streaming service, such as The Mandalorian, and a new show just about Obi-Wan Kenobi played by Ewen McGregor which fans have wanted for over 20 years.

Star Wars, especially the best parts of it such as the cantina scenes where Obi-Wan cuts off the arm of an assailant in A New Hope, then shortly thereafter Han Solo kills the bounty hunter Greedo in a blaze of gun fire, these modern progressive filmmakers thought that what they had made with Star Wars could be that bowl I was talking about that could hold lots of ideas including copious amounts of progressive sentiment. Even with the billions of dollars that Disney has put into Star Wars the fans have responded flat which was most notable with the most recent Star Wars movie, which I loved, Solo: A Star Wars Story. After The Last Jedi, which I enjoyed, fans had shown they had enough of Disney tampering with something they loved and they were rejecting the Disneyification of Star Wars outright, and not buying the toys, and merchandise at the levels that Disney needed them to in order to justify their investment. This has been obvious now that the big Star Wars lands that have opened in California and now in Disney World in Orlando and people aren’t that interested. I warned everyone way back in 2015 on radio and several articles, that the key to the franchise wasn’t Luke Skywalker, it was Han Solo, the space cowboy that reflected the American values of Ayn Rand and John Wayne, which has always been at the heart of Star Wars. Star Wars for people is best when it has those elements, not actors that were cast because they were Latino, or because they were women—but because the characters were good and the actors fit the part. When Disney essentially killed off the angry white guy characters and failed to replace them with new ones, they lost their audience. The Last Jedi was essentially a movie where all the white men were killed and the crazy progressive women were all in charge and people, real people who are out there voting for Donald Trump don’t want to see movies and stories about that kind of topic, and it has really hurt the Star Wars brand.

But I am encouraged, this year at D23 Disney is showing that they can take their money and do great things with it. I am rooting for them to get it right, I want their Star Wars Land of Galaxy’s Edge to be successful, I want to see Star Wars make a strong comeback for that next generation because it is still one of the best things out there to take our culture from where it was to where it needs to go in science and thought. There is room for big ideas in Star Wars, which is what I use it for as a mythology. It’s a big story with lots of bold concepts, but at its heart it was and continues to be a space western. So long as that formula is stuck to, Star Wars will be successful. If progressive concepts are placed above that formula, then its over for Disney and they seem to understand that now, after a decade of hard lessons.

I was enjoying all the news coming out of D23 and I sort of celebrated by picking up the Lenovo Star Wars Jedi Challenges video game which converts your smart phone into an augmented reality simulator and I have to say it is extremely impressive. But you can see clearly the hit Star Wars has taken to their brand. The unit just a year ago was being sold at Target for $200 and I picked it up this week for less than $50. I figured that for that much money I could take a risk and buy the Disney product and I’m glad I did. But considering what they had done to the legacy fans with the books and previous comics and other merchandise then gave those same fans a mess of a movie in The Force Awakens, which essentially killed all the old white guys and put progressive diversity in charge only to lose over and over again to a very inept First Order, not even I would pay that much money for a new Star Wars game. That’s unfortunate, because the game itself is just amazing, a real technical marvel and exhibition of mythology pushed to its absolute limits. Big ideas, big fun, and a major advancement of the story telling experience.

The lesson here is that progressive, or even liberal ideas cannot fill up that bowl of thought, and people won’t just accept those concepts because they like Star Wars. They like Star Wars because it represents values that most people share, small government, independence, and you gotta have guns. The anti-gun policies and hippie like love your neighbor stuff doesn’t go well with a franchise that is all about war and why wars happen. When you can’t even where a gun on your hip in cosplay to the new Star Wars land in Florida because everyone is crazy over weapons and terrorism, Disney has to understand that you can’t tell a story about peace, love, and trusting the government without weapons, and expect people to spend millions of dollars of their hard earned money on it, just so they can eat colored popcorn and drink blue milk. Star Wars is about fighting for independence, especially personal independence. In all Star Wars stories that are good are examples of institutional failure, even among the Jedi Council, and that is the heart of the entire franchise. Unfortunately, Disney was a part of that institutional thinking and it took them a long time to come close to figuring out the problem. I just hope its not too late. It would be a shame if it is.

Rich Hoffman

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The 1977 Act of Emergency Economic Powers: Ending communism once and for all

Not that its any kind of surprise, but it is important to note, Democrats do wish harm on you and me so they can have a hope of beating Donald Trump in the next election coming in 2020. They’ve tried everything, the Russian hoax, the constant name calling and belittling of his entire family, and openly mocking everything he has done over the last three years as President of the United States. Now their last and only hope is to harm the economy because its all they have left. Everyone knows that Trump is going to run on his great economy so its logical that they would try to harm it, and in so doing, would wish harm on every single American just so they can gain power. Make sure to remember that. They don’t care how many lives might be wrecked in the process, all they care about is gaining and keeping power. So the economy is their target and I am very pleased to learn that President Trump is perfectly willing to protect the economy with the 1977 Act of Emergency Economic Powers.

The economy is largely driven by sentiment. A happy society generally has a happy economy, so all the psychological mechanisms that make human beings do the things that they tend to do are what drive up economic numbers. The Trump presidency has only created good sentiment for the economy by reducing taxes, putting money back in the pockets of the people who create good sentiment, and deregulating the industry so that more people can participate at a faster rate. The low unemployment that we have had and several consecutive quarters of positive GDP growth are only scary to Democrats because its proof that the President’s policies have been working and show no signs of abating by the next election, so its now or never for them and they are trying to throw the kitchen sink at him in an all out effort to defeat him in the election. Its as simple as that.

China as a communist power has been leveraging against the United States for decades and there are plenty of Americans on the liberal side of politics who helped make that happen and wanted to drive our economy into the waiting hands of China. As a result, much more of our modern media is owned or is directly influenced by China making them pawns for Trump’s trade war which had to happen. China couldn’t be allowed to continue to mooch off the American economy the way they were. Any of my readers here know that I have been reporting for decades that China’s economy is directly tethered to America. Without America they have nothing. So in any negotiation with them, this must be revealed. Once China put $75 billion worth of tariffs on American imports Friday, it was the best move possible for Trump to order all American companies out of China and into some other market, preferably America. This of course shocked the world, but its nothing short of the best strategy. We aren’t talking about simple and free open markets here, we are talking about defeating at the very least communism once and for all. And for that, the sympathizers are furious, especially those domestic enemies in North America who have been trying to get communism put in place for most of the last century.

I don’t talk about it much because it was so long ago but my sentiments about communism and the political left was solidified a long time ago. As I have reported, I have had a colorful life and spoken often with people from all kinds of backgrounds. I’ve always been a conservative, but I have a personality that gets along with anybody anywhere about anything. I can speak to people from the other side without losing myself and that has given me the opportunity to socialize with many kinds of people over the years. And so it was that for a period in my life I was invited to all the big parties in Cincinnati that sort of hung off the University of Cincinnati who lived along the rim of Clifton overlooking the city in their very nice homes and I got to know their minds well. I spoke to them as I would anybody, with honor and respect, but any compassion I had for the other side’s way of thinking evaporated in those gatherings. Essentially, they were communists, they wanted communism in America and they were set to do anything to get it. And when I talk about these people, I’m talking about the Dwight Tillery crowd when he was mayor, and Roxanne Qualls and the type of people who hung on their every word. There were the top architects of the city at these events and producers of television and stage plays, owners of the media, all the big wigs of our “culture.” So I learned first hand what they were all about and it was quite clear that the left wing of politics wanted China’s communism.

Clinton was president during those years and those types of people were very ostentatious about their sentiments. They figured that it wouldn’t be long when China would simply absorb America’s economy and we’d all be working for the communist, so they were happy. When Clinton came to town they all rushed out to lick his boots and they were elated to do it. They put up with me and my views because they liked my charisma and they figured I wasn’t a threat. My America was dying and being compassionate liberals, they didn’t mind my acquaintance because deep down inside, someone has to do the work of living, and being natural mooches, they knew to stay close to a guy like me. So, I learned a lot from them, and those types of people haven’t changed no matter what city we are talking about. Only now their theories have failed, and they are desperately trying to cover their tracks whereas then they were just getting a few presidents, in Clinton, Bush and Obama who would prop up communist China and help bring that socialist philosophy to America.

In that regard it doesn’t hurt my feelings at all that companies in China are struggling to figure out to do with President Trump in the White House. But the bottom line is that this fight had to happen and its important that Trump do what he’s doing. The anger about it is obvious because the liberal political party has completely tethered themselves to China over the years and now with the Hong Kong protests and the squeeze from United States tariffs, the Chinese economy is in real danger. And this is all happening at exactly the right time, year three of President Trump’s term with an election year coming up and the potential of four more years of the guy. Liberals know they have no other window if ever to try to topple Trump, so the economy is their target, and they hope it tanks so they can save China and reverse the trend of restoring economic power in the capitalism of the west once and for all to end a debate that was subtly started with the publication of Karl Marx’s works and to restore to the world an economy that does not have communism in it, for the benefit of all.

Rich Hoffman

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The Good Gardener: Understanding the importance of the Amazonian wildfires and nature in general

It is really interesting to gauge how liberals view events like the current Amazonian wildfires as a catastrophe when in all reality they are quite a common occurrence on planet earth. Fires start all the time, especially by lightening, however these in the Amazon that are raging currently were largely set by farmers trying to clear their land and have gotten out of control. It has even gotten to the point where the new Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is claiming that is political enemies are setting the fires on purpose to make him look bad as he is more to the conservative side of political thinking that Brazil typically has avoided, to their own detriment. So far in 2019 there have been 74,000 wildfires along the Amazon valley which is up from previous years and the blame is going to farming, and logging companies. So called “experts” which is the same as saying that people who have read the progressive National Geographic since they were kids and grew up to be college institute liberal activists, are warning that these actions “could” cause a stop to the world’s oxygen supply and begin to emit carbon and speed up climate change further. “OH NO!”

Well, all of that is garbage, there is an actual psychology to this pathological nonsense that needs to be understood before we have any real intelligent discussions on the matter. Of course by now we all can at least agree that liberals by their nature have attached climate science to their long established goals for communism and socialism using something everyone can agree on, such as climate conditions as a vehicle to launch their political ideology with urgency for action, to vote for them in office. And most of the time they believe their own arguments turning their plight into something that might make the plotline for a new Avatar movie where they are the heroes and all things capitalist are the villains.

That is after all what liberals are protesting in all wildfires is that imprint of human thought and action, farmers trying to grow crops, or industrialists wanting to turn trees into lumber to build homes and more businesses, are bad. Liberals want a world where nature rules, but the quandary to their effort is a scandal all its own, because what they are arguing for is to allow the world to remain sick when it is taken over by disease. Imagine a human body that accepted every little disease or cancer attempt where the immune system just accepted the intrusion and allowed the bodily parasites to take over and kill the whole body. That is what liberals are advocating, because in a lot of ways they see themselves as the parasites which want to thrive off all healthy activity and consume it into chaos, like the underbrush of a rainforest.

Trees are a renewable resource; they grow quite fast. Like all plant life they consume what we dispelled and what they give off, we consume. We have a wonderful symbiotic relationship with plant life as humans. And the more humans and human activity, the better it is for plant life. And following Adam Smith’s economic philosophies, forests are wonderful examples of the invisible hand and survival of the fittest. The best and most healthy plants grow and flourish where the weak and sickly perish into underbrush. It is that underbrush that occasionally needs to be burnt away from the good living life forms through forest fires. Naturally, liberals have an affinity for the underbrush because in the world of human life and functions that is what they are, and the thought of tragedy coming along to burn them all away is a constant fear for them. Every time there is a mass shooting, or an earthquake the first thing that is consumed is liberal ideas. Bravery, self-reliance, and proper philosophies for survival become the most urgent thoughts. Just as in mass forest fires, where the best rooted and strongest trees survive in some form while everything else is consumed.

Take the liberal gardener who lets plants grow everywhere and doesn’t tend to them properly. They always look like a mess. Compare that to the astute and meticulous gardener who plants certain kinds of plants here and there and trims back the dead limbs and shapes the growth of their garden with care and precision. The effort of the human influence to shape the garden makes it either esthetically pleasing or not, based on the interpretive mind of the human being. The gardener makes a choice to rid the world of undesirables like weeds and dead limbs and carves out beauty as a form of art, which is to say a way of thinking. A philosophy of thought, a value system that says some plants are beneficial to the garden, while others are detriments is critical to a good garden, or a good society. What makes a weed a weed? The value system that places it at a lower value than say a well-trimmed Japanese maple tree. A good gardener hopes that all plants do well, but once the garden grows, we must make decisions on what works and what doesn’t and change the behavior into something more conducive to a good garden.

Rainforests are messy, and hot. Life is growing everywhere, and it is unmanaged. Nature’s management is that occasional catastrophes like fires come along and clean up the mess. But ideally, mankind was born to think and make decisions to carve out nature for the best benefit, whether the need is for farming, or industry, the human mind is just another force of nature, and its disciplines are meant to create esthetic harmony by bringing nature under control for the use of higher needs, instead of some random nonsense of a bunch of animals living and dying in trees and underbrush that only are born, eat, reproduce and die. The human mind brings a higher meaning to all life and it is a force of nature in and of itself.

The typical liberal cannot see themselves in that higher plan because they know that in the great gardens of the world that they are the weeds, the underbrush, the diseases infecting a healthy body and that they must be eradicated in order for healthy conduct at life to occur. They may want to have a roll in the scheme of things but since they are parasitic in nature, their philosophies mandate that they must be destroyed in order for better things to live. That is why they cry so much when there are forest fires and try to threaten us all with a terminal life on planet earth, so to protect them from termination within the philosophy of politics and world conduct. They are the weeds and cancers fighting for their right to survive, but we know good health cannot support everything. As humans we must choose, just as our immune systems must choose healthy cells over diseased ones. To live and be healthy we must choose life sometimes over other life. A nice tree over a weed. A healthy body over a diseased one. And not to discriminate, but to discourage people from becoming weeds, from becoming liberals and help them in life find their way toward good thought and conduct. That is the most humane way to deal with political gardening. And the way to do it in the world such as along the Amazon is to burn away the garbage so the people of Brazil can use the land for something more than just decay and nonsense. Clear the land for farmland. Log for more lumber and develop the resources of that country so that people who are barely living in huts and on city streets can live better and longer for the purpose of existence which is not up for debate. Give them a better life in our world garden. The trees will grow back. But the weeds and underbrush need to go.

Rich Hoffman
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Hate Crime Legislation to Ban Guns: The Government attempting to disarm the Second Amendment to cover for their own crimes committed

One of the gun control measures that congress intends to pursue when everyone gets back in session and is being floated around more and more recently is to take guns away from people convicted for a hate crime. In fact, it was Columbia, South Carolina of all places who just enacted a first pass hate crime ordinance which is going in the same direction as what is being floated on the federal level, and it is just ridiculous. The trouble with the proposal is that it is purely reactive to the current circumstances of mass shootings, which I have said many times are the result of Democrat policies as an origin, and that it just opens the door for banning guns based on hate speech, which is entirely defined by whatever political party is in power at the time. Such a ban opens all kinds of doors toward future encouragement and abuse of the law no matter how good the intentions are of the people proposing these measures.

My brand of conservatism was common all through the twentieth century. It was the world that changed, not me, and that hard turn to the left that started really in the mid-1950s and culminated into the 60s was a bad decision based on the current condition of the world. I often say to people that I was born in 1968 as a solution to that left turn. I grew up knowing both of my farmer grandparents. Both of my parents stayed married and didn’t embark on that social experiment of divorces that was becoming so popular in the late 70s and 80s. And even more unusual, my mom was a stay at home mom, and she took all kinds of hell for doing it. She was a volunteer at my school to help the teachers with all the kid’s social events and all the other moms simply hated her, because she could be home with her children and had time during the day to do mom stuff. As a result, my view of America and Republican politics in general was not at all different from John Wayne’s America, or any of the typical westerns that were popular on television and at the movies during that period. So nothing I say is all that outlandish, only if it is compared to the screw ball politics of our current time, just as a disclosure for reference.

Hate crimes are a modern invention by Democrats to seek minority votes and to capitalize off tensions that always arise when cultures of different values are mixed together. Most of the time those tensions can be worked out with a little understanding but occasionally things get out of hand and bad things happen. Democrats especially are guilty of stoking those fires of discontent until someone snaps and thus, you have a hate crime. If everyone would just leave everyone else alone, there would be a lot less hate crime in the world. But activist politics pushes the issue and before you know it some panicked teenager raised in a house full of illiteracy is running their car through a crowd of progressive protestors committing a hate crime.

The trouble with hate crime is that it is entirely politically motivated, so that if an enemy political party wants to push your buttons as a target and you respond, you could be said to have committed a hate crime. And under these new hate crime proposals, the authorities have a right to then come and confiscate your guns. If that’s not bad enough, the natural next step is to extend that effort to hate speech, which essentially could be just about anything that President Trump says on a daily basis, because he is from the winning political party and the losers are hen pecking at him because they know of no other way to win an election. Because of that we are seeing massive amounts of banning going on social media platforms, such as Alex Jones has experienced along with many, many others. I understand shadow banning, that is certainly the case with me on Twitter and YouTube. I don’t worry about it too much, but I can see that it’s happening for sure. These are already dangerous elements in any society so we can clearly see that all this hate crime legislation opens the door for gun confiscation by whatever political party is in power, and it just can’t be allowed.

It is not radical to say that the reason we have guns, guns of all sizes and power is so that we can manage our own government. There may come a time, and it is obvious today, that we may have to take back control of our government through the use of guns. Government cannot be trusted without a check on their power, ultimately by the people of an electorate and the electoral system. Even with guns we have come perilously close to complete tyranny as the evidence of the last presidential election is testimony in itself. The FBI sought to help the Democrat party elect their presidential candidate and keep Donald Trump out of the White House, which didn’t work. But when he did, they actively played a part in subverting that election, the evidence is everywhere as revealed most explosively with the Bruce Ohr situation at the Department of Justice. That case is still unraveling, but it is very embarrassing to our government. Going back a few years we saw a similar situation involving the IRS where they targeted Tea Party groups as a way to punish them for existing, using tax laws to encumber the leadership. It was a gross abuse of power and nobody was ultimately held accountable. I was wrapped up in the middle of all that, so I saw it firsthand. It was abuse by our government, pure and simple and honestly, if I was not a gun owner, they probably would have come after me even harder. By my experience, I would say that my ownership of guns has preserved more liberty and saved more lives than if I had not had them. Let’s just say that.

As to the other proposals such as red flag laws, well the tools have always been there. Since the most recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio police and the FBI are finally doing their jobs and picking people up for the messages they put online about announcing their mass shooting intentions. The red flags have always been there, but police and the FBI were just too lazy to act on them. There wasn’t a political will to enforce the laws that were on the books, otherwise the El Paso shooting and the one in Dayton would not have happened. The red flags were there, but the cops were out eating donuts and thinking about something else. That is another reason we can’t trust our government; they are not consistent and driven by performance. They are mostly inspired by politics and when something is hot, they act. When things cool off, they sleep, sit in their cars looking up pornography on their computers, and they have massive affairs with each other. (I know a lot of cops or have over the years. I know what I’m talking about.) They do a good job when pressed and people are looking. But left to their own devices, they aren’t the most motivated bunch.

We can’t trust government to define hate crimes or even hate speech and we certainly can’t surrender our guns to them. The guns are there to ultimately protect us not from thieves and despots, but from the tendencies of government itself, to cover their crimes when they commit them from the burdens of history. And if someone like you or I are witnesses to that burden, we will then become the targets, which is what all this hate crime legislation is opening up as a possibility, for which we all must say no. For myself, I live by the Cowboy Way, I treat everyone no matter what their sex, color or country of origin the same and with great respect. I don’t need a government that is always trending toward criminal behavior to define for me, “fairness.” I’ll keep my guns, and if someone wants to come and take them, then that will leave no other choice but to call for a change in the government itself and return to a time when John Wayne made a lot more sense instead of the race baiters and hustlers of our current times who seek to hide their own illegal activity behind more laws and regulation.

Rich Hoffman

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