Tag: Rich Hoffman

The Tattooed Loser Zachary Castaneda: Dealing with pure evil when prisons can’t hold them

It took over 24 hours for the mainstream media to begin to wrap their minds around the tattooed freak Zachary Castaneda who went on a stabbing rampage just a few blocks from Disneyland in California about 30 miles south of Los Angeles in Orange County. Four people were killed and two others were injured as the Hispanic gang member who should have been in prison unleashed havoc on the innocent and robbed businesses for no other reason apparently other than he felt like being a menace. He lived with his mom in the apartment complex where he killed two of his victims and had a wife who just filed a restraining order against him and divorce so she could get custody from this train wreck of a person. In all practicality Zachary should have never been on American streets. If there was ever a “red flag” he was it, yet there he was killing people not with a gun, but with a knife and the system had no idea what to do with him. While the politicians at state and federal levels were trying to make themselves feel good about the recent mass shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio here was this loser proving why nothing they could or would come up with would do a bit of good, and they just couldn’t get their minds around it. There was no wall to wall coverage of the violence the way that the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting was covered. I sent the story to several reporters and Fox did eventually cover it a bit, but only reluctantly.

Its not that Zachary Castaneda was an immigrant that was part of the gang culture that is exported out of Mexico and Central America with great abundance these days, it’s the grim reality that there are hundreds of thousands just like him roaming around in every American city now and all of them are potential nightmares for our legal system that clearly doesn’t know what to do with them. This particular gang member was released back into society off California bill AB109 which mandated that for some prisoners who committed crimes on or after July 1st of that year in 2011 when it passed, that a term of four days be deemed to have been served for every two days spent in actual custody. This of course was to take the relief off the prisons that were overcrowded putting a bunch of very bad people back on the streets mixing with the rest of society.

The same people who were clamoring for gun control after the recent mass shootings just didn’t know what to do with this Zachary Castaneda case. The criminal was smirking in his mug shots almost as if he was glad to go back to the prison system. For many people, freedom is just too much work, you have to work for your food, you have to be civil to other people—you have to do stuff, and doing stuff for the lazy, the evil, and the perpetual failures that they are can be too much. If they can just take from other people, they can get along for a while, but for people like Zachary Castaneda, prison is the only real place that he’ll ever feel at home. They bring your meals to you, you get free housing, and there are plenty of like-minded people to share time with. The problem is, there isn’t enough prison space to hold all these people, and its too expensive to care for them. And with our immigration issues that are coming out of the drug culture to the south, he’s just one of hundreds of thousands just like him, covered in gang tattoos who have the morality of roadkill and would just as soon kill someone as say hi to them. This is a major problem in our country, and it will be for a long time.

Authorities are still trying to figure out why the young 19-year-old gunman in the Gilroy Garlic festival had a clown mask in his car while promoting the book “Might is Right.” The kid was apparently distraught over Latinos and Silicon Valley whites moving into his neighborhood. It was on the same day as the Castaneda case that it was revealed that the Gilroy shooter had a far more complex set of motives, and intent than had been previously announced, and none of those considerations fit into a nice 15 second lead in to a television story. These events required context which nobody really had. This level of violence and nonchalance was completely foreign to everyone covering these stories leaving many more questions than answers.

However, what we have to understand is that we have now in America a large population of very evil people and we don’t have prisons to put them in. As a free society there will undoubtedly be interactions with them. There is no way to avoid them especially if they come to festivals or even places of businesses looking to kill us just for being there. We’re going to have to admit to ourselves that we have a big problem and that there aren’t any easy legislative fixes. The only fix that is possible is at the social level where we can begin to create proper parameters of conduct for how we live and treat each other. And when we see those parameters being breached by some evil person, then we’re going to have to deal with them appropriately right then and there. For all practical purposes, open carry and much more CCWs need to be utilized so more people are armed and can take down some criminal like Zachary Castaneda immediately instead of being stabbed to death with no defense. The only way these criminals of mass murder can commit these crimes is because they are armed where others are not, leaving the evil doers to conduct havoc on the innocent.

Obviously, the news reports understood the grander complexity of the Zachary case, but what they don’t understand is how to connect it to the Gilroy shooter. Everything doesn’t fit into a nicely wrapped package of ideological understanding. The Gilroy kid had elements of white supremacy in him, yet he complained about whites. His radicalization appeared to be similar to those who have joined ISIS looking for meaning in their lives. And like the Las Vegas shooter where nothing came together to tell the story the way authorities wanted it to, now there is this gang member in south LA going around stabbing people to death just as the political left thought they had everyone so scared of guns that they might support gun control. Even as these stories broke and reporters were scratching their heads as producers scrambled to find a narrative they could put on television, it was released that the Bruce Ohr 3025 was released which showed clearly that the entire Russian investigation into President Trump’s campaign and early presidency was a complete hoax ran by our own FBI. Our own government was trying to pick winners and losers in the election to shape our country not by representation, but by force. In effect, the FBI was acting no differently than the kind of evil shown by Zachary Castaneda or the Gilroy shooter. Yet we are supposed to deal with all that evil equally and for that, we must admit to ourselves that there is only one way out, and that is with a gun at our hips and an understanding of how to use them.

Rich Hoffman

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

More Mass Killings in California: But why isn’t the media covering it?

OK, so a loser angry at the world committing robberies and stabbing people to death across Orange County in two different cities occurred yesterday evening, around 4 PM in Garden Grove and ended at Santa Ana at a 7-Eleven. Four people died in the rampage and 2 others were injured, which is more than the latest California shooting incident yet there was no wall to wall coverage on the cable and network news outlets. It was hardly covered at all. The perpetrator was yet another young person, this time a 33-year-old tattooed freak. He was a white guy, we don’t know much else about him at this time, but unquestionably he was a loser. So why no coverage, doesn’t everyone care about the poor people who were killed? Well, unfortunately, no. The problem with this killing spree was that it was not centralized to an emotional center people could relate to, like a school, a bar, or a Walmart, and that it didn’t involve a gun. No gun legislation or “red flag” law would have prevented these murders. Rather, this is evidence of what I have been saying for a long time, and why we need looser gun laws, not stricter ones. This is a social problem and we will see more of it, and nobody can handle that, because they are all a bit guilty in this matter. You can’t pass a law to protect us from ineptness, which has caused all these social problems. And that is why laws banning guns in any way at all will never stop the mass killings. If lunatics like this guy in Orange County want to kill people, they’ll just grab a knife, or whatever is available.

I hate to be right about all these things all the time. I was talking about the dangers of socialism in our public schools before Glenn Beck had his show on Fox in 2009 which arguably fed the Tea Party movement dramatically. The concerns have always been there, it didn’t take leaders to bring about the dialogue. Rather the conversations were going to emerge regardless of any particular person, whether it was me, Glenn Beck, or Donald Trump. People could see these things coming and they were concerned. And for good reason. Now we are seeing what we were all concerned about. Young people in the millennial category are disasters, results of epic social failures, drug legalization, a breakdown of the family, a loss of religion, and explosive and irresponsible entertainment culture, terrible educations specifically liberalized which didn’t prepare them for the real world—I could go on and on all day long. The bottom line is that these people are now in our mainstream culture and are decision makers. They don’t have unifying music like we might have had growing up, they have chaos and anger and they’ve had it their entire lives and now they can use weapons and function without their parents, and they are dangerous.

There is no way to put the lid back on the bottle. This generation of violence is going to have to play out. These kids are going to have to get older and be replaced by a newer generation that isn’t as bad as they are. I see hope there, perhaps the young people coming of age during the Trump administration will be better since as a nation we are talking about these problems openly. As much as people are upset at all the divisive rhetoric on social media these days at least the talks are happening. For these young killers, including this 33-year old stabbing murderer, they grew up where only the left was speaking, and they thought that was the path of the future because that was the only side they heard. They weren’t proud of America because nobody was defending it ten years ago when these kids were in their formulative years. Drugs were being pushed. Crazy music. Homosexual themes, loose sex, no religion except for environmentalism, socialist economies, selfless activism to drive leftist agendas, all that was in full swing and these kids are the result of those activities and beliefs.

We see even now all the radical bra burning hippies who were outright flower children in the 60s who are now heads of newspapers, colleges, and the publishing world, they are as radical as they were as young people only now they are in charge. For the foreseeable future, these modern millennials will get better but they will still believe the same things as they get older, and they will be dangerous for at least the next 30 years. They could snap at age 21, or 33, or 55—we will never know no matter how much “red flag” laws are passed. We will be helpless to solve the problem because we never dealt with the real issue. The problem was behavioral change activated by liberal, progressive values and the reaction that the human being had on those values. When those values don’t match up to reality, of course they will be traumatized. And when they are traumatized and nobody can help them out of it, they will sometimes lash out in violent ways. So we might as well get used to it. You can’t outlaw behavior, obviously.

We’re not talking about everyone of course. Most everyone feels some kind of anxiety about something or the other. But it only takes less than 1% of these troubled young people to become mass murderers that everyone fears. What you put in your mind ultimately makes us all, and most of what these murderers will be proven to have in common was bad stuff put in, so bad stuff came out. You can’t have a society that does not value life, come out being good. If the things we talk about is how bad capitalism is, or how we should kill babies with abortion, or how we should get stoned to escape from everything, what kind of world do we think these kids are going to make once they are responsible. This loser in Orange County was behaving just like a player of Grand Theft Auto would. Don’t tell me that video games have no influence on the behavior of young people. That 2018 study they keep pointing to is just as truthful as the FBI trying to tell us they weren’t spying on the Trump administration or that they weren’t trying to instigate a coup of his government in favor of Democrats.

The bottom line is that we are there, we are at a time where we have made these kids and now we have to deal with them as a society, and not just for a few years, but for the next half of a century. It will take a long time to correct the course that all these liberals have created in our society without much of a defense by conservatives. And this is the result. Killers on our streets, violence everywhere and a society numb to the shock of it all. And a media that is so much as conspiring activists that they won’t cover these stories because it doesn’t fit the gun control narrative that they all want. Because they all have a sense of it, that when average everyday people realize what a mess all this has been and they want to know who is responsible, Democrats do not want a society of guns to come after them to change out the ranks of power. They hope that like other places in the world, they can maintain their positions once the public finally understands what has happened to their country. Some do now, enough people to vote for President Trump. But those numbers will grow as these senseless murders go without offerings of real change. That’s when the wheels will really come off, which I would say has already started well in advance of this latest incident. I saw the wheel wobbling long ago, and now its too late. We will have to deal with the results.

Rich Hoffman

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

Democrat Policies Have Caused Mass Shootings: If we have Red Flag laws are we going to arrest all of them as potential terrorists?

Ahead of President Trump’s visit to Dayton, Ohio the Democrat mayor of Dayton was very disingenuous toward his intentions and toward guns in general. Rather than talk about the victims and the circumstances leading up to the recent mass shooting she made an open pitch for gun control which would have done nothing to stop the problem. Rather, the shooter was from her own political party and actually was an advocate for gun control. The shooter didn’t really care to live, and he knew that if he did conduct a mass shooting that the debate on gun control would rage, largely by his own making. So it was rather astonishing that Governor DeWine surrendered so quickly to appease gun control advocates when it was really political radicalism antagonistic toward President Trump’s successes that caused the violence. Yet nobody covered that issue. A few reporters tried to get the Dayton mayor to say something about the political motivations of the shooter, but she ignored the questions and deferred. Meanwhile, most establishment Republicans did exactly what Democrats wanted them to do really without any reason whatsoever.

Now rather than talking about the cause of the violence, everyone is talking about “red flag laws” which is a very dangerous platform. In the future, no matter what they say now, once we accept that red flags brought up by friends, neighbors or family are a means for preventing crimes then we have essentially entered the realm of the “Minority Report.” It will be the next level of social control which Google and Facebook are already performing for the government with censorship and is a direct attack not just on the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, but the Fourth and Fifth. Red flag laws are an absolute abomination of American law and serve only one purpose, by giving government more control for which they don’t deserve.

There were plenty of red flags surrounding the life of Conner Betts, but our government didn’t act on any of them. There were plenty of people including many mainstream reporters who were interacting with his extreme liberalism on social media, and he had a history going well back to high school that showed a propensity toward violence. Yet there he was running around in the world planning a mass killing. The solution to him was to have more concealed carry holders there on the spot to kill him within the opening shots instead of waiting for the 30 seconds that it actually took for the police on the scene to engage him. Because it was a nightlife district, there were plenty of police there with guns, so the carnage could have been much greater. But it could have been reduced even more if the engagement was within 5 to 10 seconds. I have a few guns that I carry that would have stopped that guy with or without body armor, and to be honest, in a society like the one we have now where moral conduct has lost its grip, that is the only solution for the short term, until we can restore some structure to our society once again. But we are a long way from that. Until we deal with the real problems, more concealed carry holders are going to be needed in traditional gun free zones so that we can cut down the reaction time from when a shooter reveals themselves, to when they are stopped. If politicians, especially on the liberal side of things don’t want Wild West shootouts in our streets, then they should have managed their cities better.

The Dayton mayor really made me sick over these last several days of news coverage. We have been talking about how Democrats are ruining cities and Cincinnati and Dayton are certainly no exception. I like both of those cities, but the evidence of Democrat leadership is grossly obvious. Yet the mayor only wanted to talk about laws like red flag and how to keep CCW holders from expanding into day cares. As she spoke it took everything I had to keep from leaping into the TV to explain to her that if we truly did what she wanted the entire Democrat party would have to be red flagged, because their rhetoric and activism against the flow of the nation makes them all a menace. Are we really going to arrest them all and throw them in jail because they “might” do something illegal and against the safety of society in general?

All liberals want out of these mass shootings are more laws that they can use later to get more control over all of us. Red flag laws once started will then be used to attack political opposition just as Google and Facebook use them now to attempt to control the First Amendment. Democrats are seeking to attack the entire Bill of Rights and they aren’t shy about it. And for most of us, we should see that as an open assault. Democrats in general don’t care about the people who died in these tragic shootings, they only want to see how they can advance their cause on the backs of them.

In Chicago, which is an important story, over 1500 people have been shot so far in 2019 to the date of this article. Most of those shootings have occurred in the south and west sides, which is filled with years and years of socialist government experimentation. The results have been a completely failed society that is obvious from the air when landing at O’Hara. There were 59 people shot the weekend of the so-called mass shootings. 7 people actually died which is just as bad as the Dayton mass killings, but nobody is talking about that with equal vigor. That is because the cause of the shootings are the results of Democrat policies and social tampering. Guns are already illegal in Chicago yet they have no control as a police force of how to stop those killings which are happening every day. More laws won’t do anything to stop the problem because the causes are in education, social safety nets and their effects, low moral conduct—no dads in the homes, drugs, and poor economic outlooks. Neighborhoods that are poor have generally adopted socialist policies over the years pushing capitalism to the suburbs which cause bad options for jobs and micro economies. High taxes, high government tampering into investments, and government run housing that nobody wants to live in are all contributing factors. To fix all those things we have to admit that it is liberal policies that have failed. No new law can mask that.

It is good that at least President Trump gets it and he showed as much on his visits to El Paso and Dayton. The political class under him are still functioning from unearned guilt, but maybe they will follow his lead and stand up for themselves. Red flag laws are already in place, but what are you going to do when we have an FBI and CIA who see and monitor this activity but fail to act. Yet Alex Jones and many other conservatives are de-platformed off social media for uttering nothing even close to the kind of rhetoric that Connor Betts participated in leading up to the shooting. The lack of attention to his activity almost look as if authorities wanted him to commit a mass shooting so that more anti-gun legislation could be enacted. That isn’t the kind of thing many of us would utter in the light of day, but we all think it within the confines of our minds. And it isn’t Democrats that are changing their tune, they are demanding that Republicans change. That is outlandish because it is Republicans who are offering and have been offering solutions. Democrats have been making them, and their lack of responsibility in the matter is truly astonishing.

Rich Hoffman

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

Republicans Should Stand By Candice Keller: Playing into Democrat strategies will just get more people killed

This is the problem with Republicans, they don’t stick together when there’s trouble, and they allow themselves to wear unearned guilt on things like these mass shootings that occurred this week. I certainly don’t think Candice Keller who represents the 53rd District in Ohio should step down for comments she made about the shooting on her Facebook account. We aren’t living in that world any more, if we ever were.

Comments made in the arena of free speech, the First Amendment should not be grounds for termination, which is precisely how liberals have wanted to set the stage, and any Republican who thinks they are doing good by calling for Candice to step down, are feeding a vast evil that is undoing all social order. It doesn’t matter how much you salute the flag or tout a record of public service, or how valiant you may think you are, if you are so quick to throw someone like Keller on the trash heap for saying her opinion of what the cause of the mass shootings are, then you are just as bad as the Democrats.

Keller is running for the senate in Ohio and given all the effort it takes to do such a thing, she should probably reconsider so that this whole thing doesn’t prolong deep into next year. There will be other elections, but she certainly shouldn’t give up her seat as a representative of the 53rd District. Who can argue that the cause of these increases in mass shootings are not caused by a breakdown in family structure, as Candice said, and that recreational marijuana and violent video games are not the cause? I think it is laughable that the video game industry is citing a 2018 study which says there is no connection between violence and video games. I play them, a lot—and I can call bullshit on that from personal experience. If we want to accurately discuss the cause of mass shootings, then we need to have an honest appraisal from everyone. Calling for more gun control doesn’t even begin to understand the cause it only deals with the effect of the matter, and that won’t get the job done. Many of the things that Candice said in her Facebook post were honest reflections that should be investigated as a cause of mass shootings.

As pointed out by Martha McCallum who did a piece on Fox News that showed most of the mass shooters from 1969 to the present were male and without fathers is a jarring statistic that should be at the lead of every story. Instead, we are supposed to live in a world of gender neutrality and avoid speaking of the matter which is likely the leading cause. Additionally, as I have pointed out frequently, marijuana use by itself isn’t a positive thing for our society, yet again, most of these mass shooters are users of the drug. Combine the elements of marijuana with depression medicine which is all too common these days in young people, and we have the potential for lots of disaster. Its one thing to be accepting of social experimentation such as with homosexual lifestyles and intoxication as if those were values worth defending, but when people start dying over the results of these social experiments, it’s a serious problem worth analyzing. Keller as a state representative certainly represents my point of view. It is pretty weak for other Republicans to turn on her the way they have out of fear of being critical of lifestyles that are at the center of the core issue of mass shootings.

Hillary Clinton threw her two cents on the heap as well showing exactly why she isn’t president. She pointed out on Twitter that other places in the world don’t have mass shootings like this and they have their own mentally ill people to deal with. We don’t of course know what causes people to become mentally ill in all cases, we just deal with the result that it exists. She said the difference is that we have guns in America which then let mentally ill people go on these mass shootings. Well, we are a free society where many of the places she is talking about in the world are not. Guns equal freedom and that danger is part of the cost of having that freedom. Having a good military and a police force doesn’t go far enough in protecting those freedoms. We may want to give ourselves that illusion, but in essence, it is the freedom of each and every one of us to own firearms and to use them to defend ourselves that keep freedom alive. And we use the First Amendment to debate so that we don’t have to use guns to defend our positions. Once people are fired for things they say, then we are playing into a vile strategy that Democrats have been trying to impose on us for many years. Voters will decide whether they want Candice Keller to continue to represent the 53rd District. She doesn’t need to step down out of some sacrifice to the liberal left.

Clearly the liberals of this country want to remove the Second Amendment and the First by instigating violence and public opinion that can allow them to acquire power without bloodshed. These attempts have been made all through history, often violently, and this latest period in our timeline is no different. Only liberals don’t want to take power by force, but rather by sentiment. If they can get Republicans to do their dirty work for them, they will. But what Candice did isn’t much different than the way Donald Trump became president. The Party may want to toe the line which liberals draw, but voters don’t. That’s why they elected him specifically. And that’s one of the reasons that voters voted for Candice Keller.

If we don’t deal with the real problem of mass shootings then they will continue, which I have been warning about for a long time. I would offer that the cost of all this social experimentation that has been instigated by the liberal side of the political spectrum hasn’t just been uncomfortable, its been very destructive to the developing minds of our youth. And now that those disturbed young people are all grown up, they are dangerous as free people. Guns are a part of a free culture because it gives people the right to defend themselves from others who might want to impose on them in some way, either politically, or socially. But with that comes a basic understanding of social value. If we don’t share those basic values, then we are going to have conflicts, which obviously we do. In a lot of ways, and this was certainly true of the kid who committed the mass killing in Dayton, liberals want to provoke this kind of violence because it gives them the changes they want. Secretly they want to see these deaths because it drives their agenda. 50 people died over the weekend in Chicago, but we don’t see those people plastered all over the newspapers. We only see that there were two mass shootings that combined killed 29 people. Yet every weekend in Chicago where guns are illegal, about that many people die, and nobody cares. They don’t care because it is the failure of liberalized culture that is the cause.

To continue to wear that mask, and to divert attention away from themselves, Democrats have been using the kindness of Republicans to share in the guilt of these tragedies. But conservatives had nothing to do with the violence. Even the El Paso murders were driven by left leaning ideology. President Trump has never said to kill immigrants. He has simply resisted the liberal strategy of overflowing our borders so fast that we can’t deal with the processing of them because Democrats need the votes to stay in power. Its as simple as that. Any neo-Nazi type of person that may be out there are just another version of a liberal. The media calls them the “alt-right” but that is far from accurate. No conservative believes in racism and one race rule, only Democrats. Democrats supported slavery; Republicans ended it. Hitler was a socialist, certainly not a conservative. And many of the vile things that are going on in our country now are not the fault of Republicans who stand for family values, good decent public conduct, and honor among friends and neighbors do not share the guilt on the mass shooting problem. Democrats do and I thought Candice Keller gave her thoughts on the matter accurately, which should be protected under the First Amendment. Not punished and thrown away just because Democrats want her to be. Until Republicans realize that is the game, we are all playing, they will continue to be victims, and mass shootings will continue without resolution.

Rich Hoffman

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

 

Want to Stop Mass Shootings: Declare Democrats as insane and unable to buy guns and make smoking pot a serious crime

Here is the problem with the mass gun shootings, for one, we have chemical problems due to intoxicants, depression medicine, pot, and other bad combinations that are altering decision making. The other is purely political and how those interpretations are interpreted by young, and inexperienced kids. Both shooters, Patrick Crusius from the El Paso incident and Connor Betts from Dayton were young people. As the mainstream media tried to focus the attention on a “white nationalist” movement they are missing the real problem. For instance, both shooters were Democrats, or at least leaning in that direction and were likely very influenced by the victimization culture uttered by the current crop of presidential candidates. In Crusius’ case, he was more of a traditional progressive. Below was a part of the manifesto left behind by Crusius:

“In the near future, America will have to initiate a basic universal income to prevent widespread poverty and civil unrest as people lose their jobs (to automation). Joblessness is in itself a source of civil unrest. The less dependents on a government welfare system, the lower the unemployment rate, the better. Achieving ambitious social projects like universal healthcare and UBI would become far more likely to succeed if tens of millions of defendants are removed.”

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/08/el-paso-terrorist-is-a-hard-core-progressive-and-white-nationalist-wants-universal-income-and-universal-healthcare/

Connor Betts from Ohio was affiliated with an Against All Gods movement which is an atheist organization. He was also a pot smoker who wanted socialism and he wanted to vote for Elizabeth Warren. Those are all important aspects to the causes of school shootings. Obviously, the other shooter Crusius was a left leaning activist more on the side of what we might call an American Nazi, which to remind everyone is still on the political left of where the country is. The focus on racism that comes from the left on the political spectrum is exclusive to them. It has nothing to do with the conservative positions as they are known in America. What we are dealing with are kids who abuse drugs, have family issues, and have just come out of heavily liberalized educations in both public schools and college. They are very much the creations of the political policies of Democrats and have nothing to do with the Trump administration other than Democrats desperate to beat him in an election have turned up the utterances of desperation from their party likely pushing these pot smoking video game players out into the world with guns they know very little about to take matters in to their own hands.

Gun control isn’t even a consideration, first because constitutionally, it’s just not on the table. We have the Second Amendment to protect ourselves from losers like these guys. When political mismanagement occurs, which is certainly the case in producing young people like these killers, we need to be able to defend ourselves from them. While the police acted well in both shootings the fact remains that they can’t solve these problems fast enough, so the solution can never come from the state to end these problems. Only in dealing with the cause of these problems will, and blaming Donald Trump for pointing out the obvious problems that the political left have created, such as racism, socialist yearnings, (Conner Betts really wanted socialism) and the attacks against white males, can we begin to solve these problems. After all, if you are a white male and have been told that you are part of the problem, you have been trained to be a leftist in school, and are under the influence of drugs, what are you going to do, work hard to have a family, a steady job, and a house—or are you going to become a mass shooter and end your life on the earth in a blaze of glory?

Mass shootings are the result of failed public policy. When our society is failing in creating a youth that values life and American lifestyles you get losers like Patrick Crusius and Connor Betts. And there are likely thousands of them out there in a culture of millions, and any of them could be the next mass shooter. The state created these people so there is no way that the state could be expected to manage them through gun control or even mental deficiency detection. Any marijuana user who is also combining the effects of that drug with depression medication could be the next volatile bomb that will grab a gun and mass kill whoever is in their path.

But that has not been the narrative, the only thing anybody in the mainstream media wants to talk about is some law that might mask their failure in society in producing these kids in the first place, but it won’t solve the problem. Only in reestablishing a sense of morality will the problem of mass shootings be reduced. But there isn’t any hope when a kid like Connor Betts who doesn’t believe in any kind of god, our legal system has no reach for him. After all, how could he swear to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, so help him God? There is nothing to compel him to tell the truth to anybody so long as he has those kinds of beliefs, and once he takes such a radical step, there isn’t much to keep him from wanting to kill a bunch of people just to get revenge on his sister for some family dispute.

Specifically, Connor Betts was politically active indicating that he wanted people to vote blue, he supported “the squad” and he hated Donald Trump, instead he supported Elizabeth Warren. Given those criteria as we discuss the definitions of mental illness and if such a criterion should be established prior to gun sales we might as well propose that all Democrats are potential mass shooters and should not be able to purchase guns. Anybody calling themselves a Democrat based on the history of them should be considered a potential mass shooter and scrutinized as dangerous. If we really want to solve the problem of mass shooters, we need to look at the behavior that causes them and start acting on it.

What is most disappointing of all is that so many Democrats and other liberals jumped all over these mass shootings, which their policies caused, to propose more failures they want to impose. They are such a disaster as a group of people and based on their track record, should be considered a menace. What is even worse is that conservatives play into their hands by accepting guilt for the shooting that have nothing to do with reality. It is not immoral to support the Second Amendment. It is immoral to support pot smokers who are atheists and dream of destroying our entire civilization. Those people have decided they don’t want to be in America and live by its rules, they want to change it, to undo it, with either a godless value system or a universal anti-capitalist wage. And these attackers of our public gun free zones were born and bred in our education system and had their tempers poked by members of the Democratic party, and once they had been good and stoked, become the next killers to hit the news and attempt to get the dialogue on gun control which all Democrats want to see, for which they themselves are the threat.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Cause of the Mass Shootings in El Paso, Texas, California, and Dayton, Ohio

It is pot and our culture of marijuana use that we need to be looking at in relation to the two shootings that have occurred within hours of each other, one in El Paso at a Walmart that killed 20 people and wounded 26. The other in downtown Dayton that killed at least ten and injured 16. In the Texas case the shooter was captured, he was a 21-year-old kid filled with spewing hate and apparently left a manifesto behind very conveniently tying the case together for authorities. In Dayton, the shooter was shot and killed by police eliminating the threat. There are still a lot of unknowns about the cases that will come out in the coming days and weeks, but in essence what we do know is that young people are largely involved in perpetrating these shootings and that as I’ve said before, the likely culprits are the sudden use of marijuana now openly consumed, that is causing this spike in violence among our youth. Gun control of any kind will not stop the carnage, and neither will avoiding the radical shoving of people into typically conservative areas by immigrants from communist and socialist countries just so Democrats can get their voting numbers up.

Under no circumstances should anybody cowardly shoot other people in such a violent way, there are no reasons for it whatsoever. None. Yet in places like El Paso where illegal immigration is literally invading their city and trying to turn their red state purple, people are very angry about the push by Democrats to overflow the border with liberal voters who are trying to change their country. It has nothing to do with skin color, but in the values of the people. The illegal immigrants just want a chance in life and where they came from typically are very oppressive socialist governments. So any freedoms they can get in the United States are many times greater than where they came from so they have nothing to lose. But for Americans, they see an invasion which is actually what it is. The immigration is being driven by failed government policies that are actually supported by Democrats to inspire them to flood the border. The evils that drive that push are promoted, not stopped, so that immigration will actually happen. So let’s get all that into context right out of the gate.

Then to make matters worse, and to actually drive up the body counts when these terrible shootings occure, we still have gun free zones such as inside shopping complexes and in bar districts like the situation in Dayton where we have taught people to duck and run waiting for authorities to arrive minutes later when seconds are needed to eliminate the threat. If we had a policy of stand and fight, guns would be friendly to a positive resolution as opposed to aggressor. In both recent shooting situations, a good guy with a gun present could have killed the aggressors quickly and with much less carnage. Our political system will say that we can’t have shootouts in our public places, yet the case remains that police can’t get to these shootings fast enough to lower the body counts. The solution is more gun coverage and much more use of the CCW in public places than we have now, not less.

But it is the cause of these shootings that we should all be concerned about because what we have is a massive failure of Democrat policy that is removing hope from young people and causing them to turn to violence to get their point across, and as a culture we have failed them. That was certainly the case with the 21-year-old kid Santino Legan who killed three at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California. In spite of security at the event, Legan cut a slit in the security fence and stepped through to release carnage making reference to getting “high” left behind on his social media posts. In other shootings leading up to this event especially among young people they all had history of marijuana use, and we have to draw conclusions that Patrick Crusius who was also 21 years old and arrested near the shooting scene in El Paso also had some history with drugs and medication. The bars in Dayton certainly have with them an element of intoxication that is the root to most bad judgment. The cause of these evens is not the gun culture that is America, it is why there is a gun culture to begin with, as the desire for violence is ever present in the hearts of people.

Video games and movies are certainly contributing factors. I would say that it opens the mind up to such a violent situation even though most people don’t resort to violence to solve their problems. All it takes is a small percentage that will. Add to that the effects that depression drugs and actual psychedelic effects that something like marijuana can inspire in some people and we have a ripe condition for these mass shootings. Poor parental structures for young people to grow up in, liberalized educations, a bar toward adulthood that keeps getting pushed longer down the road to where age 21 isn’t considered old anymore. We keep these kids in a state of dependence for far too long and by the time they arrive into their 20s they have been treated as children too long. These are all very serious contributing circumstances that can’t be ignored considering that most of these mass shooters are all young people.

I have so little trust in our government that gun control isn’t on the table at all for me. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there were agents of our own government sympathetic to the Democrat cause who worked chat rooms and other Facebook methods to push some of these disturbed kids toward violence to set the stage for upcoming elections and to try to throw a wet blanket on President Trump’s success at pulling the nation together toward America first goals. Yes, I think the agents of George Soros are that dirty and would do much like Charlie Manson did with his Helter Skelter murders. It wasn’t him who did the killings, he inspired others to do them instead. Obviously, these kids doing these mass shootings didn’t wake up one day and decide to throw their lives away with mass carnage. There were events that led up to such a radical decision and we simply can’t trust authorities to tell us what kind of internet activity led to the violence or if such evidence would ever make its way into court. The same bad Democrat radicalism that is pushing people from other countries to flood the American border for refuge is the same likely that is pushing these kids to act on their impulse to commit these violent acts. So let’s not get hung up on the poor people innocently shot. As tragic as that may be, there is a lot more violence and evil going on all over the world that is behind the push for the border, many rapes and economic conditions that are literally killing many thousands of people who will never have their names released on ABC News.

If people don’t want to see Wild West shootouts in front of bars in Dayton, or at festivals in California, or even shopping at Walmart in El Paso, Texas, then they should stop tampering with people’s lives to inspire political movement in their favor. They should outlaw intoxicants and promote strong family values and guidance. They should also make kids more responsible earlier, like at age 18 instead of forcing kids to be kids until they are 21 so they don’t get used to having adult bodies with the minds of children playing violent video games at all hours of the day with no consequences to their thoughts and actions. As I said before, with the condition of the youth what it is today, I would expect many more of these mass shootings. They are a failure of our society at the level of its foundation and the guilt for that falls squarely on Democrat policies that have created them. And until that is understood the only method for solving this problem is to have more people with more guns on the streets to protect innocent people when these things do happen. Because the number won’t go down. We are just getting started with this new generation and they are very disturbed and dangerous as a demographic group and its time we start dealing with that fact instead of avoiding it with cries for more gun control. Gun control only puts more power into the idiots who have caused this problem in the first place, and that would be a terrible injustice.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Communist Swing from ‘High Noon’ to Trump: Why what Jerry Nadler is doing is far worse than McCarthyism

I think it goes without saying that I love John Wayne and westerns in general, but I have always disagreed with The Duke on his opinion about the great film High Noon. I have never seen it as an allegory on the blacklisting and the congressional investigations led by Joseph McCarthy, which many think it was. Yes, there were communists in Hollywood and yes it is true that Carl Foreman, the screenwriter of High Noon was one of them. The un-American activities were in full swing in 1952 led by Russia to penetrate Hollywood so essentially, they could get the control they have today during the years of Donald Trump. As I have listened to the American leftists reaction to Trump this past week and watched all the activity about the FBI and current hearings led by Jerry Nadler and the rest of the Democrats trying to impeach President Trump, I think we can look back at this documentary about the making of High Noon with a new eye toward history. Personally, I’m tired of hearing about how bad McCarthyism was on America and what impact blacklisting had on Hollywood. That cry baby stuff is long over. Conservatives are blacklisted much worse than any of the communists in Hollywood were then, so let’s revisit the morality of that time without the tears that the left have been hiding behind for years.

Truth be told, I spent the first twenty years of my adult life working toward a career in entertainment and planned to have a Hollywood film stint, and at several points I made major strides in that direction. But I am a Cincinnati conservative not that much unlike many stars who have made it in Hollywood quite spectacularly, but times have changed. If we were living in the days of High Noon where John Wayne set the standard and had the clout to run communists like Carl Foreman out of the country, as Wayne did before High Noon was even released, then I would likely be working in Hollywood right now. So in many ways I could lay claim to being blacklisted all of my adult life from the things I really enjoy. But unlike those complaining left leaning losers, I was able to do other things in my life and I have been successful in other aspects anyway. So what is there to cry about unless you are a one trick pony like most of Hollywood was and still is. They are probably worse today than they were in the time of High Noon’s release.

However, John Wayne made it very public that he didn’t like High Noon because he considered it un-American, and Lloyd Bridges was in an acting group that had lots of communists in it, which didn’t help. The American left loved High Noon because they thought of it as commentary on the McCarthy hearings, as Gary Cooper’s character Marshal Kane was a target for revenge for an outlaw that he had put in jail years ago, before his anticipated retirement. The train bringing the villain was to arrive at High Noon and the bandit was intent to bring his gang to the Marshal to kill him. The Marshal was planning to retire and marry his bride to be, but he is still the law in Hadleyville so he had an honorable obligation to fulfil his job as the lawman. Even though it may kill him. Knowing that a gang of four other killers are going to accompany the leader Kane tries to get other members of the town to help him, but nobody would.

The Soviet Union did not like High Noon because they felt it glorified the individual. Even though there were communists working on the film and the McCarthyism was in full swing in Washington D.C. it wasn’t enough for them and they made sure that even though the film won 4 Oscars because the American left wanted the film to do well, it wasn’t enough for the U.S.S.R. So, in that context it should be clear that John Wayne saw the big picture of the matter and just didn’t like High Noon viewing it as an un-American activity. Wayne was so adamant about his dislike for High Noon that he went into production for Rio Bravo as a direct pro-American answer. So, these are not new disputes these discussions about Trump’s swing back to the political right and waving the American flag around in reaction to socialist and communist propaganda. In the days of High Noon, it was denied that communism was even happening, but after the recent debates with the Democrats has shown, socialism and communism are very much the platforms of their party and their intention. So, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody is hiding it anymore. They were always trying to infect American culture with collectivist Marxism in some version or another. If it wasn’t John Wayne standing up to it, it is now Donald Trump. But the effort has always been there, and the debate is not new.

What has everyone in a panic now as opposed to the times of High Noon is that the political left felt that the pendulum was swinging in their direction in 1952, and it was. Leftist politics and open socialism were being debated, even if masked with different names and that swing has gone on for well over 50 years. But people are sick of it, and for anybody who saw Trump’s rally in Cincinnati in 2019 could attest to, people are now rejecting the political left. Trump is just the vehicle; the movement is taking a life of its own. For the same reasons that westerns were popular in 1952, conservative ideas are reemerging from the aftermath of failed socialist policies regardless of what political theater would like to believe.

The blacklisting that is going on currently with Facebook, Google, YouTube and many others is far worse for conservatives than it was ever in Hollywood as a direct reaction to McCarthyism. And its not John Wayne anymore trying to keep the pendulum from swinging to the left with more and more pro-American westerns. This time it is the left trying to fight the trend, the media that the communists did get control of. They couldn’t get the anti-American ideas to stick and patriotism is back in style and in spite all their screams of warning, are losing. Regardless of the political tendencies of the movie High Noon, I think it’s a great movie about society failing the individual yet the individual doing what needs to be done against all odds to do the right thing. It is certainly an American film especially in relation to the films of today which are far, far, far more left leaning than High Noon. But it is interesting given today’s political climate to look back at that time when the left was winning and building their case and crying about blacklisting. They have gone far further than anything John Wayne did or any other pro-American advocate during the periods of the Hollywood westerns. I could feel bitter about it, but as I said, I moved on to other industrious efforts. The left can’t and they are choking on their own crap and you know what, I think its funny. I am enjoying the show, because they deserve everything they are getting now. They started it. And its good to see them suffering now.

Rich Hoffman

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

Gurpreet Singh is in the Butler County Jail for Murders in West Chester

So what makes a man want to kill his wife and her family, or even think about doing it? Well, only a lowlife functioning from sheer evil would even consider such a thing, and a generally stupid person who didn’t know how to navigate the difficulties that can take place in family politics. But that is precisely what people are wondering after the indictment of Gurpreet Singh that West Chester police say shot and killed his wife, Shalinderjit Kaur and her parents Parmiit Kaur and Hakiakat Singh and his wife’s sister Amarjit Kaur. At the time of the murders in my community of West Chester which is one of the best places to live in the world the behavior was mystifying, and nobody really knew what to think about it. The way normal people deal with family problems in an affluent community is that they go play golf or partake in any of the other wonderful things that there is to do in West Chester that can ease off the steam. But for dumb people encumbered by cultural standards that are not conducive to intelligent discourse, it appears that Singh wanted out of his marriage contract with his wife and her family, so he killed them with 18 bullet holes dispatched in their little apartment not far off RT 747 in the valley beneath Beckett Ridge.

Cold blooded killers are often good liars and con artists who can lie to your face and sound very convincing. In fact, it was Singh who called the police on that dreadful night in April 28th of 2019. When they arrived, they detained him for questioning but did not arrest him as a suspect because he was able to sell himself off as a credible victim who had found the bodies and went into a panic. But Singh seemed fishy from the start, I certainly thought it was him who had committed the murders. Of course the thing to do was to withhold judgment until the investigation fleshed out the details and those details did emerge. Many of us who live and work in West Chester took the murders as a personal offense because those kinds of things should not happen in such a nice community with nice people. But the situation appears to be an assimilation issue where he forgot that in America there are many other ways of solving disputes rather than killing your wife’s family.

But Singh was crafty and sold himself off as innocent which police considered safe the night of the murders. Then when there was a vigil for the slain family Singh was there to essentially continue selling off his innocence by participating. But he moved to Connecticut where he was arrested a month ago once all the arrows of the investigation pointed at him. On Friday of this past week he was extradited back to Ohio and booked into the Butler County Jail on charges of four accounts of murder.

That certainly isn’t the typical case of other members of the Sikh community in Cincinnati. They don’t typically kill each other when there are family disputes, but Singh obviously played this trend to his advantage by being very cooperative with police. However, in many places in the world where marriage means different things to different people, a simple divorce is not always a path out for irreparable disputes so apparently murder is the only way for their small-minded view of the world to deal with the matter. It’s a situation many of us face, even if we’d like things to be different. When you marry a person, you marry their family, otherwise the relationship would just be considered an extended date, or a roommate with benefits. Marriage is the unification of families with all different value systems with their own histories, so it can be very difficult to navigate through troubled parts of a marriage especially when the extended family is involved which in Singh’s case, they were all in his apartment. It is hard to imagine a case where a family argument would ensue that would inspire someone like Singh to grab a gun and kill them all not thinking through the implications. Then throwing that gun in the lake outside of their apartment hoping that nobody would find it. Then call the police and try to sell off his innocence. Really, only an idiot would do something like that. It’s a sad story in every case, and a real insult that the killer has hung that stupidity on our community that really doesn’t deserve it.

Of course, what’s worse is to have the job of the attorney, in this case Charlie Rittgers who had to go out yesterday and declare Singh’s innocence. What a low life job to do, to offer yourself as a voice to such an evil person. If Singh didn’t do the killings, then who did? He left motive and evidence all over the place and his body language was terrible. But in our legal system, we are supposed to give the benefit of doubt and force evidence that proves guilt, well I’m fine with what I’ve heard so far. I thought Singh was guilty that first night, probably the police did too, but needed to gather all the evidence. Now that there is enough evidence for an indictment, what a terrible job to offer yourself as an attorney to try to explain away such an evil. It really is a disgusting endeavor under even the best of circumstances.

When families don’t get along you just can’t kill them or try to hurt them. You must have at least enough mental facilities to work with them otherwise you should never get married to whomever the family is connected to. Most of us have those skills, obviously, Gurpreet Singh didn’t. Instead he used his limited intellect to attempt to pass himself off as an innocent member of the Sikh community. But that is where the real sense of justice is quite evident, because it was other members of the Sikh community who were quite convinced that the killer was Singh because there is still enough honor left in their culture, as opposed to mainstream American culture, to make judgment calls when bad behavior becomes obvious. Singh insulted us all when he tried to pass himself off as an innocent hoping that his broken English would sell him as a husband in mourning over his slain family. But his family and friends knew better and helped the police get to the real story which turns out to be just another sad domestic violence case where resolutions to the problems were out of reach of Singh’s mind.

It wouldn’t be any of our business if the killer didn’t put it in our laps with a murder that should have never occurred. I’m sure it will come out in court, but likely the people Singh killed knew he was a phony which is why he wanted to get rid of them. He came across as a phony in all his public appearances almost shining like a light bulb for a guilty plea. A tough job for Rittgers but if that’s how you decide to make a buck covering for killers, then have fun. For the rest of us, we want to see justice brought to fruition because this idiot put a stain on our community that it clearly didn’t deserve. Singh’s lack of skill and understanding in how to deal with his family should not have given our community the black eye that it did and for that, we all deserve to be more than angry about it.

Rich Hoffman

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

You Can’t Hide Bad Behavior Behind Imaginary Racism

One of the changes I’ll be making on this site is the perspective that it speaks from. For instance, most of the time that I have written on this blog site it has been from an underdog perspective, as a member of the real “Resistance” where our country was literally being taken away from us. Normally, on a day to day basis I only associate with really smart people who are plugged in to what is going on in the world. However, and we all go through these things, I have had a family member in the hospital for an extended period and I have been pulled out of my natural state routines. So I have had to speak to people who really don’t care what’s going on in the world or they weren’t part of any “resistance” which is how I think of the Tea Party movement. Even in the entertainment community for which I have several very good friends, the trend is to not talk about politics because nobody wants to be divisive. Yet I continue to spend a lot of my time on what is actually going on and would consider myself well above an elevated state of pop culture knowledge of world events. And from my perspective a truth that everyone can relate to has emerged from the Trump administration and a new kind of politics is emerging. People can say that they don’t like Donald Trump, but history will remember his presidency as a great victory in global politics and the way we do business as a republic. So it is from that perspective that I will have future articles here and elsewhere. I am quite confident that history will catch up.

The biggest element to have fallen in politics recently is this whole notion that everything is racist which has any kind of measure to gauge success against. The Elijah Cummings issue of the 7th District in Maryland is a great example as President Trump has pointed out with his tweets so far this week describing the mess that Baltimore specifically is in. Like most big cities, Baltimore has not seen the benefit of the vast amounts of money that has been poured into its budgets. When a problem like gun violence or homelessness is targeted as an objective to go after, Democrats, all of them, just don’t have a management approach that solves any problems. Their philosophy makes more of the detrimental behavior we see not less of it, and in the case of Elijah Cummings he is a great example of it. While he runs a lot of the investigations that have been going on in Congress for a number of years, he hasn’t been able to solve the hard problems of his district with any amount of money that have been tossed into it. Just like my argument about school levies, anywhere where progressive politics is the theme of management effort, failure is attached.

To hide this obvious evidence from the public progressive politicians have decided that they would use “racism” as a shield against their failed approach. Watching Chris Wallace on Fox Sunday this week was quite a shocking bit of reporting from what I think is one of the best in the business. Wallace couldn’t get it through his thick skull that Trump’s comments about Cummings district were quite valid, just as the situation was for what we call “The Squad,” the four congresswomen who are progressive activists who have also been the target of President Trump’s outrage. Trump is a guy who made his living building elegant buildings and golf courses. To him roads with pot holes make them dumps, so from his measurement, which is the same as most people, places where homicides are up, respect for the police are down, per capita income that does not rid an area of homelessness and drug addiction are dumps, and I think we can all agree. The only thing that progressives have to defend themselves from such a striking judgement is to proclaim that it is racist to have an opinion, which is of course ridiculous.

What was outrageous about what Wallace did as what I think of as a great reporter is that he played straight into the race narrative which I found in my recent interactions with “normal people” (people who are more concerned with the kind of grill they have in their back yard than what is going on in politics) is that race was accepted as a measurement of value, which its clearly not. People have accepted this notion that people of color should not be criticized in any way about anything and if you really get down to it, that is why a lot of these inner cities are failing and people are dying in filth and poor living conditions under addicted circumstances, is because nobody—especially white people—feel they can have an opinion on the matter. Now it has become obvious that Fox News is not a bastion of conservative value. Quite the contrary, Wallace himself is listed as a Democrat and the network as a whole has moved far to the political left now that Rupert Murdoch has taken a back seat to the new CEO Suzanne Scott. One of the big decisions under Scott was in hiring Donna Brazile who was fired from the DNC for rigging the election in favor of Hillary Clinton. So Fox News is not headed in a good direction. They are still more conservative than the rest of the media outlets that are mainstream but that’s not saying much.

As I said, I know a lot of people in entertainment and talk about a double standard. Many of them are afraid to have conservative opinions because they won’t get work, even though most of the audiences for modern media content lean toward a conservative nature. Yet Joss Whedon who is a big time Disney film director, responsible for the Marvel movies and even co-wrote Toy Story thought that he could send out an anti-Trump tweet saying “We have a racist, fascist president who’s using armed thugs in law enforcement & illegal militias to keep us cowed & hopeless & he’ll take the 2020 election by armed force & blatant, treasonous criminality & that’s us now, we’re the country with concentration camps so happy 4th.” For that Whedon wasn’t dropped from any film projects, Disney hasn’t distanced themselves from him, they just let it go. But as conservatives, if any of us said just a fraction of that one time, we’d be raked through the coals and tortured in the court of public opinion.

Of course, it’s ridiculous, but what’s important to understand is that the real anger that is coming from Whedon and Wallace along with many others is that they have come to realize that they do not have their finger on the pulse of America. They have an ideology that has been built on ideas of failure over time and they used the quiet nature of America who live and let live to justify their phony belief system. Meanwhile, bad ideas weren’t challenged which impoverished places like Baltimore in the wake of nobody thinking of criticizing the place wanted to be called names for pointing out the obvious. But that is changing and President Trump knows it. Not only that, but for the first time that I can think of a person running for a second term of office isn’t afraid to point it out because there isn’t any real competition for Trump in the 2020 election and all these Democrats know it. All they have for a defense is to cry racism even though it was they who put women and minorities into these political roles then expected nobody to criticize their bad behavior just because of skin color and sex. The stupid assumption was on their original strategy, not in the reality of the situation. The world is conservative and getting more so. The covers have been ripped away and not even Fox News is safe. And that is a trait that they will all have to get used to because the country and the world is moving away from their sentiments, not toward them.

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

Steampunk and the Future of Technology

My readers here might have noticed my new mask which is kind of Steampunkish and likely wondered what the deal with it was. Well, I was shopping with my family in the famous Charleston City Market which has been around since 1804. One of the booths had kind of a Steampunk theme which my kids are into. I haven’t paid much attention to the movement because to me it represented a time that never occurred and was rooted in “what ifs” instead of factual observation and an understanding of history. Steampunk however has turned out to be very aligned with what I want to do with my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business so through buying this mask it gave me several good ideas to build off of, so I started using it on my social media platforms because I think its pretty cool.

Death and life have very much been a part of my thinking lately, I’ve had some sick family, my own aging process and all this constant news about artificial intelligence taking over the human race–becoming actually a terminator type of conflict that seems much more possible today than it did when that popular movie first came out—has been on my mind. The mask to me is a clear indication that we can enhance our own flesh now, and the future looks to be even more of a case for it. So even when our flesh dies of natural causes we can continue to live on through various mechanical means, and this new mask of mind makes me think of those potentials and consequences, so I was very excited to get it. And in talking with my kids about Steampunk as an art movement that’s when it became clear that my argument for going back into the Wild West period to look at our value systems, which is key to my own efforts, was the same in bridging those values with the technology of the future.

As kind of a prerequisite to buying that mask my wife and I spent some time in Gatlinburg, Tennessee looking at grandfather clocks, which have always been on my radar. There is a very nice store on the main strip there that we have always gone in and contemplated. Even though these days a digital display clock is often better and far, far cheaper, there has always been a charm for me in the craftsmanship that goes into a grandfather clock that I crave. And at the height of the Victorian era for which the Wild West period was a part of that is why the stylized outfits and fonts looked the way they did. It was a very exciting time where guns became very reliable and could be used to shape a culture as the Victorian designs immigrated from Europe and moved with the expanding train system into the wild frontier of western expansion. These days many of our smartest people, people who enjoy thinking, are finding that they enjoy the values of that period and would like to see a return to those values. But we are all on the technological frontier of so many other positive elements that we must find a way to bridge these values, which is how Steampunk came to be as an art form.

Its not at all a mainstream thing yet, or if it ever will be. But one thing is quite clear, it was mainstream enough to have that mask I bought displayed at the very popular Charleston City Market and people walking by all stopped to look at the crafts displayed at that booth, so there is some very obvious curiosity by most people about this type of art, whether they understand it consciously or not. I suspect that subconsciously most people are thinking the same thing, they don’t want to lose themselves as individuals in the technology of the future, and they very much want to be in command of that relationship. We don’t want to lose our lives to technology, but rather want to see humans continue to set the agenda—but one way or the other, tech is here, and we must find our way with it. So suddenly, I’m quite a fan of Steampunk.

This mask is appropriate for me because honestly, I have no intentions of every dying. Now the nature of life may change, but my essence I suspect will live on in various forms forever, and as I get older, I am quite open into whatever enhancements I need to utilize to continue enjoying life. After all think about it, I have written so much that it will float around in cyberspace or whatever form of that space exists well into the future, that it will likely go on forever as defined by universal life spans. Even if all that is left is a skull, I will get all I can out of life because that is how I approach these kinds of things. While I do advocate for the values of the past, of the Victorian era Wild West values of pure capitalism and frontier justice, I think very much that those values not only work here on earth, but will work as we colonize space whether it is the moon, Mars or the moons of Jupiter. If I could live 20,000 years to see all those advancements happen or to help them along, I’ll do it whether the form is a living entity, legacy memories, or as a variation of that mask, a biological entity more machine than traditional life that exists without losing the basics of humanity.

Coming back from Charleston I had been listening to Rush Limbaugh while staying in the very nice Mt. Pleasant area and looking at all the sites and thinking about how Google was being thought of as evil, and that Facebook was capturing so much of us to build an artificial intelligence that it was forcing tough political and economic decisions for the future. For me the solution was in Steampunk, or at least the first doors to solving those complex problems and that mask gave me a reference point. But when it came time to come back home and I punched in my address to my Google Map app on my phone it stated at 5:30 AM in the morning that I would arrive back at my home in 10 hrs. and 16 minutes. Thinking about Rush Limbaugh’s radio shows and some by Alex Jones that I had been listening to online when everyone else had gone to bed I wanted to try an experiment knowing that Google had a profile of my habits that it had been collecting about me for many years. I decided to leave my phone plugged in so that I wouldn’t reset my destination forcing Google to recalculate my destination time.

On the way home I traveled with one of my daughters, her kids and my wife so there were lots of variables. We didn’t leave at 5:30 but the time really didn’t change from when we actually did so the Google Maps had figured out all our stops, our pace of driving and the traffic conditions from Mt Pleasant to our home address and all the surprises that can happen along the way. Outside of Columbia, South Carolina we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for breakfast. At the North Carolina line we switched around some drivers. Just outside of Ashville we stopped to let the kids use the restroom. In the heart of the mountains near the tunnels just before the Tennessee border we stopped to get some more food. In Knoxville we stopped to get more gas. Ahead of Jellico Mountain we stopped by McDonalds just to stretch and get a snack. On the other side of the mountain from Jellico to London, KY we had lots of single lane traffic and some serious traffic delays. We pulled off the highway to use the restroom yet again and we fiddled around for an additional 15 minutes because we were all tired of driving and didn’t want to rush only to sit in traffic again. We stopped just north of Lexington just to stretch because we were tired and wanted to get home but were getting impatient. Then we hit traffic in Florence that lasted all the way through the city of Cincinnati. By the time we got to our driveway the time on the trip back was 10 hrs. and 17 minutes. One minute longer than Google Maps had predicted originally, which I thought was astonishing.

Technology can be our friends or our enemies, what it becomes will largely be up to the values we bring to it. I for one plan to embrace it with an eye toward longevity and accomplishing more in a lifetime than typical biological existence would otherwise allow. And even the sad stories of family sicknesses prove that technology is on the cusp of solving many of those problems. But then what? Well, that is up to us to figure out, and that is my focus in helping to shape. And for me, that is a very exciting prospect and what I think about when I see that new mask found at the Charleston City Market. To me its not a scary thing, but something that will help us live beyond the terminal existence of yesteryear, but if we hold the values from the past that worked best and combined them with the future, we wouldn’t just get Steampunk art, but perhaps a new reality that matches what Jesus said when he walked the earth, “heaven is all around us, only men do not see it.” Well, maybe its time that we start looking at it.

Rich Hoffman

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