Tag: Sports

Let the Bengals Leave: They cost too much, lose all the time, and they aren’t worth the money in Cincinnati

I enjoy the NFL product more than most do from the perspective of the premium seats.  Several times a year, I get a chance to watch a football game from the Club section or a private box, and I do like it.  I like the Club Seats at Bengals games, from Paycor Stadium, as they call it today.  I like having the Cincinnati Bengals in town and think it’s great for Ohio to have two NFL teams.  But let’s not forget who does what and for whom here.  Both Ohio NFL teams are complaining about their stadium accommodations.  The Cleveland Browns want to move from their current waterfront Dog Pound and out into the suburbs which seems like a really dumb idea.  Their stadium is right on the Lake Erie waterfront and is really nice.  Most NFL teams have received new stadiums that are exotic domes, such as the new ones in Las Angeles and Las Vegas.  Or they are complaining about getting one.  My favorite team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has a very nice stadium I’ve visited several times. I think they do a really nice job in their community, tying everything together, engaging in community activity, and providing entertainment through sports.  I was never happy with how Raymond James Stadium was publicly funded, as they all are.  But with the Glazer family in Tampa, they built a nice stadium with a big Disney-like pirate ship in it, and it gave fans something fun to enjoy.  And there are events at Raymond James Stadium that go on all year.  They don’t just play NFL football there.  Compared to the Bengals, the Bucs go to the playoffs a lot, and they have won a few Super Bowls.  But the Bengals just don’t win much.  Their season is usually over by December, and they have lost when they have had a chance at the big game.  So, the Brown family in Cincinnati have not been nearly as good of owners as the Glazers in Tampa.  All things have not been equal regarding the NFL experience and the owners who run them.

It was very contentious for taxpayers when the Bengals pushed to get the current stadium they play in, what was called Paul Brown Stadium for a while.  It was not that long ago that it was built; Paycor Stadium is very nice and is one of the big features of the Cincinnati skyline.  And as I said, I attend several games yearly as part of the Club experience.  I’m not a stand-in-line kind of person.  If I can’t get out of my car and go straight into the stadium security and to my seat with a private food service option, I will probably not go to a professional sports venue.  And I’ve been to Paycor stadium in the nice summer months and in the snowy cold days of winter.  And I think it’s great.  But it’s not worth infinite amounts of money.   The Bengals are coming up on the last year of their lease agreement with the county of Hamilton, and they want a better deal.  They threaten to move to a different city if the Hamilton County commissioners don’t lay down and cave to their every demand.  Currently, the Bengals want the taxpayers of Hamilton County to pay $150 million in 2024 and another $150 million in 2025 on stadium repairs, with the team contributing $50 million in exchange for a five-year extension through 2030. However, the county has only committed to $39 million in renovations for 2024 going into 2025 with a sort of blank check mentality. 

So here’s where I’m at with the whole thing: let the Bengals go.  See if another city wants to deal with their crybaby NFL antics.  I’d say the same thing to the Cleveland Browns, too.  While I like the NFL experience, it is a nice thing to have, but Cincinnati, Cleveland, and the state of Ohio generally do more for the NFL than the professional football teams do for those cities.  Good luck, Bengals. Have fun moving to Chattanooga or some other secondary city.  It wouldn’t take long for them to regret the move.  We all remember what happened in Cleveland when Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore only to call them the Ravens.  Then Bernie Kosar, who used to be a quarterback, lobbied with others to bring an expansion team to Cleveland to become the new Browns, named after the Bengals’ owners.  In the end, the NFL, which is more the way I think of the product than I used to, is an entertainment option closer to big-time wrestling.  It’s something for people to talk about on Monday morning around the water cooler.  But not good for much else.  I think the referees tip the scales to favor betting odds, and they do it through play calls at critical times to get one team to win over another in a close game.  (Buffalo clearly converted that 4th down over the Chiefs in that recent big game)  There is too much money involved for the NFL not to be rigged in some fashion, so the whole product’s value is purely entertainment.  And there is a limit to how much money anybody should spend on entertainment.  I think these NFL teams should pay their own way, especially in the Bengals’ case; they should pay Cincinnati for the privilege to play.  It should not fall on the county to pay the expenses of a private enterprise.  The NFL everywhere has a broken financial model that double dips the taxpayers.  But when teams don’t win now and then, a team like the Bengals abuses their relationship with the public.

Considering the size of the payrolls, some of these repairs that the Bengals want to be made at the stadium, whether it’s 30 million for some new paint or 300 million for structural improvements and general maintenance, the money should come out of the Bengals, and they should be happy to pay it to be treated as well as they are in the city of Cincinnati.  Instead, and this is expected in all NFL cities, the expectation is that the public pays once in taxes to build stadiums for these entertainment options, and then they have to pay again to go to the stadium.  And it costs a lot of money.  Nothing is cheap at an NFL game.   So, the NFL product is a pretty bad financial model, and they treat the cities they play in as if they are doing everyone a favor by watching them play football.  As I said, I think the Glazer family in Tampa does a good job building a relationship with the community that pays taxes for a stadium that is much more friendly to the community than what the Bengals do.  Or the Browns.  And the Bengals, for all the trouble and cost they impose on the community, can’t win enough even to justify themselves.  Everyone knew at the start of the 2024 season that the Bengals were in trouble.  Sure, they had a great quarterback and some great receivers.  But the coaching staff was lazy, disengaged, and lackluster.  And the defense was horrendous.  And that was game one of the season.  Going to games during that entire season was like buying an expensive hot dog so the grandkids could listen to loud music and watch losers lose.  The Bengals have not been good owners; they take, take, take from the community, and they don’t know how to win or give the community something to be proud of.  And my advice to the county of Hamilton would be just to let them go.  Call their bluff and let them leave.  One or two playoff games could have generated more than enough money to pay for the stadium repairs.  When you have several players with multi-million dollar contracts in the hundreds of millions, this money they want from the county is chump change.  The Bengals should pay for everything.  And they should pay for the right to play in Cincinnati.  If they’re going to leave, let them.  See how they like the next place they go.  Cincinnati would do just fine without them and their losing ways.

Rich Hoffman

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The Ruthlessness of Smiling Faces: What people are really up to

First of all, even though I am talking about a recent fast draw competition with the Ohio Fast Draw guys in Ohio, I am not talking about that event, but many other things that are relevant in ways that aren’t always so obvious.  Human nature is what it is, and all things are applicable.  But this particular example is appropriate across the tapestry of competition.  And to that point, I am used to extreme ruthlessness in human nature.  I don’t see the smiles that people provide to disarm your sensibilities as being innocent.  I see the worst in people because that’s my experience based on years of opinion.  So, when I attended a recent Ohio Fast Draw competition in Cleveland, I went out in support for the group because the attendance was dropping, and I wanted to boost the membership with my presence.  But from my point of view, it was hard in the second half of the year to attend the events, starting with the one in August, which I missed.  It was a late night with many good GOP people, including Bernie Moreno, Warren Davidson, George Lang, and many others, and we stayed way too late listening with a VIP perspective to a Jason Aldean concert.  I didn’t get on the road in time to get to Cleveland, which broke my routine for the year.  Up until that point, I had attended all the Ohio Fast Draw competitions.  But August, September, and the rest of the year until Christmas are too busy for me.  My goal for the year was to get to all the Ohio Fast Draw competitions and show my support for them.  But once I missed the one in August, it bothered me to have that intention disrupted.

My gun minutes before a competition

I learned at the next event I did manage to get to that other shooters were not unhappy that I did not show up.  I had been winning many trophies, and people felt that because I wasn’t there, they’d get a better chance to win themselves.  I didn’t let it bother me because I like the people who are typically in Fast Draw.  I understand and respect the ruthlessness of human nature.  So, I put those thoughts into a category of their own to deal with as I saw fit.  Even so, I tried hard to make the next competition to support the organization.  I didn’t have time for it.  I didn’t need any more trophies for the year.  I just wanted to see attendance grow, not recede.  I think Fast Draw should be a sport that more people participate in; it’s better than golf, bowling, or other competitive events.  But a lot of young people these days don’t know much about gun fighting because it’s not part of their cultural experience, as more woke activities have become part of their lives.  So, I am interested in seeing organizations like Ohio Fast Draw survive well into the future, and I would like to see them grow in popularity.  But when I showed up to the most recent Cleveland event, I was already strung well too thin, and didn’t have the time to give.  I attended to support friends.  I was disappointed that I wasn’t very welcome and that many of them hoped I wouldn’t show up.  Now, things get murky because people often don’t say what they really mean.  And they usually hide malicious intent behind appearing helpful.  So people think that what they believe deep within themselves is hidden from the outside world and that nobody really knows what’s going on if they don’t admit to something.  Well, I know everything that goes on.  I understand every aspect of human nature, so nothing stays hidden from me.  I know what is going on with everyone at all times.  And it wasn’t hard for me to figure out what was happening when I arrived at the Cleveland competition. 

In Fast Draw, severe rules for activity on the firing line, safety, and other considerations are rigorous.  Some of the more competitive people in these events go crazy when they hear a cell phone and people whisper in the background while shooting.  They get mad at every little distraction.  So, given that context, I thought it was highly unusual that at my gun check at this event, there was so much concern over my gun having a sticky trigger.  I didn’t ask for any advice; it was the same gun I had used to win several competitions that year, and it worked well for me.  But many Fast Draw shooters perform a lot of work on their guns, hoping to give themselves a slight edge in speed.  So it mystifies them that I use a mostly stock gun and that it has a heavy hammer pull.  Now, given some of the people involved in volunteering to tear my gun apart looking for a problem that wasn’t there, I thought being friendly and respectful was more important than showing anger that I was missing the opportunity to practice before the competition started.  I think they were genuinely trying to be helpful.  But I also felt that something more malicious was going on, and the longer it went on, the more angry I got. 

At the end of a lot of work, several shooters offered to loan me a gun to shoot with that day, which, on the surface, appeared helpful.  But they all know what distractions and changing anything on the firing line do to the process.  So, I found it disrespectful to see that they had made a point to look like helpful behavior to sabotage my approach to shooting in that competition.  I didn’t ask for help.  I didn’t want any help.  And I would have rather been left alone because there was more going on than trying to appear helpful.  The combined efforts were an attempt at sabotage because as the day progressed, it became pronounced that I was the center of many of their thoughts, and they had prepared for that event with an intention against me personally.  Here’s the deal: I won a lot at these competitions because of my shooting method, not because of the tricks of the gun or luck.  My times are consistently good because I shoot close to the hip in a fashion that looks slower to go fast.  And the frustration against me has been that I look like I’m not trying to go fast all the time and shoot in the .300s and even .200s.  I could, but in Ohio Fast Draw, missing the target would become more common, and you would get penalized for missing.  You are judged on speed and accuracy.  I ended up doing OK for the day.  The worries about my gun and the overall process of the day did have an impact, but I worked through it.  Part of the benefit of competitions like that is that learning to manage stress under tremendous pressure is the real takeaway.  So I thought it was a positive experience.  But I was very disappointed to see that so many of those other shooters were happy to see me having a bad day.  They wanted it, which was a good lesson that applies to most things.  It’s the way people are.  You hope that people will overcome that natural tendency.  But Fast Draw is meant to be ruthless, and people being friendly to each other is only a cosmetic ruse for their true intentions.  While I wanted to think more about people, it wasn’t enjoyable to see where their minds were.  The main rule in gun fighting competitions is that you don’t point out every little rule that might distract a shooter on the line, then break all those rules to gain personal advantage.  That behavior might help a person win a few times here and there.  However, it will destroy the initiative of any future shooters who want to take up the sport and grow in a positive direction.  This is precisely why attendance this year has been light and is only getting worse.  When it comes to human behavior, I don’t miss anything, and the moral to the story in this case is that a short-sighted win only hurts the future, which is becoming obvious to everyone.

I expect ruthlessness out of people.  And again, I’m talking about more than my experiences with the Ohio Fast Draw Association.  I would like to relax and spend time with people of common interest in shooting sports.  But often as it is in most things in life, you don’t get what you want.  You get what you get, and you either deal with it, or you are crushed by it.  So with that in mind, don’t try to hide ruthless behavior through a thin veil of helpfulness.  I see it all for what it is, at every level that it’s presented.  There is nothing about human nature, or action, that I do not see. And I see it in ways that most people even hide from themselves. There’s a reason I don’t say much to anybody, it’s because I am perpetually let down by other people all the time and I don’t expect much out of them.  And I don’t ask much of anybody because I don’t want them to have to lie to me when they have no intention to live up to my expectations. I have to manage my disappointment in people by limiting how much I interact with them.  But never think I’m not going to see the truth that is really there looming in the background.  Even if it’s just a shooting sport in recreation, or if it’s millions of dollars at stake.  It’s all the same game played by all the same kind of people for all the same reasons.  People in life want the least path to success with the least effort.  And they hate people who work hard and develop themselves skillfully.  As I have said many times, which is a big feature of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, “Rules are made by the losers of the world to give them an advantage over the competent.”  And as much as I know that rule to be the fact of life, it does bother me each time it is confirmed true by reality. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call

How to Make a Good Team in Sports and Politics: The point of everything is to give voters options

It will continue to be one of the universe’s great mysteries why people can look at sports teams and have opinions about what they should be doing, but they can’t apply those same methods to their lives.  This is a prominent issue every year in pre-season football with the mini camps as teams figure out which players they will cut and which will make their final roster.  Good teams figure out the right players and get them all pointed in the right direction for the success or failure of a season.  If the players are allowed to pick their fellow players, teams tend not to do so well.  It takes good leadership to figure it out and put people together who likely wouldn’t figure it out for themselves.  Good teams tend to have players playing together who wouldn’t otherwise be friends.  One of the mysterious qualities of leadership is to see things of value beyond the choice of friendships, and when it comes to sports, most people get it.  They understand what makes success and have many opinions about it.  But they can’t do it when it comes time to utilize those same skills in their lives.  That is certainly the situation in business.  And it is undoubtedly the case in politics.  The goal of all these endeavors is to figure out what success looks like, whether it be winning a Super Bowl, having a great business quarter, or providing a great political party to the voting public; once success is understood, then leadership needs to do what it must to give that result.  It’s not complicated.  Yet, it remains one of the least utilized factors in human interaction. 

There is only one correct measure to winning in politics; it is in a political party providing the voting public with good people they can vote for.  Any other action is missing the point.  If a political party is not focused on those attributes, then they aren’t trying to be a good political party.  I would say this is a problem all over America, in every aspect of county politics, no matter where we talk about it.  And that is certainly the case with the Butler County Republican Party in Ohio, where I live.  I can say that I know many people at that party, and I personally liked them all in some way or another.  If you sit down and talk to people, I can usually find something I like about just about anybody.  But the problem is, do they make an excellent political party just because you want them?  And in most cases, that is not the reality.  Politics should only aim to provide voters and taxpayers with good people to represent them best.  When political parties lose sight of that strategy, things go wrong.  And that is how RINOs in the Republican Party come to be.  Most people get into politics for ideological reasons.  However, the concessions they make to get along with other people become detrimental to their representation of the voter base, which is the value of the party brand.  If people have good representation in politics, then the brand of the party could be said to be good.  If voters don’t, they start to lose faith in the system, voter engagement lowers, and the direction of victory in politics changes dramatically.  When voters feel that the people they elect don’t represent them, we could say that politics has failed.

It’s just like the comparison with the sports team that desires to put a winning team on the field so people come to the games and feel good about the chances for a victory, so they buy beer and overpriced hot dogs at the concessions, which is really how the team makes their money, how they measure their value to the customer base.  If the team isn’t winning, there are fewer fans to buy hot dogs, to put it simply.  The same holds in politics.  I know many people who want to run for office within the Butler County Republican Party.  But, they do not feel they can remain people of integrity because of the restrictions of party politics.  So, we end up with the wrong people running for office while much better candidates that the public would love to have representing them are sitting on the sidelines.  This is a case where the players on the field pick people they like and are comfortable with, not the leadership of the voting public deciding how that team would shape out.  Too often, and this year of 2023 is undoubtedly a good example, many good people are not participating in the political process because they have learned that they aren’t in the cool kids club and will never be invited.  Because the party is picking the members, not the voters.  And instead of letting the voters shape the party, the players are forming the team; then they wonder why many fans are not supporting their losing effort.

Not everyone gets into politics for the same reasons.  I understand that some feel that getting into politics protects their business interests from a corrosive government and provides a barrier to their efforts to keep their businesses healthy.  These are not ideological people but practical ones who see government as dangerous to their interests in business, so they get involved in politics to protect their efforts.  And those people are trying to play nice in the sandbox with ideologically based people who enter politics for reasons of genuine philosophy.  And those kinds of people are scary to those looking for political stability.  I get it.  Just like a wide receiver on a football team being upset that a new tight end is playing the slot receiver role, the wide receiver might feel like the coaching staff is trampling on their turf.  But so what? Maybe that is the best way to become a winning team.  That doesn’t mean that the tight end should be run off the team to make the wide receiver feel like they have job security and aren’t threatened by challengers.  Challenges make the team better.  But then better for whom?  For the players or the fans?  That is what must be decided, and what I have seen from the GOP in general, especially since Trump has been out of office, is a party for the players, not for the voters.  It’s the players making the teams they want to play with.  They are not trying to give the voting public the best representatives they can get.  And if a political party isn’t doing that, they aren’t trying to be the best they can be for their communities.  While such a concept may not be complicated, it remains the biggest stumbling block to any successful venture within human endeavor.   And that is certainly the case in politics.  Some great people want to participate, but they have been told in so many words or less that politics is about maintaining friendships and that everyone needs to stay in their lane and behave.  But that is not what voters want, and until political parties listen, the public will continue to be let down by the result.

Rich Hoffman

The NFL Should Have Never Called Off the Bengals/Bills Game: Woke values are attacking the core of American lifestyles

You gotta know what kind of fight we are fighting and how the enemy is fighting it. I said it the night of the big football game that the NFL should have never called off the event during the first quarter when Damar Hamlin had a heart attack on the field after a tackle made. The Cincinnati Bengals game with the Buffalo Bills was an event of big consequences; both teams were fighting for a top seed in the upcoming playoffs and are two of the best teams in the NFL. I wasn’t at that particular game, but I knew a lot of people who were, and I know they looked forward to it all weekend and were prepared to spend many thousands of dollars to enjoy it. But after Bill’s safety, Hamlin made a big hit; he collapsed on the field unconscious and it looked very scary. It turned out to be a heart attack, and CPR was performed on him in the middle of the Cincinnati stadium, with more than 70,000 people on hand watching and millions more seeing it on live television. After some time went on and they could remove the player from the field, the NFL called the game off, astonishingly, and the night was over as far as football, Monday Night Football at that. I thought it was a terrible decision by the NFL, a terribly woke one. It wasn’t a decision that would help Damar Hamlin, and it would ruin the playoff picture for many teams. The NFL would end up canceling the game for the year, which makes it terrible for all the teams competing because now, suddenly, the two best teams are going into the playoffs playing one less game for the year. That’s not fair to anybody. 

Obviously, the NFL is sensitive to all the attacks on them by woke elements of society, that the sport is too violent, that it’s a gladiator sport that exploits young people for the entertainment of everyone else. The pressure from pressure groups regarding concussion protocols is behind just about everything the NFL does these days, but everyone must understand that those concerns are not about safety. They are exploited that way, but their intent is just to attack another element of American society by trying to change the values we have for it. Such as, in this Bengals/Bills game, one deadly injury is suddenly bigger than the game itself and the playoffs and all the fans in the stands cheering them on. By the modern woke rules of anti-American sentiment, like many things are poised against American activities in business and entertainment, safety is the new club to ruin our country disguised as helpful but maliciously introduced to freeze unknowing executives into satisfying radical elements of society toward compliance. The NFL executives knew that if they played the game after removing Hamlin, the media would have a field day of criticism, which they have experienced several times this past season, especially regarding the Miami Dolphins quarterback who passed out frighteningly, essentially being knocked out for the season. Yes, football is a violent sport; everyone knows that going in. The players get paid a lot of money because of that risk to their lives and health, and fans know what they are watching. But the pressure groups are trying to change that, and the result is bad press for the NFL as a corporate product, and as we all know by now, the attacks against America have been to erode away the values of our corporations, especially in our entertainment culture. 

The result was sickening. I’ve been a first responder for the last three decades and have seen more than a fair share of terrible things happening to people, just as scary as Damar Hamlin experienced. The NFL has thousands of employees who are on a very public stage all the time. Statistically, there will always be strange things that happen, such as 24-year-old kids who have heart attacks that shouldn’t happen to anybody under 50. We will likely learn that the Covid shot the NFL forced on many of the young players has increased their risk of these kinds of things, and for liability reasons, the NFL is very sensitive to their blame for harming the health of so many young people. So they overplayed their hand. Then again, the pressure to force players to take the Covid shot came from the same radical, anti-American elements who were behind the government push and were behind pushing for players not to stand for the National Anthem. Watching the players stand around Damar Hamlin was embarrassing; these were young people raised in a coddled society by all these woke public school elements who were visibly shaken by the experience. And they shouldn’t have been. Bad things happen, and part of the game of football is managing bad things to a successful conclusion, whether inclement weather, physical injury or the pressure of rivalries. To see all these big, tough, young people crying on the field over a heart attack victim was very embarrassing, then to hear the media report that condition as a value. The players should be stoically valiant and supportive of each other through strength. Instead, weakness, sadness, and even panic were featured in the news coverage and looked bad to an equally sensitive audience. Because of the pressure groups, the NFL had to send the world a message that their individual players were bigger than the game, and they put safety and security as the number one priority, so they called off the game.

Even worse, we are dealing with entertainment unions here, and you know what I say about those, which is true. All labor unions are communist organizations, as envisioned by Karl Marx. They are anti-American in their design and are meant to threaten work stoppages to leverage shared protections for workers, which they exploit as ground troops in a different kind of war, in this case, against capitalism and the economy of America. And the labor union has its members always poised against management, and the concussion protocols have forced the NFL to really soften the game to satisfy these radical leftist elements. On camera, we have seen violent conditions before, especially compound fractures. I remember a Super Bowl in which the Bengals were in, where a grotesque injury occurred. The Super Bowl didn’t stop playing. They carted the guy off the field and resumed play as they should have. But over the years, the players union has softened up its members to align with the big leftist radicals in the media who are fully intent on changing the way Americans value things; it’s just another approach to the ESG madness. And for the first time that I can remember, especially regarding such a big game, the NFL caved to those radical elements and called off a game, which set a dangerous precedent. American football is not like the European soccer game; part of the appeal is toughness and fighting through adversity, even fear. And those are the very elements that are attacking the NFL product, through the players union, through liberal media, through regulations that force mandated vaccines that feature safety and security over victory and accomplishment. And for that reason alone, the NFL should have never called off that football game. Because the battle is bigger than the people involved, and when injuries happen, take care of those people the best you can. But the show, as is a motto in America on many fronts, must go on, always.

Rich Hoffman

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A Man Who Gets Divorced Loses Leadership Ability: What is wrong with Tom Brady

I haven’t talked about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a while because, honestly, the world is at war, and who really cares about NFL football? But this story is about Tom Brady, who almost everyone agrees is the best football player of all time. His marriage, his retirement, and why the Bucs aren’t as good on the field as they are on paper is an interesting study on the impact of good leadership on any culture, whether it be business, entertainment, or politics. What Tom Brady is going through is a good baseline for just how important leadership is to any culture. He has traditionally been the best on a football field not because he is the strongest, fastest, tallest, or most creative, but because he has a way of making the people around him better, which is why he’s been in so many Super Bowls and Championship games and won many of them. And when that leadership isn’t working, it’s obvious why. So with the Bucs at 3 and 3 at the point of this article is not over for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They are playing in the weak NFC South division, so they are still in first place even though the Bucs should have won close games against Kansas City, Green Bay, and Pittsburg. But they lost those games because they were simply outplayed, and it’s quite clear that the team is distracted by Tom Brady, his retirement status, his marriage trouble, and his general age. It has to be tough to be 45 years old and playing with a bunch of kids who are 25 years old, old enough to be his own kids. And the head coaches are all the same age or even younger. 

What’s different about this year with Tom Brady is that the NFL obviously doesn’t want him around. The media doesn’t either. They have moved on to the Patrick Mahomes types, the Josh Allens, the much younger and mobile quarterbacks who are part of the new story of the NFL. The Bucs have done the woke thing and put people of color in charge of their coaching staff, even though they obviously have problems making decisions. They aren’t the best people for the job; they were put there because of color, although Todd Bowls, the head coach, made great news when he recently dismissed the measurement of color, which gained national attention. Bowls is a great defensive coordinator when he can dominate the other team. But his playcalling is terrible in close games when the other team isn’t intimidated, and that has certainly carried over into this year, where he remains the defensive play caller, and he just can’t stop the other team. Everyone has gotten so used to being lazy on the field and on the sideline because they just expect Tom Brady to get the ball at the end of the game and win it for them that some of these games are just getting out of reach. Tom Brady usually has an opportunity to still win the game for them, but people are happy to let him do most of the work. And that problem comes from leadership. The coaches are lazy; the players reflect the coaches. One thing about leadership that is always obvious, people adapt to the personality of the leader, so when a good leader is present, it’s evident to the world because the culture takes on their personality; when there isn’t good leadership, it’s just as evident for all those reasons. 

And every day, the news is that Tom Brady is getting divorced from his wife, Gisele Bundchen, a person many consider the most beautiful woman in the world. During the Super Bowl year of Tom Brady’s first year in Tampa, she was a tremendous asset. The other players looked at Brady and his wife, their children, Tom’s love of his parents, and his good-guy image as the best in the world, and they played off it. They listened to Tom Brady because they wanted to be like Tom Brady and have what Tom Brady had: good successful life in every way people measure success, money, beauty, ethically, and categorically. But this year, Tom Brady looks like a person like everyone else. Even at press conferences, Brady goes way out of his way to appear just like the other guys, that he’s nothing special and that he continues to play because he wants to be around his teammates. This is to other players who often have to think about whether to tackle at full speed a 300-pound player with their 250-pound bodies at 20 MPH with a head-on collision that will undoubtedly hurt the next day, a weak proposal. While they know, they have a few million dollars in their bank accounts. Why are they going to hit the other player so hard again? Especially since everything is always about Tom Brady?   Unless you have a special coach who can motivate such players, a lackluster effort is almost baked into the problem.

But specifically for other guys, they look at people they follow, and if the leader can’t hold together a marriage, then why should they listen to them about anything? A guy going through a divorce is a loser, no matter how fair that assessment might be. If you can’t hold a family together, why should anybody listen to you about anything? If a woman who knows you in your most vulnerable state, behind the media curtain, isn’t so in love with you that she’ll do anything to stay with you, then there is something wrong, and a locker room will quickly figure that out. And that holds true for everything, not just sports. If a leader can’t lead a family, they certainly can’t lead an organization, a school, or a society. All men know that once a wife leaves a man and is off to Chuckee Cheese with a new one, and a man loses his kids to a stepfather, it’s over. A family is broken beyond repair, the children will grow up with likely problems as a result, and the leadership potential of that man is gone. There is a lot of effort in the world to try to hide personal behavior behind processes, but that is just not how human beings are wired. Tom Brady is the best of all time because he did everything well. His private life was successful, which then carried over into on-field behavior. But this is the problem when you stick around too long, people start thinking of him as just another guy, who has problems just like everyone else, and at that point, the magic is gone forever. This is why I thought it would be good for Brady to stay retired, ride off into the sunset, and let history remember him as the best. But to lose that leadership ability, which he clearly has, especially now that his wife is clearly not with him, the cost is far worse than just lost games. Tom Brady has lost his leadership brand. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers may still win their division. Tom Brady may even win another Super Bowl. But in doing so, he has lost what is most important, his leadership brand. And once a man loses it, it’s nearly impossible to get back. And to the way I think, that isn’t worth another chance at a Super Bowl. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Million New Voters for Republicans: Learning to be winners, and making “playing nice” a thing of the past

First of all, if a political party like the Democrats continue to point to “the popular vote” as a measure for election victory, then you will continue to see the intent to cheat in elections. The popular vote is not how we elect people because it was determined early in America’s foundation that it was too easy to stack up voters in isolated, controlled areas that did not represent the country as a whole. And this is what Democrats have built their entire political party around, the concept of cheating with the popular vote, with blue city giveaways, illegal immigration, allowing anybody to vote without voter I.D. so that they could artificially prop up the voting numbers in places like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York City. That is why when you look at a map of the United States where Republicans are represented in Red and Democrats in Blue, you will see that the blue areas are relatively small and are concentrated in the dense city areas. Republicans have run away from Democrats for a long time and filled in the states in the rest of the country, leaving vast areas of red in much less populated areas. So when election time comes and all the voting impropriety is thrown in for consideration, Democrats appear to have more voters when they have been illegally consolidated into small areas where Democrats control the voting process. It is not an honest way to conduct elections, which is precisely why there is an electoral college. When the attackers of the American idea conjured up their schemes of election fraud and representational dishonesty, they assumed that they could lobby on behalf of the popular vote in the same way they lobby against constitutional limits on government. America has backstops in its legal system to quell the enthusiasm for criminal conduct that other countries don’t have, which is evident in the difference between the popular vote and the electoral college. 

But there is more bad news for Democrats, which they deserve, which is an accurate measure of their overall effectiveness. This is important to those who worry that Democrats have some magic power to continue winning elections. Much of what they have done for many years is artificially prop themselves up to look like they had more support in America than they really had. They are overly represented in the media culture, arts and entertainment, fashion, and the visible things people see on television. But those views are not represented in what people actually believe, especially away from the very blue cities on the coasts of North America. As I say all the time, if it weren’t for deceitful practices, such as election fraud and the desire to hide this reality from even themselves by stacking the vote with illegal aliens, ghetto giveaways by Democrat politicians to bottom feeder types looking for a free ride in life, and downright fake votes like we saw for Joe Biden in 2020 where the people counting the votes just made up around 40 million votes to give him the win and expected everyone to just take their word for it and call it a certified election, Democrats would never win elections at all. Americans aren’t that liberal in nature. They aren’t even “just right of center.” I’ve been all over the country, and Democrat politics are not in their hearts. And now, in the days after Trump has left the White House and Democrats have given the world Joe Biden, the loser in chief, Republicans have gained over a million new voters, according to The Associated Press, which is hardly a conservative outlet. 

A million voters switched to Republican over the last year. According to the Associated Press, those people had been sitting on the fence all along or voted Democrat because of the Never Trumper sentiment. These scared suburban moms thought Trump’s mean Tweets were “unprofessional” and “beneath the high office of the President.” But now they are paying 100 bucks at the gas pump to run their kids all over town to be with their friends, and maybe those mean Tweets don’t look so bad anymore. And this brings up something I explained to the Ross Perot family in their company’s parking lot the night before the election in 1992, that most voters will crawl through broken glass for a winner. If a political candidate can show wins to their voters, then voters will always tend to vote in favor of them. Trump knew this early on through his television work on NBC and his work with the WWE. People will put aside personal flaws in character if wins are the result. We see it in sports all the time, and now we certainly see it in politics. As bad as the world has been politically, all the wins come from the Republican side. All Democrats have are protests and riots in the streets. They have nothing else, and now that the bandaid has been ripped off the scab, Democrats showed their ugliness in 2020 with lockdowns, riots, and election fraud to the point where America is now rooting against them as the villains in the play. And there is no plan for Democrats to repair that image. They are the party of big government, open borders, drag queens, drugs, and crime. Like Trump would say, other than that, they are very nice people. 

Republicans have become the party of victory, and new politicians like Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Lauren Boebert have learned from Trump that spiking the football is something that voters want to see.   This notion of keeping politics in the realm of polite society is the way to allow the Democrats to continue pretending the nation is with them with the popular vote because they have convinced the other side to stay home, and they call that a win. I call it cheating, and that’s the context of what I told the Perot family the night before the 1992 election, where he was a third-party candidate who pulled 19% away from the establishment candidates the next day. That is how we ended up with Bill Clinton, but that’s also how we learned the truth about our politics over the next few decades. Perot became the founder of the Reform Party. By the end of that decade, Donald Trump was thinking of running for president against Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party ticket, which never gained enough steam to make it official. So, this discussion didn’t just pop up out of nowhere in 2015.

Instead of starting a third party, Trump and many others learned that the way to win elections was to give voters what they wanted most, representative victory. Not fake numbers and propped up population centers to make an argument against the electoral college with a popular vote illegally obtained. The Democrats have only been able to make themselves viable by splitting the Republican Party and hiding scandal behind polite society. If the voters started to get restless and angry, then Democrats would never have a chance, and they know it, as does the media. This news of over a million people switching their voter sentiments to Republican is devastating to Democrats. Because it reveals a secret that has been long suppressed, that our nation is not a 50/50 country, as it’s been sold to us. And suppose Republicans get to the point where they start embracing winning. In that case, nobody will beat them, and they will gain vast majorities in the House, Senate, and Executive Branch for many decades because voters don’t vote on policy arguments. They vote on who wins and loses and who sells those wins to the public with a spiked football. And it looks like, finally, that understanding isn’t regulated to a third-party position, but the mainstream Republicans are poised to win everywhere and often for perhaps the next century to come. Liberalism has failed in every way we can measure things, and without the ability to conceal that fact, Democrats are doomed and deserve all the losses coming their way.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I Hate Slow People: Speed is the key to a good American life

One of the most painful things in the world for me to deal with is slow people. I’ve always been attracted to fast draw with guns, and I have spent a lot of time practicing Cowboy Fast Draw over the years, working out the details of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. But before any of that, I have always driven fast, very fast. I do everything fast because speed is how I have been able to do so many things in my life in such a short period. My attitude certainly clashes with people when I go to Europe. They can be friendly people, but they are sloooooooowwwww at everything. If a psychologist were to peel back my hatred of progressives and Democrats in general, they would discover that my reasoning is that they think too much like slow-minded people worldwide, especially in Europe. In Europe, they will often indicate that there is no reason to be in a hurry to get anywhere, just to relax. Well, that’s not acceptable to me, so when I talk about fast draw with guns, that is a place where I am in my happiest place, in working with time in fractions of a second rather than minutes and hours or even days. I talk about often in my book of the benefit of thinking fast, professionally because it allows you to do many things in a business day that might take others weeks to do, even on the executive side of a business.

I find that in my life, I often do in a day what many who are in leadership might consider reasonable in a week. And when I say all that, I don’t mean it as a reckless endeavor.   Accuracy, to me, is just as important. The lazy people of the world have created a falsehood: speed happens as a compromise to accuracy, and that just isn’t the case. Instead, it displays good people against bad people, and speed has a value that brings to light a person’s quality. It is most often the case that lazy, stupid people are also deliberately slow, and they are the first to say that if they go too fast, they will make a mistake. All that says to me is that the person using speed as an excuse is simply trying to use the fear of a low-quality experience to cover for their lack of skill.

For whatever reason, over these last several months, I have dealt with more government pinheads than usual. Maybe with Covid gone and just realizing it, they have finally come out of their homes and back into the workplace. But they are back, and when you deal with them, they are talking the same nonsense as before, only now it is worse. Covid protocols by the slow-minded CDC losers have given the lazy of the world an excuse now. It’s acceptable more than ever to these government types to take the European mindset of slower is better, and we’ll get there eventually. Just this last week, I had to sit through a meeting with one of these guys, who I’m sure is a nice fellow. He probably has kids that love him. Maybe even a wife. But, wow, was he a slow-minded fool. He kept repeatedly saying, “we have to slow down so as not to make a mistake.” I tried to be as polite as I could, but the guy was taking a 15-minute conversation and turning it into 50, and asking for more time, which I never have to give to anybody. At least not some government bureaucrat. I hate government as much as I do because government is slow. The people in it are slow. And I just don’t like slow people. I understand our constitution is meant to slow down the speed of government. I certainly would never stand for the kind of authoritarian government that China has. They argue that they can move fast because they don’t have to get votes. It’s just one person who decides then everyone else follows. They made it look like it works in China by killing off all the types of people who might stand in their way, so in that way, they have made a very compliant society. But, they are still slow; they just don’t transfer that slowness through a bureaucracy. What they do is considerably worse, but it’s all bad in my mind. They measure actions in minutes, which I do in fractions of a second. 

Learning to think as fast as you must in Cowboy Fast Draw is unique to American culture, and it’s something we should be proud of. Thinking fast is hard-working and innovative. Thinking slow is lazy and accepting of the conditions of the world. By practicing a sport that requires a shooter to think in fractions of a second, it also impacts everything else in your life. It won’t take long to become frustrated with the slowness of everyone, the mask-wearing liberal who pulls out in traffic and is too slow to get up to speed, or the slow person fumbling with their groceries at the self-checkout. It takes them too long to bag their food and fumble with the payment display. Or, god forbid, going to the license bureau, participating in the medical industry, or visiting the post office—slow, slow, mind-numbing slow. It is my point of view, based on experience, that the key to American life is speed, not relaxing and waiting for things to happen. Americans make things happen, and they don’t take all day to do them. Part of Making America Great Again is in the speed in doing it. In not hiding laziness behind an illusion of quality. If a person doesn’t slow down, that bad quality will follow. Americans understand that bad quality happens when speed is pressing because the person doing the task is unskilled, and they haven’t spent their lives making themselves faster with practice. They have accepted the low expectations of government and slow-minded cultures as a way to disguise their own mundane outlook on the world. 

I’ve heard the excuse, especially from machining where tolerances are stoned into thousands of inches over a 10′ span, that they could screw up the whole project if they go fast. I say to those people, not if you are good at what you are doing. If you are good, you will be as fast as you can possibly be, even on delicate jobs. Learning to think fast helps a mind process more information, which makes for a better life lived. If speed causes stress, well, it’s because the mind isn’t equipped for it, and it should be. Americans should never accept slowness on anything. Yet that is the new expectation coming out of Covid: we should all slow down, like the Europeans, take our time. Maybe sit back and have some tea and crackers if we get too stressed out. That government pinhead I am referring to is the worst kind of human being, a lazy person who uses slowness as a moral assumption, then projects it to others to explain the lack of effort. And when dealing with such slow people, it is infuriating! 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What The NFL Did Right and What it Did Wrong: Trying to show normal when the attackers want to show domination

There is a lot of reason to be mad at the NFL. Snoop Dogg for the Halftime Show? The dope-smoking loser did a music video where he simulated the assassination of President Trump. And the Black Lives Matters communist propaganda in the endzones, “End Racism” and “It Takes all of Us,” when in fact it was Democrats in America who enslaved people and fought a war to keep them. All the WOKE nonsense that continues to pour out of the NFL experience is in many ways reprehensible. However, like many companies just trying to do what they need to do in a hostile world, to appease the looters and thieves, specifically investment firms like Blackrock who don’t fight with guns but through finance, it is impressive that the NFL once again was able to have a complete season with all the political turmoil that has been going on, specifically Covid. To have a Super Bowl and to end the season entirely with stadiums full of people not socially distancing is quite an achievement when you consider the implications otherwise. Even in China, where Covid was made in a lab and sent to the world to do its work to make the Great Reset happen, the Olympics do not have full fan participation. The forces of evil that have been at work wanted to stop the world completely, and the NFL was indeed a target. Their embrace of WOKE culture allowed them to play their games because the radical left got something out of it they really wanted, advertising for their cultural imperatives. In the minds of the NFL, Snoop Dog was a reasonable concession to give Los Angeles what they wanted so they would drop the mask mandates and all the other garbage and let America have its unique game, a Super Bowl, which just so happens to have my hometown team in it. 

While the Cincinnati Bengals lost me a long time ago as a fan, and it would take more than a Super Bowl to win me over because of how terrible the Brown family has run the team over the years, I have been enjoying the NFL in a more rebellious way than usual. I went to a few games this year, specifically in the Club Section, and it was a real treat after two years of Covid politics. It was nice to show up to a mass event with tens of thousands of people again cheering for the home team and to have a hot dog comfortably in the autumn sun. The Covid checks at the entrance weren’t bad in the Club Section; they had their own little thing going on there that wasn’t too intrusive and was speedy. I wasn’t crazy about the new paperless tickets or the all-credit purchases—more of that World Economic Forum garbage from Klaus Schwab that is part of a bigger picture. But overall, the experience was terrific to attend games again with packed stadiums and see how the NFL navigated the WOKE minefield, a very public show. Most companies and organizations fight these battles behind closed doors, but the NFL does it on a prominent stage. Considering that, I was very impressed with how the NFL handled themselves under considerable political pressure. And I am very impressed, as I was last year, to see the NFL deliver a Super Bowl to the American culture when the pressure was to cancel the event and most of the NFL games. 

I paid more attention to the NFL these last couple of years not because of Covid but because through it all, my favorite team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had found a way to acquire Tom Brady as the quarterback. It has been fun to expect my team to win every game instead of the drama of wondering if they would win some of them. A tremendous amount of life lessons come out of the game of football that is useful, and it was interesting to watch a 44-year-old quarterback dominate over kids half his age. I enjoyed it while it lasted but ultimately thought it was time to retire, which he did, and has been the talk around the world. It was nice for me to see the Bucs playing on such a large stage with Tom Brady leading the team, and I’ll miss it. But it was also clear to me watching all his games that the NFL didn’t want the aging quarterback to keep playing. They just want to give him his gold jacket and set him off to honor in the museums. And to turn the game over to the young people, who the NFL steers all their efforts toward. The NFL wanted the twenty-something quarterbacks to be the stars, not an older man beating up on little kids. While age may lead to a depleted physical condition, there is nothing like a top mind with years of experience and wisdom. On the football field, that gave Tom Brady too much of an advantage over the younger players, and the NFL clearly was sending him messages to bow out gracefully. I saw the hit to the head in the Rams game, the final game of the year, which bloodied the lip of Brady and was an obvious no-call by the refs as a signal for the quarterback to retire, which he did a few days later. He played well, brought the Bucs back from a significant deficit to send the game to overtime. Not a bad way to end a legendary career.

But when everyone wonders why the political left is suddenly so keen to lower the Covid mandates for masks and other nonsense, they think the truckers in Canada are putting the pressure on. Or polling for the upcoming midterms. I see all that as only the come-latelies. The NFL has really been the only corporation that has managed to fight through the turmoil and present to the world, and specifically the American people who needed to see it most, signs of normality. They were the first to have regular seasons to keep their Super Bowl schedule on track. When Covid hit players, reserves were brought in to cover the games. They moved the schedule around for some games, but mostly the show went on, and it was one of the only aspects of American culture to plow through the political overthrow. And for that, we should give the NFL some credit. Even with all the WOKE challenges they had to comply with, the product on the field pushed through the debates and the ridicule to show all people that life could go on and how it could look. With the NFL staying on schedule, it allowed college football games also to mimic the behavior, which has flowed over into other sports in America. I suspect that if the NFL had not stayed open and had yielded to the pressure politics was putting on it; we might not be seeing now the mask mandates being lifted and the Democrats realizing that the polling on the issue is killing them. Without that contrast in society, people wouldn’t have a point of reference to make any judgments, which has blown the narrative for Covid. Of course, I have been saying all along that Covid was a political attack on our capitalist culture from foreign enemies who fight with banking and not guns. But many people were scared of Covid and believed the government until they didn’t. And the NFL helped people see that people could go to mass gatherings and not die and that maybe the government had been lying to them all along. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Best Option for Dry Fire Practice: Having a great relationship with your firearm

Not to take anything away from one of the most incredible people in the world, Tommie, the owner of Premier Shooting in West Chester, but I am excited to report on a great new dry fire technology that many people may not know about. I mention Tommie because she told me about her exciting new dry fire range at Premier, the latest craze in shooting, for a good reason. Much of the time, dry firing involves a laser in the gun instead of a bullet and can be measured against a target by some electronic method. It’s becoming more common to use a smartphone for dry fire action. More sophisticated dry fire can be utilized like they do at Premier. There is still nothing like live fire with a real bullet striking a real target. But dry fire can be a great way to stay proficient with a gun without all the expense of firing live ammunition and can be every bit as enjoyable. Well, I have found that practicing for my Cowboy Fast Draw events a wonderful invention sold by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association called the Gunslinger Mark IV laser targeting system that I finally treated myself to, and I’m in love with it. It has been around in the fast draw community for several years but has only recently been perfected to a near-perfect system, as shown in the video above. I can’t think of anything better than this as a dry fire option for people looking for a home dry fire solution to their shooting needs. Practicing with one of these dry fire systems makes the range time much more valuable. I’m certainly not saying gun enthusiasts should replace range time for dry fire time. But that dry fire will make that range time much more useful. 

As I say all the time, especially these days, it’s essential to have a relationship with our Constitution, specifically the Second Amendment. Some people lose touch with the Constitution because they live in areas where they get used to concessions to utilize Constitutional rights in favor of collective need. For instance, in urban areas where it’s almost impossible to shoot every day in the backyard, it’s hard to maintain a relationship with your favorite firearms because they stay locked up all the time. One of the things that I like most about Cowboy Fast Draw is that it allows me to have a wax firing range in my workshop that makes it possible to shoot every day. When I want to fire real lead bullets, I go down and see Tommie at the range. But it’s not possible to shoot every day for me, because of time really, so having a range in my home makes it that much more practical. For many years now, I have enjoyed going into my shop and shooting at my strike plate range. But, for me, that wasn’t enough. I want to shoot while sitting in my reading chair and watching movies and football games. So I had been looking to get one of these Mark IV laser targeting systems, which essentially does everything my strike plate range does, except fire actual primers. Firing live fire rounds in the house and having wax bullets explode all over the living room just was not possible. But with a laser, I can shoot all day and all night long, as much as I want without the expense of using up rounds of ammunition. 

This particular unit is unique because it was invented by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association for the specific problem of fast fire and the need to register the hit in thousands of a second. Much dry fire activity is specific to just hitting a target and seeing how you do from shot to shot. The added element of speed is something special. Whenever the laser hits within the 8″ circle on the target system, it picks up a hit and measures it within fractions of a second. The light blinks three times in practice mode to let you know that your shot is coming. Then the light comes on solid and counts the time it takes you to hit the target. I not only use my target system for fast draw for all types of target shooting. I shoot from 30′, 21′, 15′ down to 5′ like I did in the video, up close so that the camera could pick up the gun and the hit in the same frame and still see the indicator. Even better, the unit is free from an internet connection, so nobody is snooping around on you while you are target shooting. It’s free of internet control, leaving target shooting the personal relationship between you and the practice and nobody else. Other types of dry fire where the smartphone is involved are giving vast amounts of information on all of us to some data collection company. So while convenient and neat, there is a cost to the technology. The Cowboy Fast Draw Association people make the Mark IV advance the sport. So, it’s a trusted source of shooting applications that makes using the Mark IV a much better experience. 

Best yet, the Mark IV Laser system allows shooters to have that daily relationship with their guns. It takes away a lot of the taboo that politics has placed on guns over the years and will enable users to use their firearms more for sport than just self-defense. Practicing with dry fire lasers has the feel of shooting baskets in the driveway. Shooting is a sport just like basketball or football—even golf. But until dry fire technology evolved to the level it is now; it wasn’t possible to practice with firearms virtually anywhere at any time of day. With the Mark IV, as I showed I was using inside my RV, shooting can be done anywhere. Even in a McDonald’s parking lot in Vail, Colorado, while you are waiting for the grandkids to get a Happy Meal and use the restroom. And the system is so reliable that it works perfectly every time. Once you have one of the Laser Training Cartridges that ignite the laser and allow the shot to fire down the barrel, you can shoot all the time, with the only cost being batteries for the cartridge. The total cost of the whole setup is around $800 for the laser and the targeting system and can all be purchased from CowboyFastDraw.com. I buy from them all the time, and they are always good about delivering high-quality items. I even recently ordered from them on New Year’s Eve, and they fulfilled the order that very night. They are like dealing with the way America used to be, always attentive to the customer’s needs, and competent. So overall, I can’t recommend one of these dry fire units more for all the reasons I mentioned and more. The best thing about it is that it takes shooting into the realm of every day and allows shooters to become much more proficient with copious amounts of practice than they could get otherwise. And making better shooters with much more handling only helps everything, from Constitutional consideration to the advancement of shooting sports, because more people can now participate. There is no downside, and for shooters everywhere, knowing that something like this is out there is something that could be life-changing in a good way.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

They Teach You To Be Dumb So You Don’t See Their Crimes: Thoughts from the Ohio State/Michigan football game

Government Schools are designed to Make You Dumb

If you do a root cause analysis on corruption, you will conclude that laziness is the primary driver.  And when you look at the most common trait of a government employee of any kind, on average, you will find that they tend to seek that type of work because they are lazy.  Therefore, it’s nearly a promise in every circumstance that you will get corruption out of government employees that will need to be heavily monitored.  Yet what do you get when you hire government employees protected by a socialist labor union to educate your society?  Well, you get the results of laziness and corruption on a mass scale.  And to look at it another way, what is the root cause of criminal behavior?  Well, it’s laziness again.  People would instead steal something than earn something because they think it is the easier path to a personal objective.  So guess what happens when you have criminals running your government, and they are also in charge of educating your society?  Well, you get the results of what I saw while watching the Ohio State, Michigan game.  The audience of over 100,000 people there in Ann Arbor all caught looking at the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, the illusions, the smoke, the mirrors, the bellowing projection of fear seeking the blue pill distraction of an exciting football game.  But not dealing with the root cause of much of what is wrong with society, a poor education not because we didn’t fund it correctly, but that we allowed people to learn all the wrong things.  

Education to me is a lifelong experience.  I think everyone should read a book or two per week, during their entire lives.  Graduating from college at age 22 isn’t enough to become an “educated person.” I deal with many people who have master’s degrees and doctorates, and I don’t consider these people educated.  It may give them a good start in a field of endeavor, but education is a daily adventure, not a final destination.  In the times we are in now, there are so many opportunities to be educated; we have access to more books and information than at any point in the history of the world.  And being well-read is a responsibility of all people.  If you want a great society, you need an educated society.  But as it stands, and what was evident at that college football game, all college sports, and even professional sports, is that the criminals of our society have deliberately dumbed down our people through the education process so that they can get away with committing crimes on a massive scale. 

One example of this deliberate ignorance was the expectation of the Biden administration into lying to our face about gas prices.  The Biden radicals shut off oil production in America.  Gas prices went up.  Then we were told that a global cabal runs the oil market and that America was powerless to do anything about it, when in fact, we just had a president in Trump who had the oil price issue under control.  But what is really driving up the costs of deliberately sabotaging the oil market is the Biden administration’s commitment to the United Nations climate change agenda.  Those same officials stood in front of the media and lied to everyone about the cause of the rising prices, and they expected their answers to stick.  They also expect the media to report the information as propaganda out of sheer laziness and the crippled mind of ignorance the public education system had given them.  The best way to hide a crime, or many crimes, in this case, is to teach people not to see it.  That is the result of our public education system and our colleges.  They are mass failures, and they were made that way on purpose by lazy, criminal-minded government employees who would rather live by a life of crime than by the ethics of hard work.  For proof, review the contents of the Biden laptop, and everything will become very clear.

Those poor people at that football game are most upset about the high gas prices. Still, they do not want to shake up any controversy with their friends and family over politics and election fraud instead of turning their energies to a football game.  They spend fortunes at those two prominent colleges, and they want to see something positive for it.  Is their education valuable? Did it teach them anything really useful in life?  No.  If anything, it has crippled them intellectually.  But if Michigan could only beat Ohio State, well, then there’s something to cheer for.  Suddenly, a six-figure education is worth the money if Michigan could beat Ohio State only one day a year.  Or, as usually happens, Ohio State wins and justifies all the wasted effort in those educations with a rallying cry all the students and their parents can enjoy. This dominating sports program serves as the face of the school.  Meanwhile, all the bad work is done behind the scenes; all the wrong things are taught for reasons that only serve a criminal enterprise in public service. 

It’s just something I noticed as the students rushed the field at the end of the game, where Michigan won the game.  The pent-up energy was more than a victory; it was a justification for their belief in a system that has let them down.  The results of the football game at least gave them some lipstick for the pig.  But it had emptied their bank accounts on another kind of theft, the looting of minds that might otherwise function from intelligence.  But it’s not all bad.  Education is the most important thing we do, but its responsibility cannot come from the criminal class, the public servants who do those jobs because they are too lazy for anything else in life.  No, the education for things in life must come from you.  You must not look to others to educate you; you must do it yourself.  And it doesn’t end with a college degree, a $400,000 house, and 2.5 kids in a flat marriage to someone stuck in the same rut.  No, education is every Saturday morning from 5 AM to noon, or every morning from 4:30 AM to about 7 AM, reading books, voluminous amounts of books, the great classics, popular fiction, modern commentary, speculative sciences, sciences, the religions of the world.  Everything that’s going on, I can see it all very clearly, but then I function every day in the manner I commented.  I get up early every morning, and I read.  And on weekends, I usually read for 6 or 7 hours per day before everyone else gets up and does things.

You do that kind of thing all your life, no matter how young you are or how old you get.  You educate yourself by feeding your mind good things.  You can still watch the Ohio State, Michigan games.  It comes on at noon.  You can still do your weekly chores.  You can still run the kids around town and drop them off where they want to go.  But while you’re waiting on things, you read a book instead of wasting time on Facebook updating your profile picture to people who really could care less about it.  They only give you a vote because they want the same from you.  Instead of wasting your time, feed your mind, make yourself truly smart, and only then will the blatant antics of these modern government crimes become apparent because the criminals count on everyone not to see what they are doing.  And the dumber you allow yourself to be, the more you trust the education they gave you, the more crime we will see in our society.  And they’ll do it until we stop it, and the results of the Michigan game won’t prevent it. 

Rich Hoffman

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