Tag: State Soverignty

It’s All About Gas Prices: Who cares about Khashoggi, for $20 I was able to fill up my whole tank

You have to understand what’s going on when you hear that all these United States Senators and the like are suddenly upset about the CIA report saying the crowned Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the execution of a Washington Post reporter in Istanbul. The righteous indignation is not over the death of a political activist reformer using his position as a reporter to incite challenges to Saudi Arabian rule, it is to make the gasoline lobby in Washington happy because they are very unhappy that President Trump has made America independent again at the gas pump and that has driven fuel prices under $2 per gallon where I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. This happening just as the Holiday season is in full gear giving American consumers millions and millions of extra dollars to spend on a fourth quarter spike to the 2018 economy. Those who profit from a less than great American economy are pretty pissed off, which all who are reading here should be very happy about.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the gas prices. I stopped by my usual place to get gas early in the morning before most people were up and decided to put $20 into the tank. Usually that gives me about a half tank that I use most of the rest of the week. When the pre-pay was complete, I put the gas nozzle back into its holster and jumped into the driver’s seat to go about my business. Out of habit I looked at the gas gauge just to make sure that it was reading the fuel that had just been applied to my vehicle’s tank and was surprised to see it was nearly full. That prompted me to look at the sign out by the main road at what the gas prices were and sure enough it said the price per gallon was $1.99. I thought that was simply astonishing given the world conditions. After all, that was precisely why Parisians were rioting in the streets that weekend, was due to excessively high gas prices due to too many environmental constraints.

President Trump had a plan and that was to make the American economy the strongest it has ever been, so one of the first things he did once sworn in was to make more supply of gas so that Saudi Arabia couldn’t dictate the supply exclusively essentially charging anything they wanted for a barrel of oil. Politics had created an artificial constraint to leverage favor toward the oil and gas lobby and that meant very favorable margins for them at the expense of the consumer. Trump took that away from that lobby and put the money back in the pockets of the consumer with competitive supply making America the largest oil-producing nation in just a few short years of his first term in office. A miraculous feat in and of itself. Of course, you won’t read about this miracle in the press and within the media culture because most of them still rely heavily on oil and gas money in advertising, and they certainly don’t want the public to know how fragile their existence truly was or how they have been price gouging people at the pumps for well over 50 years.

Of course, part of that equation was to keep Saudi Arabia as a supplier, because that competition leverages even American producers to keep their prices per barrel of oil down. So in a free market system that needs as many competitors as possible to get prices to a real market value, “what customers are willing to pay for gas” Trump leveraged the American fuel market to bring down the costs in Saudi Arabia and that effect has been a downward trend in gas prices since 2016, when Trump took office officially. Then of course the Crowned Prince appears to have killed off a rival in the press for which the world, particularly those in the media, wanted punishment for. But Saudi Arabia is a sovereign country. If he wants to kill people, that’s his business, right?

The way liberals work is they use peer pressure to leverage sentiment. In this case they wanted to trick Trump into going against Saudi Arabia which would really make the gas lobby happy, and it would give liberals what they want as well, a damaged president with a weak economy going into the 2020 election which would make him easier for them to beat. By excreting peer pressure on Trump they “the media run by the oil and gas lobby through advertising” could force him into a corner for which he could never get out of. But, Trump fortunately is a business guy and he isn’t so prone to emotional sentiment because he knows how the game is played, so he did the unexpected, he used his friendship with Saudi Arabia to leverage them to further reduce oil prices which is why gas prices are trending downward dramatically right in the meat of the Holiday season in America. This has pumped a lot of expendable income that would otherwise just go to oil companies in artificially inflated margins and put those dollars to use in the American economy. How about that—who would have figured?

People die all the time. For instance, a lot of people have died near the Clintons all through the years over lots of different types of issues. Benghazi comes to mind. Seth Rich does too. What if The New York Times and other newspapers put as much effort into discovering the conditions of murder of that Democrat operative who supposedly was leaking documents from the DNC directly to Wikileaks had an investigation done to the extent that they perform one for the murdered Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi? Both were high-profile murders, but one directly involved Democrats and pointed to a smoking gun that was very embarrassing to them. The other took away the leverage President Trump had created with Saudi Arabia through friendship to keep gas prices down in the fourth and first quarter of a new year during the 2018 Holiday season. The media being against the Trump agenda almost violently is picking their stories to fit an agenda, one that makes their advertisers happy ultimately.

Of those paid participants in this grand conspiracy are senators like Bob Corker, the forever Never Trumper who wears a Republican title next to his name, but might as well be a Democrat operative in all reality. Corker and those like him in the senate who really hate everything about Trump because the president is independent of the usual Washington controls would love to see the American economy tank if it got rid of President Trump. They wouldn’t care if gas prices were $4 per gallon, which they were under previous administrations for which Bob Corker was still a senator because the gas lobby was happy and that money flowed back into the pockets of senators through indirect means, and the Washington establishment was very happy about it. I’m only picking on Bob Corker because he has put himself at the front of the Anti-Trump Saudi conspiracy. There are reasons for his Anti-Trumper behavior and you’d understand if you know anything about the guy. He is a compromised person, years ago he made a lot of his previous money in real estate, a lot of which went bad. As of 2008 he had a net worth of around $19 million and just ten years later its at $40 to $50 million on a job that only pays $174,000 per year. Math doesn’t lie even though senators often do, Republicans and Democrats.

Part Two: The Corruption of Bob Corker

I say all this because you have to know the game that is being played, not the one that the media is showing. The hatred of Trump isn’t because of the death of a Washington Post reporter, it’s because the economy is too good, and that Saudi Arabia has lost their leverage. By looking the other way on the Khashoggi death Saudi Arabia has to be very thankful to Trump, and gas prices are showing it, and will get even better as we get into the 2019 vacation months. After all, the Seth Rich death was overlooked, so why not Khashoggi? I mean if all deaths are equal, everyone should care about them no matter who they are. But the Khashoggi death is only out of a need to control the optics so that the gas lobby can attempt to regain control of the world market. But Trump didn’t fall for it and I’m happy because for $20, I was able to fill up my whole tank at the gas pump. And that is what really matters.

Rich Hoffman

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Richard Hardy’s ‘The Program Manager’: A book more about communism in the corporate world than business, but well worth the read

You have to understand, I read a lot. A whole lot. And if I could, I’d read even more. Every time we have one of these Holiday seasons and all the people I know send me texts and emails wishing me good tidings and my response back to them is usually short and to the point, it’s usually because I’m rushing back to a book. That’s not all I do of course, I live a very full life, but I think reading a lot and maintaining my rule of reading at least one book a week all weeks of the year is very important. Professionally I am a professional problem solver, and I don’t spend any time looking over my shoulder the way a lot of people do worrying about being knocked off the ladder of success because honestly the root source of my magic is my ability to read and communicate what I have learned. But to be honest, it takes a lot of work. I don’t think there is any book on this planet that can teach people to be successful if they are not willing to do a lot of hard work. I would say to anybody who fantasizes about being successful that unless you are willing to outwork the other person, you will likely always be second place in anything you do, or in a lot of cases, dead last. If you lack drive, curiosity and a quest for knowledge you will not have much of a life, and those are just cold hard facts. My habit is to look at reading as a daily exercise and I do it as much as I can, and the results always give me a competitive advantage not so much over other people, but in the circumstances of challenges that are presented to us all. I like having the answers to questions before they are even asked, so keeping a brain fed is the best way to achieve that function.

Being the Holiday season of Thanksgiving where generally there are four consecutive days off every year it is a time to catch up my ratio for the year and to stay on target, I needed to read seven more books to catch up to my 2018 targets. Some of the books I read in 2018 were big ones so it can sometimes take a week or two longer to read them, which throws off my target, which I always catch up on during the two Holidays at the end of the year. Over this particular Holiday weekend I was able to read four books, some of them 300 to 400 pages, some of them only about 150. And surprisingly it was that shorter book called The Program Manager written back in 1999 and self-published by Richard Hardy formerly of Boeing that I enjoyed the most. Usually books on business topics are boring and the fun of life is not present in them. But its important to suffer through them because always there are little nuggets of information that need polished a bit before you can use them, but are of great value nevertheless.

Much to my surprise Richard Hardy likely nearing retirement hit on a very slippery topic in his book on how to be a program manager, and that is to articulate how much communism is present in the modern world both politically and within corporate structures. It really too me by surprise, but as an older guy it is understandable. But I’m sure within Boeing there was a lot of consternation about his book coming out, even if it was self-published and a little rough on the grammar. The insights are quite good and as you’d expect from someone at the top of their particular field of endeavor. I look at those kinds of books as though you had the opportunity to meet someone and have them tell you their life story and you can extract from that whatever you want. The professionalism of the publishing profession is to put it as bluntly as Richard Haley did, filled with communists. Of course, nobody calls themselves that, and many of the publishers in New York and London think that term is rubbish. They call themselves progressives now, or “environmental activists” but that is only because they don’t know their history. For students of history, not the history they teach you in public education or in college, what is present in almost everything, especially in the corporate world, is varying degrees of communism that people have just accepted over the last 100 years. A book like Hardy’s The Program Manager would never be published professionally by a New York publisher. But sometimes it is those books that are the most valuable to read.

And while we are being blunt, most of the Lean activities that most company’s employ to attempt to mitigate that trend is to get communist thinking of group associations and power from above structures to become more holistic instead of siloed. Cuba for instance as a communist country was extremely siloed meaning they were never open to outside ideas, but only the ones flowed from the top down. Lean concepts are all about decentralizing those sentiments so that the point of emphasis is the health of the company everyone works with. Like most politicians’ power structures within an organization chart become their obsession and they constantly view their workers as middle-class citizens, or even worse, among the poor and they spend a lot of time thinking about that class structure when they should be thinking about running a business. I was curious what Richard Hardy who worked in the very stringent Boeing culture did to solve problems in that environment and was surprised to find him such an Ayn Rand fan, an individualist who understood the nature of all things. After reading his book I’m not surprised that he was so successful and sought after. But I was surprised to learn how consistent it was to my own personal thoughts on the matter.

And that is what reading can do for you, just when you think you know everything that there is to know, you find yourself surprised by something that should be obvious but isn’t. When it comes to business books, most of them are very dry and philosophically dormant. They talk about how to do something but don’t really get into why companies are siloed or how holistic thinking can be good and sustainable for continued profit growth and employee sustainability. But Richard Hardy made his point quite well protecting the names of his fellow workers at Boeing and replacing them with a metaphor of bulls protecting a herd as essentially being the primary objective of the program manager. Most of what he said in his book are things that are easily obtained in other books and college level courses, but in his case he was talking about the development of the Joint Strike Fighter well in advance of our modern times which I remember being a part of, so I had some context to his subject, then to read some of the behind the scenes decisions and the why and hows was quite a treat. It was a very nice surprise that doesn’t come along too often.

I don’t know how well the copies of it that are still out there will be. I bought one that was in good condition arrive, but as I flipped through it the pages were falling out from being dry rotted. I practically had to tape the thing together as I read it to keep the book intact. But if you can get your hands on one not so much for the task of business management, but for understanding how communism entered all our lives and tried to change the nature of American life so subtly and over such a long period of time, it is a very interesting read and well worth the time in doing it.

Rich Hoffman

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The Real Killers of Jamal Khashoggi: The context of honesty regarding Trump’s defense of Saudi Arabia–never forget Seth Rich

Now we are seeing the evidence of how things became so screwed up before the Donald Trump presidency. As Black Friday dawned across the American continent and gas prices were down on average by .25 cents per gallon the issue of morality came up regarding public relations between our White House and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s direct relationship with the Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi. For some reason we were all supposed to be worried that the Prince put the hit out on the reporter and cut up his body in an embassy in Istanbul. The reporter himself was a friend of Osama Bin Laden saying of him, “I collapsed crying a while ago, heartbroken for you Abu Abdullah”, using Bin Laden’s nickname. “You were beautiful and brave in those beautiful days in Afghanistan, before you surrendered to hatred and passion. Khashoggi to put it simply in a very complex story was a liberal progressive on the world stage and had the sympathetic ear of all liberals trying to advance the world in a direction it didn’t want to go. Like most liberals they tried to use peer pressure applied through the media to destroy the lives of people whereas the Crown Prince still used old world tactics like death and torture to maintain power. So in such a world of vast immorality, How can any value be determined? Essentially in the power of the United States economy. That is where morality resides.

The reports are that it took seven minutes to die as assassins had injected the reporter with a numbing agent to alleviate the pain and stop the screaming. The hit squad listened to music on their head phones as they started cutting up the body, while still alive. They removed the body parts piece by piece and destroyed the evidence, just as Democrats had with their email evidence was well as our own F.B.I. in their attempts to have a coup against the incoming President Trump before he took power., and once the killing occurred, everyone went about their business. Turkey was outraged that the United States wouldn’t take action against Saudi Arabia who tried to dredge up the memory that it was Saudi Arabia who had backed the attacks of 9/11. But what they failed to mention was that it was the Jamal Khashoggi faction that supported the terrorism as he was a supporter of The Muslim Brotherhood. You might remember those guys who had personal invites to visit President Obama in the White House often from 2008 to 2015. It’s not a conspiracy theory or a “whisper campaign” to discredit the radical Khashoggi, but rather a fact. Ultimately in the war of power alignments in the Middle East with Israel in the middle of it all and Saudi Arabia to stand in direct conflict with Iran and Syria the urgings of the progressives are that all that should come to an end just because one of their own was killed in the conflict.

But there are other ways of destroying people, not just in cutting them up into little pieces and getting rid of the body so nobody will ever really no the gruesome details. Liberals in America literally did everything they could to destroy the life of Brett Kavanaugh prior to being confirmed on the Supreme Court. Liberals try desperately to destroy the careers of anybody who stands against them in the press, such an example would be the best-selling author Bill O’Reilly, formally on Fox News. They had no problem trying to use a phony sex scandal to destroy everything O’Reilly stood for, the media was so vicious that they didn’t care if he ever showed his face in public again. Did they physically kill O’Reilly, no, but that’s not how people destroy other people in civilized nations. In the Middle East, they still kill people literally. In the West, enemies of others try to kill the social footprint a person has in the world using democratic peer pressure to do the messy part of the work. We are talking about a double standard such as how the media did not hold Sherrod Brown from Ohio who had a history of domestic violence but ignored it so that the senator could defend his seat from the challenger Jim Renacci. Liberals don’t care about Khashoggi or moral clarity, they only care that they lost a voice in their attempts at global progressive crusades. They care about how they can change the world and gain power using ever manipulative tactics to do so. But nothing more.

And the people from the so-called conservative branch of things within the GOP such as Bob Corker and Bill Kristol, all Never-Trumpers who are raw displays of who various factions of the political right and left are still enemies of the President and the people who elected him, much the way the conflict between the Crown Prince and Khashoggi were. In Saudi Arabia they kill each other, in America we fight it out in the press. Is that better than killing a person, arguably it’s still aggression and conflict. Kristol isn’t going to be killed by Trump but the conflict is just as real between them. Enemies of the President would love to trap him into making enemies with Saudi Arabia so that by 2020 the American economy would be a wreck and people would blame Trump for the high gas prices and further instability in the Middle East. Why should Trump change all that over some progressive reporter who was against him too? Where is the incentive?

And Senator Menendez who just won reelection in New Jersey, by a little bit, is crying for morality over the Khashoggi murder too. Menendez the federal corruption charges guy who had all kinds of trouble in 2018 after a judge declared a mistrial barely saving him from serious jail time is on the lecture trail promoting action against Saudi Arabia. This is the same person who has an “F” with the NRA and anywhere else in the country besides liberal New Jersey wouldn’t be able to be elected on a one-person ticket suddenly has international credibility because he has come out against Trump’s support of Saudi Arabia. These are the kind of people who are standing against President Trump—these people aren’t any different from the assassins who chopped up Jamal Khashoggi. The only real difference is that they aren’t as literal in their villainy. But the are all villains attempting to change the world to their own version of it.

The only real morality of all these scandalous characters, and Trump clearly understands it, is the American economy. By siding with the Saudis in the world it gives him negotiating leverage for all future deals but more than anything it keeps gas prices down through the critical Holiday season. One bad move with the economy and all that positive GDP growth that the United States is experiencing could turn negative, and that is really what the liberal press and RINO conservatives like Corker and Kristol are after. Nobody ever cared about Jamal Khashoggi being cut up into little pieces, only that they in the media didn’t want the same thing to happen to them. But they will use anything to attempt to bring down President Trump, even if they can trap him into making an error in moral judgment that would destroy the American economy. And that military equipment that the United States is selling to Saudi Arabia, that is worth so much money, it means more than just jobs to Americans who make it, it’s all about having a friend in the Middle East that can stand against Iran and protect Israel. That is really what the liberal press is after, they want America out of the complicated Middle East so that progressivism can be ushered in on the backs of Islamic radicalism. And for that they will kill anybody literally or metaphorically. The American economy is the bright light that saves so many lives around the world, and without that light many more people die and are plundered out of existence by radical progressives and even members of America’s own intelligence agencies who still hope and pray for a one world order. The assassins cutting up Khashoggi were probably much more morally fit than the typical liberal operative, like James Comey, Hillary Clinton or even Peter Strzok. At least the assassins were conscious enough to listen to something pleasant while they did the dirty work. American liberals in many cases are much, much, much more brutal and uncaring. They can do the deed and lie to our faces without having to listen to any music, and that makes them very dangerous.

Just remember something, Seth Rich……………………………………The New York Times certainly didn’t do a big investigation on that murder directly attached to the DNC.  Hmm, and I don’t recall Saudi Arabia forcing a resolution on that murder.  So why Jamal Khashoggi?  Well, watch all these videos and use the questions that come from them be your guide to reality.  And when the question comes up about law enforcement covering up evidence to help create a political story, never forget what the F.B.I. did for Hillary Clinton.

Ultimately, this is why I support Julian Assange at Wikileaks.  I’ve been to the embassy there and I think the Trump administrating should stand with him as the world closes in to remove his journalism from the reporting of global news.  I personally don’t trust the media and their ties to governments.  This is just one case that shows the dangers.  I stand with Julian Assange!  That’s me in the picture at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Assange lives.  I consider it one of the few places in the world where real freedom of the press exists. 

Rich Hoffman

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Thankfully No Jokesters at the White House Correspondence Dinner in 2019: Respect and Leadership do not owe comedy “equality”

Honestly, I think the pick to put Ron Chernow as the headliner of this year’s White House Correspondence Dinner is a good one. His book on Grant was fabulous as he is a great historian and to me that should be the purpose of the dinner. This tradition of laughing at ourselves as a country is a pretty dumb one. How it got started in the first place is something that we should have revisited a long time ago. I understand the need for comedy, but there is psychologically something much more sinister going on at roasts of celebrities and people who have achieved great importance, and when it comes to President Trump, he has one clear message for his years as the leader of the Executive Branch, respect is a theme he has always wished to cultivate on projects he works on. This trend to make fun of everything so not to show that we as a culture and as a people don’t take ourselves too seriously has major flaws that should have ended after Johnny Carson and Bob Hope’s era closed. After them, the trend went out of control and has turned into a joke and that doesn’t help America be great, which for many in the typical White House Correspondence Dinner audience always wanted anyway.

I share with Trump a distaste for personal aggrandizement. I just never have participated in it and I don’t do it to other people. Part of the gift of thinking positive about everything is that it has to start with yourself and if you are making fun of some imperfection that you have to show the world that you aren’t any better than they are, well then you are a captor to their limitations for themselves. When you work hard to be the best person that you can be, why on earth would you sit around and let people find flaws in what you have done? Especially when the people making fun of you haven’t made any efforts themselves at greatness.

We all have grown up with this notion that its good not to take yourself very serious and it was always a false one. After all, if you don’t take yourself seriously, who else will, and in many cases—especially when it comes to children we raise, people we lead in industry or just friends and neighbors, they need someone to believe in. So if we allow our value to be cheapened by silly jokes about ourselves and allow our image to be brought down to earth where all the lazy and unambitious are sitting around as losers smoking pot, drinking too much and generally showing no yearning to live life to the fullest, then we have cheapened everything we individually stand for, and that has always been the point.

When people who do great things allow themselves to be chided and ridiculed with a display of humility it is a silent endorsement that the masses and all their lackluster effort are the standard and the efforts of the great are meant to be absorbed in the murky depths of social stagnation. There was always an unsaid truth between the person who makes fun of other people and those who allow it that states a lack of superiority in the target and if left unchecked the bar that we should all aspire to falls short. In my own personal life even as a very little kid people would tell me, especially adults, that you can’t go through life as if your shit doesn’t stink. You can’t go around acting like you are better than everyone else and expect to be a successful person, because they won’t let you into the gates of life if you don’t make peace with them. Well, I never listened and all those things they said were untrue. Reality states that if you are the best at things no matter what controversies are going on in your life, the world will beat a path to your door and line up to seek your attention, because they will need what you have to offer. So why would anybody who works harder than the average person ever give jokesters a seat at the table of equality by allowing puns to go unchecked.

People who want to elevate themselves by castigating the successful and harder working will call their targets “thin skinned” if they don’t silently endorse the efforts at equality by allowing it to continue. But why did it ever become necessary to “take a joke” especially if one doesn’t dish it out? I can tell you dear reader that the source of that trend comes from the same European concepts that invented Marxism and it never should have been allowed to set foot in American culture. Personally, I am a very positive person by nature. I think greatly of myself obviously and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. I love myself and everything I do and I live every single day and every single second of that day trying to be the best that I can be. And when I deal with other people, I always look for the positives in them. I always try to extract out of them goodness and a positive self-image. People who fail to respond or persist to continue their lives as a joke and find jokes in others are really just too lazy to try to accomplish anything in life, so their attempts at jokes are meant to keep the bars of life low for everyone. I see this as detrimental to any productive culture and have never participated. I don’t let people make fun of me and I don’t make fun of them. If they do make fun of me, I will tear up whoever it is that is doing the banter because I see it as an attack not just on me as a person, but on what the efforts of goodness should stand for. Do I take myself seriously, yes? Of course! And for damn good reason. Everyone should, and I am happy to help them look in the mirror and like the person that looks back at them. But fault-finding is a very negative thing and has huge implications on the quality of any society, and I personally don’t allow it.

I have never thought it appropriate to have a White House Correspondence Dinner that centered around telling jokes and making fun of our own culture. People around the world watch the video clips and it doesn’t set a good standard for a country that leads the world to make. Why would anybody follow a culture that finds so much fault with itself? The answer is they wouldn’t. Yet that has always been the secret ambition of the jokesters, to keep others from following the great people of high ambition and taste, and to celebrate the weak losers of lazy aptitude. We are talking about the kind of society that celebrates the star football player in any school at the same level of the class clown to the point where the star plays right along to endorse the behavior because they think it’s the popular thing to do—and that if they don’t, they may lose their star status. That is the great ruse of our modern times, that jokesters are just as important as the stars that build the society.

I understand Trump’s reservations about the way the White House Correspondence Dinner has been conducted. After all it has the word “White House” in it so that is a brand that President Trump has a great interest in protecting. Why would he want to cheapen it with the jokes of the stupid and lazy, to lower its image on the world stage just so that he could appear “cool.” That’s what we say to people we want to lower their guard to us, “be cool.” Don’t get upset, just drop your standards and opinions and join us in the collective mud of civility where we are all equally bad, stupid and imperfect creatures of God. No thanks. I like striving for perfection every day and working as hard as I can to get there. The last thing I want to hear is some joke about my hair, or the way I talk, or other little nitpick. And Trump is of the same mind, and I don’t blame him for it one bit! One way to make America great again is to believe that its great to start with, and that requires looking at the greatness and celebrating it, not making fun of it and trying to demean it so that other people won’t feel the pressure to be better. They need to try to be better and not use jokes as a way to insulate themselves from the expectations of the ambitious.

Rich Hoffman

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Red Dead Redemption 2: Defining the meaning of an American

There are so many things to talk about, but I consider the new video game Red Dead Redemption 2 on the big console home game systems to be one of the most paramount issues of our day. Not just because I love westerns and video games, but because the story itself is really at the core of our modern world and the confusing philosophies that we contend with every day—is big government better or small. I’ve always loved the “Red” games as the producer Rockstar has published them over vast amounts of time. The first Red Dead Redemption came out in 2010, and its sequel just this recent year of 2018, so a lot of time, money and effort goes into these things and they are truly epic for any scope of entertainment venue. But as I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I couldn’t help but think a thought I had been thinking for a long time, that the game was essentially Game of Thrones only set in a western instead of some unidentified middle ages of Europe. The essence of the game is to ask the question, “what does it mean to be an American.” The conflict of the game is when many different sectors of society unleash their understanding compared with the natural human tendency toward greed and violence. The result is a very compelling story that could easily fill up several seasons of a Netflix drama.

You can tell that the game is upsetting the progressive elements of our present society, they have lots of problems with some of the themes of the game. Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in 1899 just as the progressive movement is getting underway. In the game there are random characters that you meet many whom are part of the suffragette movement. As a player you can choose to help those people or harass them and many players are picking up these screaming feminists and putting them on railroad tracks to be run over by an oncoming train. And the game is providing awards for those actions, so the real progressives in our entertainment culture have serious problems with that. Additionally, the character you play in the game, Author Morgan is in a gang as kind of the heavy. The leader of the game is a guy named Dutch who is essentially a socialist philosopher. I don’t like the guy but it is a very interesting experiment in the fallacies of socialism that his vision is being destroyed moment by moment in the game driving him to lunacy because he can’t get socialism to work without being a criminal element in the larger context of society.

I thought Rockstar Games went out of their way not to insult progressives as many of the storylines within the game treated them fairly. But as the player you decided how relevant they were or weren’t, and that is what has progressives so angry. By the end of Author Morgan’s story in Red Dead Redemption 2 I had my good meter tapping out as high as it could go. That is a meter you get for doing good deeds for people, and mine was as good as it could get. And it was rewarding to do good as opposed to doing bad things which many players might be tempted to do. The whole thing is a very interesting experiment in human behavior that I thought went well beyond any previous entertainment exploration, whether it be a novel, a movie or a television show. This form of story telling I thought was very revolutionary, and powerful. I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is the literary equivalent to a Dicken’s novel, but Rockstar Games put a lot of effort into the whole presentation that there really has never been anything quite like it anywhere yet. I think of it as I often do with these massive video games, like its taking a resort vacation to an exotic place. On my 70” 4K television with a Bose sound system, its easy for me to forget that I’m just in my living room. The world is vast and well rendered in Red Dead Redemption 2, almost to the point of ridiculousness. That makes investing yourself into the stories that much more compelling, and powerful.

And again, by the end of Author Morgan’s storyline anyway, with the good meter at the highest point, because the character and those he interacts with changes depending on that meter, Author came to the point of what being an American really was. The game sifted through all the various elements of turn of the century North America and found the real heart and soul of American life quite wonderfully. It was a shame that his realization came all too late, but the point of the game is the tapestry that everything is set in more than the lives of the characters. I found the whole thing extremely refreshing. Its one of those things that everyone who can find the time should endeavor to experience.

I have always been around guns, but the first time I played Red Dead Redemption back in 2010 I had not yet purchased or became involved in Cowboy Fast Draw. But at the end of that game I decided that when things called down for me in life that I would. A few years later when an open window came I took 2K and had a custom fast draw holster made for myself and I bought my Ruger Vaquero. Since then I have been practicing Cowboy Fast Draw almost every day and I have become proficient. That is important because I see the gun, especially the way it was presented in American westerns to be even more symbolic to the life of free people as the samurai sword is to Japanese society—which is saying a lot. I usually dig a lot deeper into things than most people do so the first Red Dead game was something that built on thoughts I had been having for a long time. By the time this new game came out, I had a very good understanding of what Cowboy Fast Draw was all about so it was even more meaningful to me to be able to go around that vast world and gun fight other characters. I think any player would find the experience meaningful but for me and the kind of things I do in real life, it was even more so. It’s a world you simply don’t ever want to end.

That is why I think there is real opportunity here. We keep hearing about all these socialists that have been trained in our public-school system and are now making moves into larger official government positions. And that is in a class with the Trump economy and there is a lot of consternation about what will happen as a result. But the social experiment has already been simulated in Red Dead Redemption 2. And the socialists, like Dutch in the game, have no choice really when confronted with reality. Now, not to give too much away because Red Dead 2 is actually a prequel to the first Red Dead, but Dutch eventually has to jump off a cliff to kill himself because his views of the world just don’t match the reality of a new American idea. People followed Dutch because he was intelligent and well read, but that couldn’t solve his basic problem with his corrupted philosophy. And in a very complex story about many, many people, somehow Rockstar Games hit the nail right on the head, and it is truly a remarkable achievement in art and entertainment. And one that carries directly over into the politics of our modern times, in haunting ways that were quite intentional. There were moments in the game that were like the climax of every movie I’ve ever seen, only in the context of this game, they were better.

Rich Hoffman

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After the Smoke Cleared: Trump Republicans are much better off

I would have liked to have seen the House of Representatives stay Republican, but with so many RINOs in it, the passions of the upcoming generation of socialists couldn’t hold enough seats to give it a proper majority. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one of the new victors entering that branch of government, so as the smoke clears it may well be a blessing in disguise. The best way to quell the socialist movement coming from that progressive corner of government is to expose it in the light of day. By holding the Senate with good gains, the Trump agenda remains intact along with his ability to confirm judges so the direction of the country will not spin off the rails. All in all it says a lot that Trump was able to stave off a socialist revolt and what happens next will likely scare off any sentimental support that people might have for socialists like Ocasio-Cortez. We may not like the socialist tendencies that have been implanted in our culture, but we’re going to have to sift it out in conflict so that people learn their lesson. And House Republicans need to construct a strategy to retake their majorities in 2020.

However, generally I was happy with the results, locally George Lang won a hard-fought challenge to win his first full term in the 52nd District. That was number one on my list of needs for the election. The second was to maintain a Republican governor in Ohio, this time getting one that is more than in name only. There is a real good shot now of Ohio passing a Stand Your Ground law. A real good chance. The other big thing that needed to happen was that Issue 2 went down in flames, that was the school levy for the five Butler County schools that wanted to extract a lot of money from the public to avoid arming teachers in schools to deal with the potential of insurgent attacks. Those issues were particularly important to me on the local level and the inside baseball aspects of politics. So I am very glad to see things working out well, as they should have.

I was very sorry to see Jim Renacci not to come out on top of the very liberal Sherrod Brown for the Senate. The media gave Brown a free pass, just as they did for many of the House Democrats, which will be exposed rather spectacularly in the coming months, but with the liberalized media that we have, a lot of people like Brown who have no place in government were propped up, and that was certainly the case for Renacci. I personally think Renacci would have done better against Brown by getting more down and dirty, but that wasn’t his style. So the liberal held his long-standing seat with the wind of the media fully at his back, much like the young kid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I think of these candidates as media props who can’t stand without help from their media outlets and it says a lot that so few of them managed to get elected with everything that was thrown at the Trump administration. Renacci’s seat was always a deep pass with a low percentage of completion for net Senate seat gains, and Trump got those anyway, so strategically in the big picture it’s not a big deal. But Jim was certainly the better man by a long shot.

With Ron DeSantis winning the governor seat and Rick Scott winning in the senate for Florida a major bullet was dodged that will establish a turning point that the state needed to experience. The progressive caucus could have done a lot of damage to that great state for economic activity and with a friendly House on Capitol Hill could have made a real mess of things. But not getting a progressive stronghold in Florida it leaves House Democrats isolated and in a position we all need them to be in, with a circular firing squad aimed straight for their positions, instead of trying to aim in various pockets all over the country. Florida couldn’t afford to go blue, and thankfully it didn’t. And its important for Republicans to keep it that way. Poor people who don’t have much interest or knowledge about politics find these progressive candidates attractive, because they don’t know any better. In a few years when the next round of elections comes up during a presidential year the Trump economy will have taken off to even higher levels and impact even more people in a positive way, so states like Florida will be much less vulnerable. This particular year Florida was as exposed to change as it will likely be ever again, so the results there were particularly important.

With all the effort that Democrats put into trying to destroy the Trump administration it is pretty embarrassing for them to see a gain in Senate seats. No longer are there RINOs like John McCain or Jeff Flake there to tip the scales toward Democrats, of a particular note Marth McSalley beat Chrysten Sinema for the open Flake seat which is like trading in a Ford Fiesta for a Corvette as far as standing for Republican ideas. The Senate is much stronger after this election than it was before so that is a big positive. If Republicans could have held the House, the Democratic Party would be a smoking heap now, but let’s face it, the media owns the Democrats and the results they did get were obtained with a huge amount of effort and many millions of dollars wasted. The modest gains they did get were won at a great expense and knowing the way President Trump works, Democrats will have to look in the mirror and wonder if what they wished for will really be worth it. Its much easier to defeat an enemy out in the open than one that has been hiding in the shadows and now the shadows are gone. The map across the country is overwhelmingly conservative except for a few pockets of liberalism here and there represented by the House seats. And that means that promises and hopes become reality and responsibility which the Democrats will choke on both right out of the gate.

Like all battles there are always casualties but what matters is that you win, and the big seats Republicans won both locally and nationally which is of vital strategic importance. On the pro-gun side, which is as I’ve said many times, the essence of American capitalism, Ohio has a very strong state representative in George Lang who will advance pro-business measures and advance Stand Your Ground laws, and he has a governor who will sign those bills. It was never a concern about building up the votes in the House, George can certainly do that, it was that the liberal John Kasich, a Republican in name only, would not sign those bills. DeWine has indicated that he will. That will make Ohio even more of a red state and Florida to the south will join in those efforts. Progressives have targeted Ohio and Florida as insurgent zones of their leftist ideology and both states have pushed away the efforts which is far more powerful than holding a House with a bunch of radicals screaming for power. Now the liberals are isolated into one branch of government and exposed, and that is a good place to have them as the rest of the nation marches toward a new kind of Republican Party, one that is successful, and truly conservative, and for a change, winning.

Rich Hoffman

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Having “IT”: Controlling the properties of quantum entaglment in sports, politics and business

Probably the most valuable commodity in the existence of any human being is the discovery and utilization of “It.” We always talk about “it,” we are always on the lookout for “it.” Just about everything we do as people is about “it.” Yet with all that pursuit “it” is as elusive as a slippery fish captured in the high mountains of a cold morning when most people have been camping for a week and don’t quite have their wits about them, and they lose “it” in a moments notice. We have dedicated university study to “it,” we have lots of charts and statistical data to try to capture “it” by means of thought, but those who have “it” know that it has nothing to do with anything collective society can provide through groupthink, “it” is a result of personal investment and trust in personal ability honed through a lot of practice. Having “it” is the most powerful element a person can have, more so than all the gold in the world, because by having “it” it means that the world will be beating down your door looking for attention. I’ve witnessed two times in the past several weeks that people who have had “it” were at the top of their game and from outside, “it” was easy to see. The first time was when President Trump came to Lebanon to speak. The second was in the last half of the third quarter and the entire fourth quarter of the Tampa Bay Buccaneer game against the Cincinnati Bengals at Paul Brown Stadium. Even though I am a Buc fan this article isn’t about football, but in the various mechanisms that humans find “it” and display “it” for use in the needs of life, and I’ll say up front that there is a science to “it” and it involves quantum entanglement.

I said it at halftime, the Buc’s coaching staff should have pulled the expensive quarterback Jameis Winston at half time. Watching the live game as opposed to what you see on television I could see by the body language of the other players that Winston had lost the team—he had lost “it” and people responded to him negatively. Winston had three interceptions in that game and the Bengals were winning at that point something to the effect of 34 to 16. As I said, I had been thinking a lot about “it” lately, some people have “it” and some don’t. When they do you can see “it” from across the room. In fact you can feel “it” the moment they enter a room. They don’t have to say anything, you can just tell. “it” has nothing to do with anything anybody can give you. In fact, it’s not about other people at all, it’s all about how you make other people feel that embodies the quantum entanglement that scientists can often measure at times such as mass prayers and large social events where something like an entire stadium of people are rooting for the same outcome—or are fearful of it.

Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon which occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state of the others even when the particles are separated by a large distance—instead, a quantum state must be described for the system as a whole. For instance, if a particle is measured with its spin in one part of the universe in one direction, it will have an effect in the opposite way on the other side of the universe ignoring any rules of relativity. Of course, humans, really everything is made up of particles so such a phenomenon greatly influences the behavior of everything, especially human life because as a species we tend to think about such things and record their interactions as opposed to a dog or a cat that might witness such things but not have any observed thoughts on the matter. One of the ways that humans interact with quantum entanglement is in the act of prayer, which has been scientifically studied by physicist to measure the activity of particles under such conditions of mass human concentration. The implicit belief is that when a large group of people pray, they are having an effect on particles on the other side of the universe or vice versa, they are asking something somewhere to spin particles in a positive way in the here and now even if that something is on the other side of the universe, or perhaps beyond it. That is why we can “feel” moments of elation in certain locations such as churches or places of great historical significance. The manipulation of particles can often reside even across the layers of time and space so the quantum entanglement is still being affected even when thousands of years have passed, the particles of that area may still be reacting to something that is happening elsewhere at a great distance.

For instance, Paul Brown Stadium was built to participate in sports activity which is ultimately concerned with quantum entanglements. As human beings we don’t quite understand why we are interested in these kinds of things, only that we are obsessed with the results, so we design sports as a way to capture, “it.” “It” being the positive manipulation of particles in the direction of our desires to influence the outcome of events we might be invested in. The momentum of the football game was heavily in the favor of the Cincinnati Bengals and the crowd in the stands was dancing happily with the result. Obviously, the players could feel it, and it was working great for the Bengals and the body language of the Buccaneers said they were feeling the weight of it. The game of Jameis Winston showed it. At the start of the season he had to endure a four-game suspension for grabbing the breast of a young woman. The Bucs started the season with backup quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick and they had great success. By the time Winston came back the team did not respond well to him. When talking about “it” we must always talk about the unique qualities of leadership. Winston had lost the team during that suspension. He made too much money to sit on the sidelines so the Buc’s management put him in ahead of Fitzpatrick, but the rest of the team just couldn’t feel the magic of his leadership, and it really showed in the game against the Bengals when I was able to observe it live. The moment that the Buc’s pulled Winston from the game the body language changed completely with the Buc’s players, both on offense and defense and they nearly won the game. A last-minute field goal by the Bengals took away a miracle comeback but the observations of quantum entanglement within that stadium on that particular day in October in Cincinnati, Ohio was unquestionable. The game wasn’t a fight to put points on the board which is how human beings often measure success for failure, it was a fight over quantum entanglement. I would go so far to say that the entire invention of such games was to touch the effects of quantum entanglement and to uncover elements of “it” within our society in predictable circumstances—to evoke “it” under controlled thought experiments such as a screaming crowd between the game times of any given Sunday at 1 PM to 4 PM.

In Lebanon, Ohio I posed the suggestion to my daughter who attended the President Trump rally to thousands of people willing to stand in the cold and rain to hear him give the same speech over and over again that there was a lot more to Trump than anybody credited him with. People were showing up to this event to be in proximity to the positive quantum entanglement that the President has become a master of utilizing. If ever there was a person who had “it” it was President Trump. When he arrived, the place erupted into an intense greeting as if a rockstar had showed up. Trump purposely took the stage slowly making eye contact with as many people as possible and when he looked at you, you could feel the energy. We often accept such behavior in musical performances, but here was Donald Trump with just his voice, no instrument, no song to sing, just him to evoke in people such emotion. Trump understood the necessities of leadership and they were on full display and ultimately that was why Republicans suddenly were cool, because as the new leader of the party Trump was influencing the quantum entanglement of existence itself. A person can be said to have “it” when they can evoke such emotions in mass groups of people. Whether its President Trump or Ryan Fitzpatrick the nature of leadership is in having “it” and “it” is the ability to evoke the particles that interact with other people and influence them in ways that lead to success. That is done by either influencing them in the here or now or manipulating them on the far side of the universe, but when it is happening, that is when we say that someone has “it.”

I usually stick around at these big events and that was certainly the case at the Bengal game and the Trump rally. I watch people leave until there is nothing but empty seats. I do this because I like to track the influence of “it.” In Lebanon the venue that Trump had spoke in the meaning of the evening was gone the moment Trump and all the spectators had left the area. “It” was gone so it wasn’t the place that created the excitement. It was the people, the audience reacting to Trump who was able to evoke in them a quantum entanglement of particles that made them feel positive toward the outcome. I did the same at Paul Brown Stadium, I waited until everyone was gone and it was clear that “it” had left too. The circumstances of quantum entanglement were not evoked by the place itself, “it” came from the players on the field and the spectators that either rooted for or against their intentions on the field of play. The whole game was an artificial rendering of quantum entanglement meant to discover “it” within a framework of entertainment but for the very serious need that humans have to touch such greatness that truly is an element of the universe that has great power.

Of course, on a more serious note we deal with “it” every day, or in the cases of most people, the lack of “it.” Successful business people know how to utilize “it” at will. People scratching at success pray for “it” and sometimes by random happenstance they get “it” even if only for a short period of time. They might call it luck but I call it the successful manipulation in a positive manner the utilization of quantum entanglement. Whether it’s in successful business transaction, politics or sports, we can see “it” happening all the time. But controlling “It” is the obsession that we humans have with quantum entanglement and using the mysterious particles of the quantum realm to our advantage as tools of implementation.

Rich Hoffman

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All You Need to Know About Illegal Immigration: Understanding the latest caravan story from Mexico

So right on target for the election of November 6th is a caravan of thousands of immigrants trying to make their way toward asylum at the North American border with Mexico. Their reasons for fleeing wherever they are coming from are due to the deplorable conditions of their homeland and we are supposed to make the judgment to allow them entry even if it is under an illegal status because America is a compassionate nation that welcomes all comers. Basically, it’s a political trap caused in every way possible by the liberal-minded. They caused the conditions that these poor people are running from, the gangs, the human traffickers and the drug culture that manufactures raw poison meant to destroy the mind of North Americans, then they organize them in the way that they know how to gather together in Honorius or Guatemala and travel north to seek asylum in America, and they know when to leave to make the most impact in the media. It’s all very well-coordinated by various members of the liberal left.

I interact with more people from different places in the world than anybody I’ve met in my adult life, and that is not because I’m living a sheltered existence. Quite the contrary, I talk to many more people on a weekly basis at all levels of our social order than most people would have the opportunity to otherwise. I have a very interesting life that involves many thousands of people each week, let’s just say that. And I happen to enjoy the company of people who come from other countries because they tend to be hard workers with deep commitments to their families. For all the talk about hiring American and buying American I have a different take on it that doesn’t fit a nice political campaign slogan. I completely support President Trump’s position on illegal immigration, but as a business man he understands the same problem and is attempting to fix it through his policies on the opioid crises, but when it comes to finding hard workers for a business endeavor, most of the time when you interview 100 people for a job, the people who came from somewhere besides an American city where they grew up in a one parent household and around drugs for all of their childhood, those people aren’t prepared for a job in the United States whereas the kid who worked hard to get into America and get their green cards and American citizenship statuses are, they are hungry for the American dream because they came from places where that dream was far from a reality, so they appreciate what an employer can do for them and the relationship is very good.

When I talk to people very smart on this matter they never seem to get the big picture. Very few people are ready to admit that their children, “The Millennials” are not intellectually prepared for the workplace. They have terrible work ethics that were taught to them by an American culture that took their freedoms for granted. They are used to video games to entertain them, fast food so that they don’t even have to prepare for how they get food on a daily basis because its cheap and easy to get in America. And there are so many social safety nets that they don’t even think about things like insurance, or getting sick because they know the government has their back no matter what they do so they live lives of no consequences, and that makes them douche–bags to deal with. When I get the opportunity to give a Millennial a chance, I do every time if I think they can pass the drug screening, but most of the time I am terribly let down by their behavior. Out of every ten that you try to give a chance to, 9 of them will wash out and make themselves non-employable. Not unemployable, but rather not able to be employed because of their bad work ethics. You could pay each of them a million dollars a year and they wouldn’t be worth .50 cents because they don’t have the intellectual tools to navigate today’s workforce. The cause of this is of course liberalism, too much government in too many people’s lives, from their education systems to the type of policies that made it so that mom could find new dads and the old dads had to pay child support while trying to pay for kids in two marriages none of which the children think much of the father. The net result is several generations now of sloppy minded young people who do drugs too much, sleep too long and have to go to the doctor for every little ache and pain. The value of hard work has been driven from these poor people and they are the products of American culture mired in liberalism.

Meanwhile the liberals haven’t had quite so long to destroy the people of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Even though socialism and communism have ruined the economies of people from many third world countries, the family structures of those regions are very intact. Sons love their mothers and at least the children see their fathers working hard to make basic livings. The quality of living is not good in Guatemala, there is no economy to speak of because socialist revolutions have destroyed all opportunity for outside investment leaving behind gangs and drug dealers to fill the economic power vacuum, the young people do not have in many cases power or internet connections for video games and there are no Taco Bells on every corner for them to acquire food easily without having to make plans on how to acquire it, which is a daily challenge in most third world countries. So those people coming from those places like to work, it makes them feel good to be able to get a job and do well for their families and I find I have a lot more in common with them than I do people who have grown up taking American culture for granted. So the argument over immigrant labor isn’t about low wages as much as it is about hiring people who still value the morality of hard work. To me American work is what I grew up with having both of my grandparents own farms, they worked hard and I learned my work ethic from them, and I find I have a lot in common with a young person from the other side of the world who was taught by their mom and dad to work hard for the things they want in life even if their wildest fantasy is having a car that they can drive to that Taco Bell to get food for lunch at.

But you can’t have open borders, you can’t just let these people roam into your country turning it into a third world country, borders have value and having a way to restrict that immigration keeps the value high for those who do the hard work to get into America as a worker. Maintaining a strong border makes the value of an American job something worth fighting for, for everyone—especially the immigrant. George Soros is dreadfully wrong in his open border view of the world. And so is Paul Ryan and is desire to make the Koch brothers happy with what they call cheap labor. As I said, the situation is much more complicated than that, but even conservatives have a hard time explaining why immigrant labor is better often than what domestic labor offers. Part of making America great again is in making American workers like work again. Any hard-working culture can be said to be a successful one, and America has to relearn some of its past traits that made America great in the first place. Right now there are too many Americans that are lazy, stupid, and overly dependent on government. And that is by choice, not demand.

But ultimately when American “imperialism” is cited as a reason to be mad at American troops or policies in far-flung regions it should be viewed that America is protecting its borders so that caravans like the one presently flowing across Mexico aren’t motivated to risk everything for a potential life in America. They should have it in their home countries. If a place like El Salvador is creating problems for families to have productive lives in, then America has a moral obligation to protect its own borders to help those people have what America has so that they don’t have to make such dangerous journeys, and that is to promote capitalism in those places so that proper economies can flourish. It’s not an accident that such impoverished areas are created in the first place, we understand what makes them—its liberalism, whether the problem is in Syria, or in Central America, it is in the lack of opportunity and the dangerous conditions of their home governments that propel illegal immigration which eventually becomes an American problem as they try to flock into our borders to have what we do, freedom and opportunity. That is why the caravan traveling now must be stopped at the American border and those people sent back. But that is also why it is America’s business to promote capitalism in the regions these people are trying to escape from. The villain in the entire matter is liberalism, the same liberalism taught in modern American colleges and public schools that has destroyed the American work force. Lucky for us in a largely decentralized society, the people have been destroyed but the economic engine left running, so America is not a poor country like the ones in Central America. But to solve the problem on both sides of the issue liberalism has to be abandoned and capitalism used to fix everything. That is the only solution available and until it is, these contentious border crossings will be a problem.

Rich Hoffman

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What a V.I.P. Pass Means: The refusal of the press to understand Trump supporters

I am always grateful when someone gives me a V.I.P. pass to some event, whether its political or some sporting endeavor—or the opening of some new restaurant. When I do something, I like to get up close and personal with it, but I do not have the time to wait in lines. I am not a line kind of person largely because it’s a time management issue. I have too much going on all the time to really spend too much time on one thing. So, When I get the opportunity to be a V.I.P. at an event I take it very seriously and am always very appreciative. Usually if it’s a political event, like the Trump events always are, if I go it’s because somebody thought enough of me that they offered me a V.I.P. experience. Such a way of attending allows a person like me the time to do what I do without making it into an entire day’s event. So it was in that context that I saw the fangs of the national media at the Trump rally in Lebanon in a way I wouldn’t otherwise have, and it was obvious.

Usually at these kinds of political rallies there is a general entrance and there is a V.I.P entrance that is usually near where the media enters. In fact, the last three or four times that I had been to a Trump event, the V.I.P. entrance was in the same place as the media entered. So it was only logical as we parked in Lebanon, Ohio and came to the entrance to the Trump rally that I notice the media sign-in table, so I asked them where the V.I.P. entrance was. The girl who answered me was about a year shy of 30 and was pretty smug. She repeated what I had said like some puppet and pointed at the long line that was about a quarter-mile long that everyone else was standing in waiting to get into the event. I paused on her face because I wasn’t sure if she was challenging me to a fight or was trying to be helpful. An older man who was standing next to her and was much more reasonable pointed around a chain link fence just to the other side of their position and told me that the V.I.P. table was there.

We stepped around the fence avoiding the long line and got to the table where some really sharp young ladies were doing the check ins, so I felt that whatever that was I encountered with that bizarre lady was over. Another thing I like about V.I.P. lines is that the security is usually less intrusive. They figure that you wouldn’t have a V.I.P. pass unless you knew someone important so they treat you differently, as not a potential terrorist posing as a Trump supporter, so security is usually much smoother, and in this case, it was. Not less stringent, but more respectful for sure. Once we were through I was immediately thankful for our passes. I had brought my daughter on this particular event because out of all my family, she hadn’t yet had a chance to see the president yet, so this was going to be a treat for her. Even though we had the passes we still showed up three hours early and it was a good thing that we did because the place was already stuffed with people. Under the big roof of the main stage the entire floor was packed and there wasn’t a seat to be found. It was astonishingly crowded.

But the event organizers were very nice when they saw we had the badges and they directed us to our seats in the bleachers just behind where the president would be speaking. I was thinking about what the media lady had said as we approached, it was obvious that she thought anybody coming to a Trump rally with a V.I.P. pass was pretentious and that it was violating some unwritten rule she lived by that was very much the way Democrats view the world. Nobody was more important than anybody else so how could someone coming to a Trump rally be more important? Well, as they showed me to our seats the bigger picture was obvious. I saw people there I knew from other events and the necessity for V.I.Ps was obvious. Trump could be assured that the people directly behind him knew what to do with the cameras on them, and they were all safe people who were good for security. Mostly the people sitting around us were all either big political players or major donors, so they were invested in the safety of the president, and we were part of the show. In my own way I give a lot more to the plight of the president than people who one or two times in their life wait all night to get a seat in the arena. We all do what we do and all those things were needed for this type of show. So I didn’t feel guilty about being taken to a nice seat while the people in the pit were stuck standing for up to six hours. And they didn’t seem to resent us, we all understood the larger context. Everyone was just happy to be there.

But as the media started doing zoom checks of the crowd from their position some of the organizers caught what was going on around the media area and discussions were brewing about the bright yellow badges that the people in the V.I.P area had around their necks. And the media was talking about it in a negative way. Apparently other media types were just as appalled by the signs of a V.I.P area as that girl was that I encountered. So the event staff came by and asked us to conceal our badges and to stay in our seats. The venue was too packed to get up and move around anyway. There was no way to really go use the restroom or to get some food so the only thing we could do is stay put. That is when it really became clear to me why the media hated Trump so much, he was making even political rallies cool again by breaking down norms the press had long accepted, basic rules of practice. V.I.P. passes certainly aren’t a new thing, and Democrats have those types of things at their events as well, but the media had in their minds that Trump supporters were still a subspecies of political activism and that Trump’s people couldn’t be that organized as to have a V.I.P. base to draw from. It is a denial of their own making, but it did have an impact on the way they covered the Trump events.

It was a fascinating observation and a new level of hatred that I hadn’t seen before, but the disdain was quite clear. Perhaps at other events the thoughts were that Trump would never make it to the presidency or that if he did, Democrats would knock him out of power. So there wasn’t much consideration about different status levels of Trump support from his base. But now everything was a little more real for them, the media was getting tired of covering Trump every night and having him berate them. But they had to go because their media bosses needed the ratings of covering Trump and they were becoming very resentful. And to make matters worse were the obvious evidence of Trump’s ground game, the financiers, the provocateurs, the political support that became the members of the V.I.P. section. The media had been wanting to think that we were all playing political house, and some people still refused to believe that what they were seeing was real. But it was quite real, and even more than that—it was better than what was going on with the other side. Wherever there are V.I.P. passes that are as valuable if not more so than a back-stage pass to a rock concert, there is value that justifies them. I appreciate that value immensely. But the media obviously had a hard time accepting the obvious. They weren’t the only ones with special access, or in the case of that rally, limited access. They were able to be in the press area, but they weren’t able to get to where we were and that seemed to bother them. And that is a very subtle sign of winning that doesn’t get talked about very much. But it is one of the biggest bits of evidence of these changing times and it makes me even more proud of that little souvenir that I will never forget. It meant more to me than just being able to get a decent seat. It was the evidence of some changing times that are getting better by the day. And I’m looking forward to those continuous improvements.

Rich Hoffman

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Be Proud of the Cowboy Hat: It is alright to be proud of western culture

I took it more than a little personal, the abandonment of Columbus Day and the way the media belittled Melania Trump’s choice of hats while on tour in Africa. Both of those issues were blatant attacks on western culture for which I happen to love, and I don’t take attacks on them lightly. On Melania’s hat several in the media stated that it looked too “colonial” and that she should have been more sensitive to blacks and their plight. And regarding Columbus Day, it was the attack of the Europeans that ruined the utopia of the Indian tribes that were encountered during 1492 and beyond. All things in western culture we have been told by modern-day academia was to cast aside and think of as a sickness. Well, to my observation, it is the opposite way of looking at things, it was western culture that has created opportunity for improvement for people of all races and is the best thing to ever have happened on planet earth. And nothing represents western culture more than the cowboy hat which I have worn all of my life. Anybody who wears a cowboy hat is making a bold statement about their appreciation of western culture, its inescapable. For instance, watch the following video of Sheriff Jones from Butler County, Ohio wear his hat on the way to the microphone to give a little speech. The addition of the cowboy hat says a lot about him and the culture he is functioning from.

I have worn a cowboy hat of some kind since my early days of grade school. I grew up on John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns and I thought everyone in the world wore them, until I went to school and learned otherwise. At that time some of the big progressive pushes that we know now were just getting started. It was out of fashion for a housewife to stay home with her children, they were made to feel bad if they did so. It was stunning how badly other women treated my mom because she was still a stay-at-home mom in the late 70s and early 80s. There was a great push by progressive society to get both parents out of the house and to turn over the raising of children to the state. My mom was one of the last hold outs and most of the kids in my classes wished she had been their mom, because they were children and wanted attention—and the public school couldn’t give it to them the way they wanted it. She volunteered at school a lot and all the kids knew her and wanted her to be their mother because she could give them attention.

Obviously, I was a very observational kid. The direction of society didn’t make much sense to me so I continued to wear my cowboy hats as a little kid just about everywhere I went. The more kids made fun of me over it the more I did it. I was always aware enough to understand that their behavior toward my hats were to put pressure on me to change my style of dress. It came to a point that I was determined to make a fashion statement all on my own, and I wore some form of a cowboy hat from my teenage years well into adulthood, actually up to the present. Those hats to me always represented a distinction, my vote for the sanctity of western culture. I never saw the cowboy with their guns and hats mounted on a bucking bronco to be the oppressors of the Indian. I never saw the headdress of some tribal leader to be equal to the cowboy and their big hats. The hat represented progress and human fulfillment, the Indian headdress the worship of nature and the limits of mother earth. The two sides were never meant to live together, their ideas were just too different from each other. For centuries the west and the east ran from each other until they collided in North America in the early 1700s ultimately and went to war over their differed philosophies.

My attire cost me, more than a few dates. Women are always the pace setters of social norms and even though I was dipping my feet into the waters of being a male model right out of high school my attractiveness could not erase the uncomfortable social pressure that dates felt when going out somewhere with me. I could have easily alienated the pressure by not wearing the hats and dressing more normally for what was expected in the late 80s, but I felt that would be selling myself out, so I never did it. I was most comfortable when wearing a cowboy hat so that’s what I did most of the time. I can say that as a young guy of about 24 to 25 when I was meeting with engineers and investors with some of Cincinnati’s most high-profile characters at the time I wore a brown western style trench coat and a very stylish cowboy hat all the time—to the point that it made people feel very uncomfortable. I had to work extra hard to get them to take me serious with that kind of attire which looked like it belonged in a 1870 western than in 1993—but it felt authentic so I kept doing it. I lived on the campus of the University of Cincinnati at the time and I dressed that way everywhere I went around that college. It was certainly out of pace with the rest of the world.

It took another twenty years before people stopped looking cross-eyed at me when I’d wear my cowboy hats into public. When you get to a certain age people stop caring what you do or how you dress. Once you are too old to run around with women, people no longer view you as a rival for their affections, so if you wear a cowboy hat out in public they just overlook you. But to me they were worth wearing and the pressure that came with them because I always had the feeling that it was my way of supporting western culture. And why not support western culture? If you didn’t accept the premise that all that came from Christopher Columbus was death and mayhem rather than the flowering of a new kind of society, then what else would you do? The Indian never built a railroad, they didn’t make guns or build buildings. They were superstitious nature lovers and what was great about that? Didn’t mankind have a mind to take the world and invent new things to expand life in unique ways? And who did that better in the history of the world but the western culture that founded North America as a free country with the idea of self-rule? And from that came this marvelous economy!

I still proudly wear my cowboy hats and I never regretted it. Hats are a purposeful statement about the values that the individual has. When you are the only one wearing one, it can feel awkward because it certainly sticks you out in a crowd, which is why most people don’t wear them. But at various periods of American development hats spoke about the kind of society we had and they were fashion statements that represented distinct values. And I don’t think any other form of fashion says more than when a person wears a cowboy hat. Doing so states that the person wearing it is proud of their western culture and that they reject the idea that eastern philosophies should take precedence in the realm of value. The criticism of Melania and Christopher Columbus has at its root the premise that western society should be abandoned—but for me and many others, it is the other way around. And the way to vote that sentiment is to wear the hat of western culture proudly and without apology. History knows the truth.

Rich Hoffman

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