Tag: Steven Bannon

Steve Bannon Pleads Guilty to Fraud: Why people like outlaws, but not criminals

It can get pretty murky whenever money is involved as to the final outcome, which to me was the case with Steve Bannon, the popular WarRoom podcaster and former strategic advisor to President Trump.  He recently pleaded guilty to defrauding investors on a private effort to fund the southern border wall in the U.S.  The hitching point for prosecutors was that the investors believed that 100% of the money was to go to construct the wall, so if some of that money goes to buying a pack of gum for instance, or some administrative cost such as buying paper for a copier, then that could and would be considered fraudulent behavior and a political enemy could then use that technicality to call the behavior fraudulent.  It can get pretty wild and scary with all the emails that start dealing with money.  I have a standard policy of keeping any money out of it when I do something with others to avoid the pitfalls Bannon found himself in.  When you find yourself a prominent national figure, some people will always seek to sink you on any technicality.  So, of course, the radical leftists think this admission of guilt from Bannon is going to hurt him in the eyes of his very vast podcasting public, and I hate to break it to everyone, but America likes bandits and outlaws, so long as they are not bad guys themselves and are seen as fighting against a corrupt system.  In that case, people will find the criminal behavior to be good and will punish the bad guys who attempt to get control of the law so they can define good and bad behavior.  People still have a sense of justice that extends beyond what some central authority tries to impose, which is exactly how President Trump ended up back in the White House and where the mug shot he received from the Fulton County Jail over the case there regarding overturning the election of 2020 is now seen hanging outside the Oval Office in the White House.  People are pretty smart and not just compliant followers, and they could smell a rat in that case; the more Trump’s political enemies dug in, the more they supported Trump and, of course, people like Steve Bannon.

A good soundboard on this strange mystery can be seen in my favorite steak house in Cincinnati.  I think it’s the best steak house in the Midwest, and it is certainly on par with any restaurant, wherever they are, in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, or anywhere else.  It’s called Son of a Butcher in Liberty Township, Ohio.  Growing up in Liberty Township, I never imagined in my wildest fantasy that something like Son of a Butcher would be located where it would be and that some of what went on in that location would be some of the most essential things in the business and political world.  But we’re talking about bad guys here and can’t stray too far off the mark.  If you have ever been to Son of a Butcher, it is known for its very wild interior decorating with lots of art painted all over the walls and crazy chandeliers hanging from the ceiling everywhere.  Every room in the restaurant has a kind of artistic expression reflecting contemporary pop culture.  For instance, in one room looming over what they call the Godfather table, indicated so from the popular movie series, is a painting of the Joker from the Batman movies.  Another room is filled with paintings of books from popular literature.  It’s a wild place artistically and looks more like a kind of dive bar in New York than something you’d find anywhere in Cincinnati, let alone Liberty Township, Ohio. 

Of course, the food is even better than the decorations, as they know how to pack a punch for food preparation.  They have some very expensive steaks at the S.O.B., as it’s known, and a couple of people eating there could very easily spend 1K per couple.  Some of the food items are moderately priced, but they are on the high end of the menu offerings and is often one of the most interesting places I find myself in routinely. It’s the perfect place to meet people for complicated conversations, to say things appropriately.  When I am there, I am usually put into a back room, which is my favorite place, that seats about 8 to 10 people, has crystal skulls all over the place and is pretty wild in a place of wild rooms.  They call this place the Criminal Room, and it has pictures of famous outlaws popularly known.  Painted on those walls is a large mural of Bonnie and Clyde.  Around the circumference of the room are two large paintings of very well-known pop culture icons, Marylin Monroe and the other Snoop Dogg.  Marylin Monroe was arrested several times for driving without a license and driving too slow in one instance.  Another time, it was for a peaceful protest.  The room paints her with a mug shot, illustrating that just about anybody can be seen as an outlaw if people dig far enough. Then there is Snoop Dogg, who lately has been trying to change his image into something more kid-friendly and popular rather than the thug gangster rapper who advocated for lots of recreational pot use.  Snoop Dogg was arrested for his role in a murder investigation, the details of which have just been sealed from public record in 2024, about the time that the popular rap star and Corona beer commercial spokesman started to change his image to a broader audience.  The murder was a 1993 case that didn’t quite get to prosecute him for extended jail time, but the charges were severe.

The point of the matter is that even with the murder charge hanging over Snoop Dogg’s head, the public didn’t care.  They bought his records anyway, turning him into one of the world’s superstars in music.  And I probably wouldn’t know much of that story if he wasn’t painted on the Son of the Butcher walls that I see at least once a month.  That is certainly the case with Steve Bannon and even President Trump.  Republicans have been harming themselves with their brand by trying to push out the bad boys that all the women like and put in place all the embarrassing stiff pencil necks that they think adhere to the law, but when they get pushed around by the political left, they end up being seen as George McFly from the Back to the Future movies.  Steve Bannon sees himself more like John Paul Jones, the popular pirate from the Revolution, so he understood all this well before others did in the GOP.  But the lesson is, if you want to win people over to your point of view, a background as an outlaw only helps you.  Being a criminal, however, hurts you, so there is a very fine line to walk. The difference is public judgment; if the public sees lawfare occurring, they will support the victim if they stick up for themselves, which is why having those celebrities in that room at the S.O.B. is so artistically revealing. We love people who challenge the law that corrupt people use to hold back our society.  But people do not love criminals who unfairly seek to exploit people in a weakened position.  And the more that the bad guys have tried to prosecute Steve Bannon, who just stepped out of a jail term right before the election of 2024.  The more popular and influential they have made him.

Rich Hoffman

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People Are Going to Cry For President Trump and Darbi Boddy When they are Gone: What will come after them will be much tougher

The world is changing whether they like it or not. They are not in charge

I don’t like the guys on the Showtime show The Circus. I have talked about enjoying that show in the past, but that was during Trump’s first run for president and the world was a much different place. These days, everyone knows what everyone thinks of each other, so some pretense of fairness is no longer needed, as it was back then. But I find that The Circus is a good political show, even if I don’t like the people who put it on. It accurately reflects the political tides of the moment, which was alarming to them when they interviewed Steve Bannon and tried to interview Kari Lake but couldn’t even get enough material to do a segment with her. Astonishingly, as knowledgeable as they are about politics, they are missing the signals going into the 2024 election. They do not understand the MAGA movement, as most people obviously don’t. And they were nothing short of stunned when they heard Steve Bannon from the Warroom podcast, who used to be a chief strategist for the Trump White House, so he’s no slack-jawed loser, tell them that Trump was a moderate in the MAGA movement and that one day in the near future, they were going to wish they had Trump back. There was a kind of stunned silence, even for them. There has been an acceptance that we live in a world where co-existence with evil was always going to be the case, and increasingly, there are people in the MAGA movement who are supporting Trump, hell or high water, for militant reasons that defy conventional politics, to put it nicely. I’ve said it since before 2015 when Trump came down the elevator of Trump Tower, and just about every day since, I want to run campaigns against Trump as a liberal because, to me, he will always be a New York Democrat. That’s the world I’m fighting for.

It didn’t have to be that way, which was my thoughts when essentially all the Butler County judges had to recuse themselves on the Darbi Boddy case, which is a screenshot of the future of politics.  There are thousands of Darbi Boddys out there, the school board member at Lakota that I have talked about so much.  The belief was that the established order would play games and prosecute her with some power over the law and order society and that everyone would bow down and kiss some ring of party politics.  That is exactly what is wrong with the Republican Party in the wake of Trump.  That the Koch Brothers and Fox News still think they have some power to steer people away from Trump, that people are so stupid that they’ll vote for Nikki Haley instead of Trump.  These are all people smoking crack and are way off the political trajectory of modern sentiment.  They aren’t even in the room of consideration regarding reality.  I tried to warn everyone about the Darbi Boddy case.  These days, some lazy attorneys hiding in the background who are looking for an easy negotiation with the next unionized labor contract by getting rid of politicians who might stand in the way of that task with threats of jail, or even worse, are over.  That kind of local political abuse of power is what gave rise to Trump and the MAGA movement.  There is no control that the system of before has over people.  They have lost it, by their own incompetence.  That is what Steve Bannon meant when he said about Trump to the interviewers of The Circus that not far in the future, they will wish they had Trump back.

Darbi’s case in Butler County should have never even seen a courtroom, and now it’s going to go to the Supreme Court, and an impartial judge will have to be selected, and the party politics that has stuck its nose in all this business has screwed things up.  Darbi Boddy certainly didn’t do anything wrong.  And the judges involved in this case knew that from the outset. Instead, they played along with some assumption that they were in control and had a right to abuse their authority for some view of the world that has long been outdated.  And that is among people I know, that they have an entrenched view of the world that is not represented by reality that they refuse to see beyond.  I could have told them if only they had listened.  But the same could be said nationally and internationally.  Most people who work in politics don’t understand.  There will be a day when Trump is no longer in politics.  Right now, Trump has broad celebrity appeal, and he has a lot of Democrats voting for him.  He has broken down the blue firewall by changing how people can support political candidates.  I like that Trump ran his White House as a strong conservative, but he is way too liberal for my taste, and I am sure there will be a future with people much further to the right than he is, that I will happily support.  Yet people who hate Trump, Darbi Boddy, and thousands of politicians who are rising in the wake of all this, who will run and win future political offices, are mystified by this process and are refusing to deal with reality, as they did in Butler County, Ohio until it was too late.  The world will move on without them because they were never in charge. 

And it’s true, in just a few years, most of the people who have declared their hatred of Trump and fought so hard to keep him out of the White House with every legal maneuver available to them, and then some, are going to wish they had Trump back.  They will not like a world run by the Darbi Boddy’s of politics.  The Lakota school district will wish they had her back, too, when she’s not there anymore.  Essentially, what we have in government are radical labor union types deeply committed to Marxism who are using old tactics of resistance to stop needed changes.  And our political system has kicked the can down the road all this time to reach this point where there is no more road.  The belief that elections could be controlled to protect the thieves looting off it is over.  And Trump is viewed among MAGA Republicans, like me, as being entirely too nice.  I think of Trump as a liberal moderate.  I see him as a Democrat.  He is far better than the other alternatives and committed to stopping kicking the can down the road. And I am very supportive of that kind of talk.  But for me, he’s not even on the conservative radar.  Once he is done with politics, I will expect people far to the right of Trump to occupy positions in the Senate and the House and at state and federal levels; I plan to see the destruction of the Department of Education and many other assumptions of labor-controlled government that have ruined our country.  Trump is just the beginning.  Over the next ten years, I expect drastic changes.  Like Darbi Boddy in Butler County, Ohio, everyone has choked on the chicken over just one person.  The political world hasn’t seen anything yet, as the recent Argentina election indicates.  This isn’t just an American thing.  But it’s a sentiment worldwide, and it’s not going back to how it was…..ever.  History will never let people forget. 

Rich Hoffman