Tag: Trump

The Ohio Republican Party Endorses President Trump: When I say something, pay attention and benefit yourself

I would offer to anybody who would care to do the work to point out when I was wrong.  Occasionally, I may support a political candidate that doesn’t quite get over the finish line, such as the Russ Loges situation in Butler County, Ohio.  But that was due to him being put on the ticket with a loser, someone I didn’t support, which pulled him down.  But generally, when I help someone or propose a topic for discussion with resolutions attached, I tend to be right.  And I would dare anybody to go over my many years of doing this kind of thing and show me where I have ever been wrong, especially on big topics that are very controversial, such as the Covid attack we experienced around the world.  I was one of the very first people to explain what was happening, and everything I said, everything, turned out to be right even if it took a few years to unravel the story.  So I’m not a spike the football kind of guy, but this is an occasion where I have to spike the football because there was so much opposition along the way, I deserve to spike the football now and then.  This is about several Lincoln Day Dinner conversations that I had in April of 2023 when Ron DeSantis came to speak with his wife, and they were presented to us as the final solution for the 2024 Republican nomination.  As I said on that day, and as was confirmed in December of 2023, the Ohio Republican Party has endorsed President Trump for the 2024 election, and I can’t help but say, “I told you so.” 

Those were dark days after the 2020 election, and I have watched the Republican Party quickly try to bounce back to the mess it was before Trump came along.  It wasn’t that long ago when I had a VIP opportunity to meet with all the Ohio bigwigs at an event in West Chester that involved Kid Rock, and I politely did something else.  At that time, these were the biggest names in politics, and just under ten years later, almost none of them are still in the game.  They have been removed from office in some form or another, and I saw that coming way before anybody else did.  Even before Trump came down the escalator, I was for Trump and said so while everyone else was supporting, well, everyone else.  I quickly saw Trump’s advantages, which are pretty evident today.  I knew what the real challenges were to the Constitution, and I knew it would take a personality like Trump to accomplish our objectives.  And nobody else would be able to.  It took the election of 2016 for everyone to get on board, and even then, it wasn’t until the actual inauguration that people openly admitted to supporting Trump.  And I thought it was disgusting when so many people were quick to jump off the Trump train after the stolen election of 2020.  Yes, it was stolen.  How could anybody think otherwise by this crooked, criminal government that wants someone like Joe Biden in the White House?  How obvious does it have to be for people?  Yet quickly, in the wake of the 2020 election, people retreated to their former positions of supporting weak presidential candidates in 2024.  It made no sense.  The trajectory of the country was not headed in a RINO direction, so why did so many intelligent people insist on such picks?  What did they think would happen as a result?  Didn’t they understand the game that was on the table in our country and worldwide?

At the Lincoln Dinner 2024, I listened to some bizarre theories about why Ron DeSantis would be better than Trump in the White House and I couldn’t help but scratch my head.  That dinner was an excellent event where we all had a chance to meet DeSantis and his wife, and I saw nothing in their personalities that said, “These are the leaders of the free world.”  So why did people insist that DeSantis would be Trump lite, and that was exactly what our country needed?  I disagreed politely, of course.  Nobody knew what was going to happen next.  I had very strong feelings that I knew.  But you never know until you know.  I explained to everyone how Trump would win his legal cases, why he wouldn’t be thrown in jail, that the social media landscape would change to Trump’s advantage, and that he was the only Republican worth supporting.  People thought I was crazy and had drunk the Trump Train Kool-Aid too much and had lost perspective.  So, it was a frustrating night.  I was in the minority and have been for the past three years.  Since Trump was removed from office, I began adding videos to my written articles and there are now well over a thousand of them, most of them are about Trump in some way or another, explaining why Trump is great for America and global politics and I put them out for free, so people can have some point of reference.  Yet many brilliant people couldn’t see what was right in front of their faces, which was baffling. 

The smoke has cleared a lot since then, even though it was just a few months ago, and the Ohio Republican Party has formally endorsed President Trump once again.  The Central Committees get it, and increasingly, the Republican Party is a lot better than that event I spoke about in West Chester with all the heavyweights who lost much of their appeal over the next few years.  But through that smoke, I have called things accurately despite the opposition, and here we are.  Trump is way ahead in the polls.  All court cases against Trump have turned out to be nothing and we are watching our country punch through a very dark time, and redemption is on the radar.  By endorsing Trump, now the Republican Party can get on the same page, which it has needed to do for a while now.  All the fragmented opinions can now be joined, and we can focus on winning.  As I said, there is no place in the future for authoritarian government like what the Biden administration offers.  That is not where people are, nor will they ever be.  The Trump offering is the opposite of what the media is declaring: an authoritarian regime.  It is they who are the authoritarians.  Trump is freedom from that approach and it is just bizarre that more Republicans didn’t see it all along.  So, getting the Ohio Republican Party endorsement was a huge announcement, not just for me, but it allowed everyone else to get on board and unite the party.  I continue to write and say a lot of things, much of them, if not all of them, will turn out to be true.  I hope people will make it easier on themselves and listen instead of trying to fight me over every little thing in the future.  I say things, people listen.  That’s how it works.  Listen and benefit.  That would be the best approach, and when it comes to Trump, it took everyone way too long to get there.  But at least they are there now, and we can put our minds to good things to come because we all deserve it.

Rich Hoffman

The Biden Push for EV Vehicles: A total disaster by a tyrannical government that tampered with markets with massive failure

I do find the Tesla Truck a desirable option, not because it’s an electric vehicle, but because it’s armored, and would be a good addition to my lifestyle.  It would have come in handy a couple of times last week.  The bulletproof windows for small arms fire and the stainless steel body would be great things to have.  But Tesla is a good car company. Aside from the new Tesla Truck, they are fancy golf carts with reasonable market options for a gasoline economy.  And they have carved out a nice little niche for themselves, supported by just enough public interest to be interesting.  The drawback for me is all the charging, and the frequency of it.  Around town, for the stuff under 20 miles, the Tesla Truck would be great for my lifestyle.  For anything over those short stints, charging becomes a problem.  I know where most of the Tesla charging stations are within a few hundred miles of my home, and they are pretty well thought out, so long as there aren’t a lot of other Tesla drivers looking to charge their vehicles simultaneously.  So, as long as Tesla vehicles stay in a small market where they are rare on the road, buying one is much more attractive than if they were common and had to wait in line to charge their vehicles during long-distance travel.  It’s hard to beat the way travel is now, where fuel stops take under 15 minutes.  We have a very busy economy, which makes sense because it is the world’s most productive.  So, anything added to that economy by way of transportation needs to observe the rules of the game, which is speed.  And electric vehicles don’t have it.  They take too long to charge, and you must charge them too often.  Otherwise, I would say that the Tesla Truck is a superior vehicle.

But don’t say I didn’t say so on this electric vehicle market problem that has hit us, because of government intervention.  The Biden administration, thinking it knew better than the consumers, imposed all these regulations on car manufacturers to make more electric vehicles in their war against fossil fuels, and now all these companies, like Ford, have produced electric cars that are sitting on lots that nobody wants, and panic is setting in.  All the major car companies listened to the Biden administration when it was declared by such and such date, within this present decade, that all cars would be electric.  Of course, we know that Biden didn’t come up with all this nonsense on his own.  Rather, he was told what to do by the global World Economic Forum communists and their cult of love for Mother Earth, an insidious love that would make Norman Bates jealous.  Their beliefs should be considered technically insane, nobody should be listening to them to construct any public policy.  This is a consistent theme with these global lefties; they are authoritarian types who view government as a kingly mechanism and everyone is their subject who must honor every kind of edict constructed by the court no matter how dumb it is.  People are to do what they are told and to appease their king.  And if that king, or kings, decide that people should be driving fancy golf carts, that is just how it will be.  So, a complete dedication to the EV marketplace was imposed by the American government through a stolen election, and like a bunch of dumb fools trying to appease their insane king, the car companies tried to make a switch to all EV cars to meet the target dates set by the government. 

But that’s not how it works, not anywhere.  There is a reason most of the world’s economies are not very effective: they have socialist and communist governments that impose too many constraints on their financial opportunities.  Constraints take time, and they cost money.  They make bureaucrats and administrators happy by feeling like they are doing work when all they do is slow things down, which then holds down a country’s GDP.  The government in America doesn’t like Tesla cars for all kinds of reasons, mainly because of the way Elon Musk has built his factories, which are largely automated.  Automated factories don’t need unionized labor that can threaten to strike every five seconds and sleep on the job while watching Netflix movies—so big labor combined with big government is often the same.  Communist labor unions influence most government jobs, so they start with the wrong thinking.  So, the government thought it knew best to ignore the one EV company that had worked to satisfy a real market value for electronic vehicles, then would impose on the other corporations that were doing fine making gas-powered vehicles that they would all switch over to electronic vehicles, where the batteries are made in China largely, creating single point failures everywhere.  It was a hugely dumb idea, yet the Biden administration committed to it in the first months of his presidency, and now, three years later, there is a panic from those car companies that nobody wants their product.  Americans aren’t buying EV cars, not to the point that they were expected to, and now there is all this investment in a market economy that nobody wants, which is a big problem. 

But what’s worse is that the plot looks even dumber.  Now that all the car companies are failing, the real intention of the plan seems to be to make personal vehicles so expensive that ordinary people couldn’t afford them, forcing people to move back into their cities where public transportation would become the dominant form of personal transit once again.  Again, the Biden government represents an authority approach where slowing down is their method of choice.  My children had just returned from Europe, where they took the bullet trains all over the place.  They are interesting, but when you get to a train station in Edinburgh or Paris, then what?  You walk, take a bicycle, hire a driver.  People quickly lose their independence, which was always the point.  In America, you drive your big car from city to city, and once you get where you are going, you take your vehicle.  You don’t wait for a train, Uber, or anything.  The minds of the insane have created all this micromanagement in these 15-minute city concepts.  And now we see the cost of their authority approach in billions and billions of lost economic opportunities.  Rather than meet Adam Smith’s invisible hand of market need, they thought imposing their vision onto financial standards was best.  And the result has been utterly disastrous.  And just in time for the next election, it’s all hitting the fan, as I said it would, years in advance.  If only they had listened.  But many fools followed each other over the cliff and now have themselves to blame.  Government should support the expansion of market economies, not get in its way and that is the real problem with all the EVs sitting around looking for customers that will never come.  The government tried to shape the market rather than adapt to the growing need for economic expansion.  It hasn’t worked anywhere, especially in the United States.  If EV cars were truly the best, and Tesla at this point makes the best, they would find their way into market consideration.  Instead, the government has decided to pick winners and losers, and if people didn’t like it, they could take a train, which is the answer all left-leaning politicians come up with, which has turned out to be predictably, and grotesquely wrong.

Rich Hoffman

What the 2023 Macy’s Parade Tells us About the Economy: It’s Back to the 80s

I watch the Macy’s Parade from New York on Thanksgiving Day as a measuring device for our public health every year.  I usually comment on the kind of balloons they have on the parade route and what type of music they feature creatively.  And also, what is the tone of the broadcasts, and the commercials?  There is usually a lot going on to report that provides a good indicator of other economic factors that say a lot about us as a culture.  And sure enough, the 2023 Macy’s Day Parade had a lot to say.  If I had to pick a theme that was decidedly a major part of the decision-making process in putting the parade on this year, it was “Remember the 80s.”  Because most of the musical acts and creative selections were attempting to rub off the magic and music of the 80s to bring happiness back to the consumer culture, in the past, it was always common to exhibit very progressive themes, like “gays teaching class,” “drag queens make a cake,” or some similar social intrusion.  But I’m telling you, and Disney is a great example of this; going woke has made a lot of corporations go broke.  And that’s more than a catchy tagline.  You can see in the behavior of most corporations that they are reeling from terrible advice from Larry Fink and the gang at BlackRock and, ultimately, the intruders at the World Economic Forum.  By this point in the global insurrection process, we were supposed to be on another currency controlled by the centralized banks, digitally, China was to have surpassed America as the dominant economy, and President Trump was supposed to be in jail, and have all his political capital removed.  So there is a lot of soul-searching going on that many people who thought they controlled the world are embarking on, and it’s not a pleasant experience for them.  And all that shows in the creative decisions at this year’s Macy’s Day Parade. 

I’ll go even further than that, this Taylor Swift lunacy with the NFL and the Kansas City Chiefs is part of the story.  It’s a constructed monstrosity from a corporate brand that needs something to spark interest in the product, and predictably, because Taylor Swift is suddenly at NFL games dating a famous player, women are watching football.  European soccer has been appealing to this younger generation, and the NFL had to do something, so there is nothing better than a romance between the most popular “anti-Trump” pop star on the planet now, where they play her music during NFL games abundantly, and one of the premier players in Travis Kelce.  I noticed that this romance didn’t start until shortly after Taylor Swift played her concert series in Cincinnati, which is a kind of melting pot of heartland sentiment.  It just so happens that Travis used to be a Cincinnati Bearcat football player, so there is something of a connection with Cincinnati that they both have, in some ways, they are wholesome products of one of America’s most wholesome cities.  Some people measure such things as obsessions.  I believe the matchmakers who put these two together, such as Erin Andrews, played a role in understanding corporate politics through such imaging.  “Hey, you guys should date, it would be great for the game and for your careers.”  Taylor Swift and Kelce go on a few dates, talk about how great Cincinnati is, and pretty soon, they are swapping spit in the shower and sharing a towel.  A new corporate romance is born, meant to carry public sentiment positively.

The musical selections at the Macy’s Parade were along the same lines.  They had Cher, references to Back to the Future, and many Broadway plays with people in cowboy hats, as if they were trying to appeal hard to mainstream America but weren’t sure they knew what it was.  What they didn’t talk a lot about was progressive politics, to the point where it was avoided by everyone involved in the presentation.  At the beginning of the parade, a bunch of Palestinian protestors were blocking the route, and they were disposed of quickly so as not to impact the show, which I thought was great.  The show must always go on.  And if you were watching it on television, you never would have known.  It was interesting to watch Cher perform because she is one of the biggest Never Trumpers out there and would generally be one who would throw support to Palestinian supporters, but here was a 70-year-old all dressed up singing sexy songs from the 80s.  Later that day, I might add, Dolly Parton dressed up like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader in her 70s, trying to show that age and sexiness were not lost during the Thanksgiving Day tradition of the Cowboys playing football during a halftime show.  The NFL could have picked thousands of other people.  Entertainment had millions of different options, but they decided on Cher, Dolly, and the safe music of Taylor Swift to sell their corporate image.  There were no Black Lives Matter references, no bending the knee at the National Anthem.  There was almost a desperate hope that these corporate images might politely be invited into the public trust again by giving audiences everything they sought and more. 

As I have been saying for a long time now, the BlackRock stakeholder capitalism idea was never going to work, all that goofy stuff they have been yacking about at Davos was never going to be accepted by the American public, and it is there that world cultures trend.  European rock bands and entertainment must export their art to America to make money.  Not China, as the entertainment industry used to think it was possible to sell to the public.  Not Africa, Russia, or Europe.  If you can’t tap into the greatest economy in the world, the one that every economist everywhere should be studying instead of trying to change into a socialist utopia, then there is no market.  And the ultimate feature of that art is the Mainstreet options seen in features like the Macy’s Day Parade.  This year, it was all about an olive branch to the MAGA voters.  Over the last three years of Biden, it’s evident that the public wasn’t seduced into the World Economic Forum monstrosities cooked up under their economic view.  And people wanted optimism in their art again, in their music, movies, and Broadway plays.  It wasn’t that long ago when Broadway was utterly shut down due to COVID-19.  Well, people moved on to other interests, and getting a ticket to a Broadway play isn’t so hard now, just like Disney Parks, where attendance is low.  People didn’t need the corporations.  They don’t need NFL football; all the progressive activism has hurt their brand.  They are turning to Taylor Swift to help them recapture the magic, but it looks like there is permanent damage to the NFL because of their anti-Trump activism that will never come back.  The Macy’s Parade of 2023 clearly states that significant changes were on the horizon, not the kind they politically support.  Yet that is the world of tomorrow, and they are trying to embrace it today.  Their actions are an admission of good things to come that they aren’t all that happy about, but if they want to be in business, they had better embrace it.

Rich Hoffman

I’m Happy to be Called a Radical: How lazy people hide the truth from the public

Let’s have an honest discussion. Otherwise, I would have just left it alone.  But over the last several weeks, since the previous election in 2023, I have had more people refer to me and people I know as radicals than I have ever heard.  Let me tell you what they really mean when they say such things.  They intend that they are too lazy to fight for their country and to do the right thing for themselves and their families.  Most of the world, all through history, is pretty lazy, and people would rather shmooze their way into a better life than work for it.  And I am the opposite.  And I find among other people who are also being called radicals because of our support of Trump, and of a dislike of RINO Republicans, and many other things such as abortion rights, pot legalization, homeschooling, and the economy, that the real frustration is that they are too lazy to do the right thing, and they are frustrated by other people who aren’t, and it exposes them for the losers they are.  If only they weren’t so lazy and soft-minded in intellect, the world would be a much different and better place.  The name-calling is in anger for those same people feeling exposed for being less than they should be.  They have let the universe down by not working to make it better.  Instead, they let some pin-headed loser of an attorney attempt to shape local politics with personal destruction so they can have an easier time with a labor contract with a radical teacher’s union.  Or they support little bits of Marxism in their businesses and political climates because they are too lazy to compete with other companies for market share, so they turn to lobbyists hoping to get an advantage through the power of government.  When someone calls someone like me a radical, what they mean is that they are too lazy to do the right things and always fall into evil because of personal failures they wish to hide behind a façade of social merit.

Let me explain another thing: some of the most vile characters that we are dealing with these days never turned away from a Christian nation calling them names.  People like Saul Alinsky, who wrote the handbook of left-winged politics, Rules for Radicals, put the title on his cover, embracing the term as a badge of honor.  Conservatives have been suckered over the years by church interpretations of Christ to turn the other cheek and focus their efforts on getting into Heaven. Actual Luciferian devils of all kinds have been assaulting us to our faces and literally trying to bring Hell all over the earth, and we have been too lazy and too complacent to do anything about it.  Allowing evil to spread like wildfire gives us this world of garbage we see today.  A place where public schools teach kids not to use their minds but to have sex in kindergarten and to be taught by a transvestite who wants to do a strip show in our city streets for children.  Yes, if you open Rules for Radicals to the very first page, the dedication page, you will see that Saul Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.  So, it’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s a fact and an audacious one.  And when I talk about the Blood Cult of Baal, this is exactly what I mean: it is easier for lazy people to sacrifice something of value to spiritual rulers than to actually do the work themselves to make the world a better place. 

Saul Alinsky used to hang around the mob of Al Capone in Chicago and learned from them how to defeat Mainstreet, Christian America, which would then become the playbook Democrats would use to destroy the Republic of America.  To do to the rest of the country what they did to Chicago has ruined the city to this day.  Republicans care too much about what people think of them as being considered good Christians, socially rather than at the level of their very souls, and they could be exploited with name-calling.  It has worked for the last hundred years to such an extent that it has gone overboard, well beyond what Saul Alinsky could have hoped for.  People like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have openly embraced this notion of being called “radicals” because that’s what they were.  They wanted to be.  And on the backs of that effort, Bill Ayers and his crazy Weather Underground wife launched the political career of Barack Obama, the kid born in Indonesia or Kenya by an unknown dad of communist origin (we at least know that much), to destroy America while the polite conservatives just sat there and avoided being called names.  Such people would rather see the world burn before anybody calls them a disparaging name because they are so concerned with external visuals that they are terrified that people might see what they are really all about.  That is how evil spreads in the world, and Saul Alinsky, through the gangster Al Capone, understood it and knew how to use it to destroy the concept of America; they have been doing it to us all this time, and some people like me are sick of it.  I was never OK with it, and I’m not signing up to allow Hell to reign over the earth. Instead, I am committed to making on earth as it is in Heaven.  And I’m not putting up with evil in any form.  And if that’s radical, then so be it!

We have an excellent restaurant in my local area called Son of a Butcher at Liberty Center across from Pies and Pints.  I recently had dinner with a large group, and there is a backroom for such engagements.  This restaurant is filled with very eccentric artwork, and this particular room is dedicated to criminal conduct; it has mug shots mainly painted over the table you eat of Snoop Dogg’s mug shot and that of Marylin Monroe.  And it has the antics of Bonnie and Clyde looming along one of the large walls as crystal skulls peer at you through their antics of hell and damnation.  I love the place!  Not so much in the reverence of such images but in the admission.  In another room at that restaurant, they have what they call the “Godfather” table, which is very large and meant to reflect the participants of that famous movie.  This artistic approach to a dining experience says so much about our current culture, which Saul Alinsky had figured out and Democrats have been exploiting for years, especially recently.  People, like the Cult of Baal, would instead work to be part of a mob and gain the strength of the masses rather than stand as an individual and work to make the world a better place.  If they could find power in group behavior where they only had to appease a mighty criminal overlord or some demonic entity from the netherworld, then they would do it because they were lazy and would otherwise be found to be detriments to the world because they feared being called names for fear that people might learn what they really were, so their public image was of utmost concern to them.  To the point where they were entirely controlled by it and by those who held judgments behind the name-calling.  But not everyone is trying to hide who they are.  Some people are proud of it.  And these days, when the bad guys call you a radical, we can all wear it as a badge of honor.  Because if we have made them angry enough to call us that name.  Then we know we are doing the right thing.  If doing good is radical, then I’m thrilled to be one and will be motivated to do a lot more of it.

Rich Hoffman

2024 is Time for Harvest: Separating Good from Evil

As romantic of a notion as conspiracies might be, and they are, ultimately, many of the dark rituals to come from the following of astrology were related to the acquisition of food, such as knowing when it was time for harvest and preparing for the upcoming winter. And specifically to food supply, the production of wheat, and its use in the human diet. We forget these days just how stressful it was to wake up every day and figure out where your food would come from because food is an assumption for us in these modern times. It’s easy for us and in all varieties. But for thousands of years, right up until around 100 years ago, food was a very stressful problem, even for the rich and famous. So nurturing a good crop of wheat to the harvest was a significant undertaking, and it’s why such societies were able to make judgments of good and bad more directly because, literally, their food supply depended on value judgments just to survive. This is what the Parable of the Weeds is all about in Matthew 13:24-29 when Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.” Jesus essentially said to let the weeds grow with the wheat and not try to pull them up together; otherwise, you will destroy your crop in the process. Jesus was talking about tares, which are weeds, and specifically darnel, which looks like wheat during the early stages of growth. In this case, the best way to save your crop would be to separate the weeds from the crop at harvest time, not necessarily during the growth of the good wheat. And under such a metaphor, we can look at our times and say, “It’s time for the harvest.”

Can’t let the weeds sink roots

We have allowed a lot of weeds to grow in our culture, largely out of compassion, because we live in a time when perhaps we thought we could let everything grow together. That we could co-exist with evil and that demands on our survival would not be challenged. But that was incorrect. Instead, we have allowed many weeds to take over our gardens of life and now we cannot separate good and evil so easily. Like the darnel, evil looked a lot like good, and now their roots have intertwined together as parasites threatening to kill the host crop if we were to attempt to remove those weeds as they have been growing. And like the darnel, the weeds looked like the wheat we wanted, so we left it alone to grow, unmolested. This is the problem with having a society that does not cast value judgments on the wicked and estranged intellect. Letting a multitude of terrible menaces grow into a healthy society has destroyed our culture and stunted its growth outrageously. Of course, we took it for granted because we have lost touch with the necessity of using value judgments for survival. We have entertained this fantasy that we could all get along if only we respected each other’s place in the garden. Yet in so doing, we have only harmed what’s good and allowed what’s evil to perpetuate and grow in strength, leaving our only means of dealing with such a problem to a hope that everything might survive until a harvest.

We have a lot of darnel in our society

I would point to the year 2024 and the re-election of Trump as the harvest time of our present generation.  Of course, the weeds who have been surviving as parasites of the good will have great anxiety as the intentions of the harvest are revealed, the separation of the wheat from the weeds.  The darnel of our culture, which is vast and in many forms, knows that their time as parasites is ending, and they are naturally terrified.  After all, they are a lifeform too, and they were created to be parasites living off the good, to disguise themselves to even look like the wheat of our desire so that we might not know what they are until it’s too late.  Until they are in our schools teaching children to be transexual maniacs and sexually obsessed losers.  Until our national deficit is over 34 trillion dollars, with 1 trillion added in the last business quarter of 2023.  That drugs would be sought after to numb our minds from the terrors we see, that hidden tyrannies hidden in our technology would give us no peace in seclusion.  The war against good and evil would turn everything we thought we could trust into a pitched-fork devil of ill intent.  Everywhere we look, we see weeds, and it’s so bad that we can no longer tell what is good for us or bad.  We can’t know the wheat for the weeds because, at this point, everything looks the same.  We have not tended to our gardens; we have let the weeds deceive us into thinking they were wheat, and we allow them to grow and wrap their roots around the roots of our good crop, daring us to pull them and, in so doing, to destroy everything we value.

But it’s harvest time, time to pull up everything, wheat and all.  It will be a messy process, but our fields must be cleared in the aftermath.  At that time, the darnel can be removed from the wheat, and we can distinguish value from the parasites.  Because we have yet to separate the weeds from our garden early in the process, the field has become overgrown, and there are more weeds than wheat.  So we have quite a mess to deal with.  But once the job is done, we have a clear field, and we have determined the wheat from the darnel, separating the good from the bad, we’ll have a chance to start over.  We nurture our crops by keeping the weeds out of our garden before they wrap their roots around what we value.  Always after harvest, when we see our clean fields and a healthy food supply, can perspective begin to bring sanity to our concerns.  And when it does, we must protect our wheat from infancy and not let evil wrap around our values to feed off them for its sustenance.  The weeds must be pulled before they can ever take root.  That is why we must tend our gardens and have value judgments on the good and the bad.  We must get rid of the bad before it matures into a parasite that is dangerous to the things we value, such as a food supply.  It is also in understanding such parables that evil wants to eradicate the Bible from a culture so that we can’t tell the difference, allowing evil to grow unmolested.  Such an idea was always a bad one, and during this time of harvest, one that we should never neglect again.  The Bible is full of such wisdom and has contributed to all productive human cultures.  And we’d be wise to listen before it’s too late.  

Rich Hoffman

The Jewish People Should Learn from History: Stop trying to appease evil

Never forget, it was the Hamas terrorists who parachuted into Israel, like a cut scene from a Call of Duty video game, and purposely assassinated innocent Jewish people just because they exist. Since then, the people who support Palestine, the original occupants of the land of Canaan that God decided needed to be eradicated for their sinful ways and given to the people of Israel, have been claiming to be the victims and have been calling for a ceasefire from retaliation.  They attack, kill, and destroy, then immediately ask for peace.  The Jewish people are one of the oldest people living on earth to this day, with a culture that has survived many tough times.  They are God’s chosen people, yet all their history, persecution of their very existence has followed them wherever they’ve been scattered to, to the ends of the earth.  So, to some extent, they have survived by appeasing all the bad guys in the world, and for Bible readers who study the ancient texts without a preconceived notion, Yahweh has become very angry toward the Jewish people for their weakness and apathy toward conviction.  It was a source of much frustration for God that the Jewish people sought to appease their persecutors so much when he would have rather had them slay their enemies without remorse.  And we see that now, even as Israel is under attack by terrorist groups sympathetic to the PLO many Jewish people in America are registered Democrats and support liberal policies that are detrimental to their very existence and feed the power of their oppressors.  Which is a very dumb idea.  It’s one of the reasons that such villains exist in the world: nobody stops them from unleashing hell upon it.  God would prefer the Jewish people to defend themselves as a group of people.  Not seeking to survive by appeasing evil with timid social values.

You might have seen that Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood types support Joe Biden with a big fundraiser hoping to get the old man’s campaign moving in a positive direction.  Spielberg used to be a great filmmaker, but not so much anymore.  Like many Jewish people, his politics have not lined up with reality, and it shows in him as a person.  Many Jewish people in Hollywood support Democrats and have made themselves part of the problem by essentially making peace with their oppressors in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.  It’s great to have an ancient connection to your past, but what good is it if your only means of survival is to embrace the bad guys?  It reminds me of the old stagecoach robberies where villains would get on a train with many passengers with a lot of money and stick them up.  I always wondered why people were so compliant and did so without fighting back.  Perhaps it’s because they believe material possessions aren’t worth dying over.  They think that they can always make more money or get more stuff.  So that their view of protecting their family is to do whatever they need to do to live another day.  My thoughts, however, are that when someone tells you to hold your hands up if you want to live, then that is the time that you pull out your own gun and defend yourself.  Appeasing evil strengthens their resolve and makes it easy for them to be evil.  This ties into a lot of God’s original problems with the Jewish people, as stated quite clearly in the Bible.  Why don’t people attack their enemies and trust that God will protect them from harm?  When God says to attack a nation and destroy it, do it, even if you are grossly outnumbered.  Trust God: he will take care of you. 

God was always frustrated with his chosen people because they did not attack, and they were always trying to appease the desecrators of their culture, such as the Baal worshipers who continued to corrupt them during their entire existence.  King Solomon didn’t just build temples to Yahweh; he built temples to other gods because he had thousands of wives and concubines who worshipped Baal and other regional gods and always tried to make them all happy.  It was about that time that God just gave up on the people and let Nebuchadnezzar have them through a vicious attack that oppressed the Jewish people for the next several thousand years.  If it wasn’t the Babylonians, it was the Romans.  Then, Islamic radicalism took over all the Holy sites from the Bible to essentially attempt to desecrate them beyond memory, and in doing so, tried to kill off the Jewish people entirely because the dispute was whether or not they should have ever existed in the first place.  What right did God have to give them the promised land, where the indigenous people were worshiping all these pagan gods and were considered the original owners?  Who was this God to come along and give their land away?  That is where morality comes into play and the right and obligation to pass judgment on the wicked and decide that a proper morality has more value than just surviving.  Defending the world from evil has more merit in Heaven than just giving up and appeasing evil so you can survive another day. 

And we see this same mentality in supporters of liberal politics, those who support Democrats in America, for instance, the Steven Spielberg types.  For them, the fantasy characters they created in Hollywood that did fight back represented the desire all people have to fight back against evil.  But then there is the ethical problem of saying, “It’s only money.  Give it to them so they don’t shoot us.”  And once that kind of appeasement has been entertained, Hollywood types like the Spielbergs of the world lose their audience because that’s not what MAGA Americans want their country to be like, appeasers to evil who don’t fight back.  That is the essential element of those against Trump.  To make America Great Again means fighting back against evil oppressors when so many Democrats and RINOs have decided that the best way to survive is to give evil what it wants, not to cast judgment against all the Jezebels of existence, and to make peace, not war.  Isn’t that what all the dope-smoking, communist hippies always said?  Going back to the movie Poltergeist, I always had a problem with Steven Spielberg putting that pot scene in the bedroom where the main characters were smoking a joint together.   No wonder the ghosts ran them off from their home because they were weak-minded losers.  But that was Steven Spielberg on a plate.  And that is why Hollywood isn’t what it used to be.  Like the Biden administration, which talks out of both sides of its mouth, not because it has any conviction but because its goal is to survive at all cost, the goal is not to fight evil, but to yield to it.  Even if it means appeasing the evil in the world when God wants people to fight against it, appeasing evil was never God’s choice.  Jesus came along and gave everyone an excuse to embrace peace, which has all kinds of Hindu elements to the approach that has only fed many villains in the world, appeasement, which has only encouraged them to rob more trains and take more people’s money without working hard to earn it for themselves.  And in that way, appeasement is the root cause of how evil spreads worldwide.  And when we look around at why there is so much evil thriving everywhere, it’s because we have too many appeasers who look to avoid conflict when they should be embracing it, as Yahweh always tried to convince them to do with his full support.

Rich Hoffman

An Amazon.com Pricebreak: A guidebook to capitalism to step out of the darkest period of American history

There is no shame in being good at what you do

I have had many of these over the last five years: super-secret meetings with people in the back of some restaurant or shooting range where people want to talk. Only this one was 30 or so people who were fans of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and they wanted a little private class on the subject matter. I get the secrecy; I think of it as enslaved people learning to read during the Underground Railroad Period. People want to learn how to improve themselves in a world that doesn’t want them to accomplish such a task. These people were Chamber of Commerce types and were concerned about other people knowing they were meeting with me because it was a social taboo. But I was happy to attend the event and give a talk, which everyone enjoyed. But during the Q&A section at the end I learned something from the class, that my book was being offered on Amazon.com for $4.59, which is practically giving it away. Normally, most of the sales that I see come from the publisher’s website, is $16.99. When I get the sales report, it usually has a long list with all kinds of prices shown, and some of the lower numbers I had thought were likely Kindle downloads. So, I didn’t pay much attention to them. But at this little seminar, a fan told me about it, and sure enough, the book was listed by Amazon at that very low price, so low that it’s likely cheaper than what it cost to make the book. Yet I wasn’t surprised upon hearing this; it didn’t make me angry. I think it was meant to make me angry, to be very insulting to me. But my reaction is one that I’ll share here: if you can get the book for a cheaper price, then I’m happy to let you know about it.

A pretty good price

I personally like Amazon; I get a lot of books through them. I also am a frequent visitor to bookstores all over southern Ohio, going as far north as Dayton and Columbus regularly to get books that I don’t want to wait for to arrive in the mail. I read three or four per week on average, so it’s a major priority for me to have access to new books. For books that I must have that afternoon, I go and get them at an actual bookstore, the old-fashioned way. And I prefer hard copies of books because I don’t like the bad guys out there to know what I’m reading or looking at on the internet, because I am watched by just about everyone who wastes time watching people. And the algorithms set against me are outrageously difficult, for getting visibility. I frequently get offers from IT people wanting to “fix” my foundation links because my Google score is so low that people searching for me don’t find me on the top picks because of all the blacklisting I am listed under. I typically say no to all those offers because most of them are likely the same people doing the damage, and they’d love for me to make it easier for them to rob the stagecoach. Amazon does not like me politically, and they’d love to make me feel that I’m at the bottom of a well nobody could hear me from. That is a common strategy for them, so I never expected a fair shake from Amazon. They offer the book because they are a prominent bookseller and want to say they offer such books. Even if they hate that people want to read from someone like me. So I put them out of my mind and never really took the time to see what they were selling my book for, or to check reviews because they set algorithms on their server against me that obviously were not encouraging. So, I put my mind elsewhere. The sales listings tell a different story, so much so that I didn’t even notice the Amazon pricing.

There will be a major shift in the economy over the next decade

The book has been out for a few years now, so I don’t read it every day. When I wrote it, I had been thinking about the contents for a while, but after Biden was put in the White House and Trump wasn’t there anymore, admittingly, I needed to take a break from the world for a few weeks. My wife and I took our RV out into the desert of New Mexico to escape Biden and the COVID protocols that were such a dark period in American history. I knew the economy would take a hit and that corporations had been seduced by this World Economic Forum view of the world and would need a guidebook out of their wokeness. So I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, applying my favorite sport, fast draw, with a genuine love of history. I enjoyed touring all the John Chism and Billy the Kid sites in Lincoln County during the winter of 2021, which had a lot of snow on the ground, even in that part of the world. It was a very revelatory experience for me, and it shows up in the book, which, looking back on it after a few years, is very good. Like I said, I read a lot. I have just finished a few books by Johan Norberg which I think are great, but they aren’t as good in my mind as my own book. Not just because it’s my book but because the contents are revolutionary compared to the large amounts of Marxism that have taken hold in all corporations around the world. I wrote the Gunfighter’s Guide to give people a weapon to fight against that trend, which turned out great.

A large worldview helps see things more clearly

The book as I thought it would be, has been a slow burn. It’s not one of those books that makes a splash and then fizzles out. When I wrote it, I was thinking of a book I love called The Machine That Changed the World, which is about Lean Manufacturing and is filled with many assumptions about a Marxist world without ever naming the beast. I wanted to write an antithesis to that which businesses could use to improve their situations without destroying their essential character. I have read many hundreds of business books, and most of them make it a point to declare their hatred and unfairness of capitalism, which is quite obvious in the Lean Manufacturing movement, which seeks to centralize power to the people and is antagonistic toward management, which is consistent with the labor union view of the world, which is always socialist in origin. In 2020, with Trump out of the office and the world on lockdowns, corporations thought the best strategy was to play along to get along. But after three years of the Biden economy now, people are looking for answers, and many of those answers only come from a source like mine, who has made it a point to declare the answers in spite of the social poison that wants all such voices to hide for their lives under a rock somewhere. My point was never to hide but to engage the enemy as they present themselves, like a gunfighter. Fight the villains in a dusty street and gun them down metaphorically for their intentional destruction of the world. And to be proud of it in the process. As I gave my presentation to that audience, I couldn’t help but reflect on how good the book was. I’m very proud of it; it has helped people who have read it and applied it. I don’t just reflect on the times of the gunfighters during American expansion but also look to the future with AI and improved technology. It’s more of an attitude than a reverence. But the world for the next few decades is going to move much more toward capitalism and away from socialism, and already many corporate leaders see the writing on the wall. And they were looking for a translation, so we were all meeting secretly, not for my sake, but for theirs. But if I learn of a price break everyone can take advantage of to get the book, I’m happy to share it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings in the least. I like seeing people getting it, finding inspiration, and achieving success. That is, after all, the best compliment I can get and why I wrote the book in the first place, for people to enjoy and be helped by. So the more people who have it, the better it is in my mind. And at that price, it makes it very easy for people. I can’t promise that the price will stay that way, but when I hear of a price break, I certainly will pass it along.

Diversity, equity and inclusion was always going to fail in business because it’s not rooted in real social value

Rich Hoffman

The 400 Fools in San Francisco: Capitalism is Destroying Communism, and Xi Jinping knows it

It’s not at all surprising that there were 400 fools who attended the Xi Jinping summit at San Francisco with Joe Biden. Most corporations, as I have been telling everyone for years, have communist leanings, and for the many lazy executives in them, the trend of globalism was in their favor. A stable business climate controlled by the centralized state allowed them to look like smart people, without actually having to be very smart. To win in that game, you had to cozy up to the regime, do what they tell you like trained seals, and you’d be successful, or at least appear that way. That whole competition thing is not for those timid people. Capitalism is scary because so long as the communists were in charge, they could always say, “They told me to do it,” when the shareholders started to complain about lost revenue. So I don’t view the people in San Francisco pandering to Xi to be particularly important. Sure, some of the richest people in the world were there. Elon Musk was there to grovel in front of the communist dictator, but I didn’t see what a lot of people did in the meeting. Rather, I saw the end of a dying regime, in China, playing out the plans of many decades coming to a fizzle that wasn’t very spectacular. All the concepts of globalism were falling apart across the world, and China was trying to appear to their home country as if they had conquered the United States, and the fulfillment of their objectives had come to fruition. That is how the entire visit would play on state-run television in China. A groveling Joe Biden pandering to the power of the communist party. The red flags of communism lined the streets of one of the great American cities. Communism had conquered the West and the people there were subjugating themselves to its incredible power.

The electronic voting machines have lots of problems.

Joe Biden’s behavior wasn’t surprising either. After all, he would not be president if not for Xi Jinping. China currently put Biden in office and the direct payments were part of the discussion. The Biden crime family had become wealthy over the years, selling access to their elected offices, and China knew what they were doing when they put the hapless old man in the White House to get rid of Trump. They didn’t like Trump’s trade deals, so they showed the power of China by inserting a complete buffoon in Trump’s place, displaying control over American elections and the people’s pick. China was almost daring anybody to do anything about what they did in 2020, first by releasing COVID-19 to lock down the world, then at the end of the year, the part they played to rig the election. For those who have not been paying attention, the electronic voting machine case is finally starting to get some traction. As I said in 2020, these cases often take years to put together, and part of the crime was to outpace the slow American legal system. That was part of the election theft, to move faster than the courts could process and China was clearly in on it. They have a lot to explain, about direct tampering with voting machine results and how Covid escaped from a Wuhan lab in the first place. But the voting machines were not the only form of election fraud. Just a big part of it. How does anybody think that people like Xi Jinping stay in power? Not by honest elections, that’s for sure. People don’t want to believe that rigged elections have been part of the American system, but the evidence is obvious that it has. And that China has played a significant role, even to the point of showing off, which Xi was doing in San Francisco.

I think it’s highly possible Trump will win every state.

But it’s not what it appears to be. China’s primary concern was that the world was turning away from them and that a serious decoupling effort was underway to separate the two economies, not to strengthen the relationship. And by inviting those 400 fools, tech leaders we always hear about in the news, CEOs from BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and Apple might do something to stop the trend. But they were part of the problem, and they had their issues in a free market society. Most of the damage they had conducted in the social awareness vacuum. And those days are over. People know what Larry Fink has done with his buddies at the World Economic Forum, and the pitchforks are out in America. There is going to be hell to pay in more ways than one in the coming years, and the protection of big-state communism won’t be able to hide them. Supply chains in America are realizing the liability of partnerships with China, with all the games on exports that go on, the trouble in dealing with communist labor unions on the West Coast that strike every five seconds and slow down the loading and unloading of cargo to and from China. Let’s just say that the labor advantages of dealing with China are no longer as enticing. They may have a lot of hard-working people that don’t blow up your budget, but the politics of dealing with China is ridiculously cumbersome, and slow. And people are moving on, finding other ways of dealing with supply chain necessities.

Game over for global communism

Which is what I saw in the body language of Xi.  I saw a worried dictator who knew the game was up.  Trump obviously saw it, too, in comments that followed.  Trump knows he’s going to have to deal with Xi as president soon, so he is already setting up the negotiating table for leverage.  But Xi knows this is the last year of Chinese rule.  The election fraud had given them a lovely puppet, but the American people didn’t follow him, leaving everyone exposed in the process and leaving those 400 fools in attendance with eggs on their faces.  A furious world is headed their way.  Election fraud won’t be so easy this time around.  Of course, they will try because they have no other way of winning.  They had been planning this communist push for years, and this was all they were getting out of it.  Global communism had failed and people were turning away everywhere, especially in the United States, and state visits like this in San Francisco were not going to fix everything, because it was all smoke and mirrors, to begin with.  Sure, they showed the world they could put Joe Biden in office and control the American political system with honey pots and payoffs.  But what did they get for it?  The American people were not bending their knees to the communists, and they had no intention of ever doing it.  And the big American corporations showed they had little power over people’s fundamental beliefs.  It was a disaster, a nightmare for them.  And it was their last gasp before the tables turned, and the world got a lot harder for all of them.  Because communism is dead, free markets would force validity, making all the corporations that had bought into the communist plot vulnerable to destruction.  And so it went; the show in San Francisco fell flat and sputtered to a close with the grim reality of what is to become of all of them.  And they deserve everything they have coming. 

Rich Hoffman

The Cheating Spouse: Sara Carruthers Called Us”Extremists”

I wasn’t going to talk about what I’ve been saying to all the mostly guys in the Republican party of Butler County, Ohio in the wake of Lynda O’Connor’s loss from the Lakota school board until I read the comments from Sara Carruthers in the Journal News. Obviously, she was referring to me and some of the core team around me who are considered radicals where she said she hated the “extremism in the party.” And that she said, “I think it’s sad to have other Republicans fighting against you.” Well, she’s up for re-election and my message to her is, she’s next. And all those like her. We can’t fight Democrats when we don’t have Republicans in the party. So, we must go through this process to make things honest before we can ever consider winning in politics. Otherwise, it’s all an illusion. Everyone has probably seen the video that Candice Keller took of Butler County Commissioner Cindy Carpenter campaigning for a Democrat on election day. There are a lot of RINO Republicans operating in the Butler County GOP, and they have made their voices known more ostentatiously since Trump has been out of the White House. And many of us, just aren’t going to put up with it. I’ve never given any illusion that I would. I work with people. I listen to their point of view and give people an honest shake. But politically, I’m to the hard right of the Tea Party, and that isn’t going to change. Obviously, I’m interested in politics for different reasons than other people. So my comment to people who have been asking me why I can’t support these RINOs when we learn about them is that I always say, “I love all Republicans until they show me they aren’t. Then I hate them.” There is no middle ground.

One of those cheating spouses

Further, I have been saying to lots of people an obvious metaphor that is directly relatable. Political relationships are a lot like marriage, with marriage being something everyone can relate to in some way or another. And most of the people I have been talking to have been men. I have said this to women, but the context is from a male perspective. When you catch a woman climbing out of the window to sleep with someone else on the other side of town, don’t go out and buy her a diamond ring. It would be best if you were looking for ways to get away from her, not deepening the commitment. And in regard to Lynda O’Connor, I feel she cheated on me, and my way of dealing with that isn’t to profess my love for her, or even to hold my nose and pretend like we have a happy marriage. Once it’s over, for me, it’s over. Forever. My policy is to let the cheaters have their loves, their forbidden fruit. I won’t play happy family with tea on Sundays like there isn’t a problem. A lot of people with low self-esteem are afraid that they won’t ever find another spouse, or maybe there are kids and property that are all wrapped up in the marriage, so it’s just cheaper to put up with all the cheating and play happy family. I think a lot of people find themselves in this situation, and it rolls over into their political lives. Well, that’s not where I am. I want to believe in the people who represent us politically, and those are my standards and the standards of a lot of people I know and associate with. What I hear from all these crybabies after this 2023 election are complaints that we have standards and that we should give those up and put up with the cheating wife who crawls out the window to multiple lovers across town, to keep the kids together, essentially.

To people like Sara Carruthers, it is considered “extreme” to have values.  The Trump MAGA movement is considered “extreme” because it does not want to put up with the politics of the past, where values are thrown out the window, and concessions with evil are endorsed.  In those kinds of statements, I hear a lazy person who doesn’t want to do the hard work of representation and upholding the values of the community she represents.  That certainly was the anger at Lynda O’Connor.  She did not express the community’s sentiment; she worked against it, even working to silence the community from having an opinion.  And that is what many of the insiders in the wake of the 2023 election have been expressing: frustration that they couldn’t control the narrative and impose some low bar that the rest of the community would put up with so they could compete with low-level Democrats for office seats.  If that is what we have to do to compete with Democrats, to play their dumb game, then the answer is, no. I know many people who will be a hard pass on that approach.  What’s the difference then between a Democrat and a Republican if the brand is destroyed by becoming one of them?  When Cindy Carpenter (Sheriff Jones’ budget girl) is campaigning for Democrats on election day.  I’ll pass if that is the kind of teamwork Sara Carruthers is talking about.  Like I’ve also been saying a lot lately to the soft-shelled tacos of the Republican Party, “With Republicans like you, who needs Democrats.” 

Here’s the deal: everyone can do what they want, I’ll only tell you once, Trump will be back in office.  There is going to be a very violent and tumultuous four years coming up while we clean up years and years of neglect.  And anybody who wants to ride that political train, get on and fasten your seat belt.  I know many people willing to fight for what’s right, and they will either do it arm-in-arm with a political party or work against you.  So, you better catch up if you want to do anything political.  It’s not extreme to have “high expectations,” and we are talking about that.  The anger at Lynda, Sara, Cindy, Sheriff Jones, and many of the business owners of Butler County who are only in politics to protect their investments is that they do not match the high expectations of those interested in politics that represent their values.  The message is that everyone should lower their values to accommodate the cheating spouse just to maintain the façade of marriage.  Which a lot of people do.  But these “extremists” that Sara is referring to are not those types of people.  Sincerity and honesty are not bad traits, and it is those traits that these aftermath losers are indicating are holding back the Republican Party.  I know many bright young people who would run for some of these future political offices.  But they will not kiss a ring or play nice with their morality.  This is why we end up with losers who lack ethical standards in some positions, which is why the Republicans are losing.  Not because the expectations are too high but because the kind of people they want are too lazy and too compromised to live up to those standards.  The future of politics will force that issue to be addressed, ready or not.  And in Butler County, Ohio, many are not. 

Rich Hoffman

Bernie Moreno and J.D. Vance in West Chester, Ohio: Making Hard Work Great Again

I always enjoy the optimism of an early campaign effort, and Bernie Moreno’s is undoubtedly one of those good ones, early on. He’s running for the Ohio Senate seat against Sharrod Brown, but first, he has to win a primary, so he and J.D. Vance were at Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, Ohio to make a pitch, and it was full of optimism and an approach to politics that is full of more than empty promises. I like seeing people like Bernie getting into politics, people who have been personally successful and know what it looks like, and who want to do good things for all the right reasons. So, I was enthusiastic about seeing the two of them together, a current senator, and the one who would be his partner representing Ohio in the Swamp we want to drain. We are looking for MAGA Republicans who can work with a Trump administration, unlike the last time. If there has been anything good about losing Trump to exile for a while, it has been that it gave us a chance to knock out the firewall that the Congress and Senate had in preserving the Swamp. If you want to drain it, there must be cooperation from the other branches of government. Otherwise, it just won’t happen. And things are shaping up in a very positive way. I am pretty excited about the future, for a lot of reasons, and one of them was a book I had been reading that very day when I was going to see J.D. Vance again. It was Johan Norberg’s Capitalist Manifesto and it was strange to read a quote in it about J.D. Vance, from a Swedish perspective. Norberg’s book is not an American outlook on capitalism. Instead, it’s a European globalist view and a fascinating process to watch. But he was using J.D. Vance and an example about Middletown, Ohio to make a point that I thought was well made. So, it was weird to have all those elements come together in one Friday morning spectacle.

The point made was haunting me a bit because I am a bit older than J.D. Vance, and I watched Middletown, Ohio, go through its transition from a wonderful blue-collar town that ran off of an Armco economy, a steel mill that told a similar story to those in Pittsburg up the road.  They were the centerpieces of the town, and it’s where everyone worked.  But through lots of influences, particularly communist globalism, the steel mill lost its power, and the economy of Middletown tanked, and never recovered.  It went from a thriving town to something that looked like a third-world hell hole within a few decades.  By the time J.D. Vance came along and was a young person, his experience was captured nicely in the book The Hillbilly Elegy and the movie of the same name by Ron Howard.  That popularity and the association that J.D. Vance now has in the Trump MAGA movement, which Bernie Moreno was now a part of, got Johan’s attention to make a point about globalism in general.  J.D. Vance had said, which Norberg quoted, that neither he nor his friends wanted to have a blue-collar job.  They were all told to grow up and move away to some white-collar job, and that America was going to move to a kind of service-oriented economy.  I remember hearing my dad’s speech, “Do you want to grow up and dig ditches?”  Blue-collar work was frowned upon, even discouraged.  So, no wonder so many of those good jobs picked up and moved to places like China.  It wasn’t so much bad policy that moved them, but the education system, the entertainment culture, and political priorities that had it all wrong, or right if you consider that they were all in on a scheme to destroy America, that caused so many young people to grow up and not want to work.

If you want to destroy America, convince their young people to grow up and be lazy.  This wasn’t the point of Johan Norberg, and indeed not where J.D. Vance was politically.  But it was the underlying reason all the steel mills picked up and moved to other places through globalism.  It was getting harder and harder to find good employees to do these jobs; the labor unions certainly didn’t make it any easier, so those corporations moved to places with better workers and more of them.  And the natural poison pill to cultures like Middletown, Ohio, was that nobody wanted to grow up and work as hard as they had to watch their parents’ work.  Those kinds of blue-collar jobs were looked down upon as if they were part of a lower class.  It wasn’t enough to own a home, a few cars, and a bass boat.  Kids watched their parents be put down by culture in general for working in a steel mill, so they grew up wanting nothing to do with any of it.  And now that America doesn’t make much anymore, people are seeing firsthand how valuable manufacturing is to a culture and rethinking how they value those jobs.  That is the primary driver of the MAGA political movement.  People were told many things over the years; now that they see where it has all been going, they don’t like it.  And they want to improve the situation dramatically. 

I would offer that for those who profess that they want to make America Great Again, the best place to start would be to make Hard Work a Priority Again.  It is not so much a throwback to how things used to be, but to look at the grandparents and their parents who made up towns like Middletown, Ohio, promising to begin with and value what they did and to emulate that hard work in the future.  Americans were suckered by globalism into being lazy; they were told that they could grow up and make lots of money in a useless white-collar job where they ordered pizza at 9 am for lunch three hours later, doing very little in between.  And that everything would be great.  And it hasn’t been.  Americans need to get back to working hard and working often.  We need to stop listening to the rest of the world that wants more socialism, which consists of more breaks, more government handouts, and much less freedom.  The globalism we have experienced was a disaster and has been terrible for places like Middletown, Ohio.  Not because globalism was evil in itself, where capitalism would have an opportunity to lift everyone to a higher living level.  However, what globalism turned out to be was an attack on the American way of life toward conversion to global communism; that attack came in the form of convincing an entire nation that hard work was beneath them and that whole generations would grow up to be lazy, entitled, and dependent on globalism for their necessities.  The kind of MAGA movement politics that J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno were pitching and the type of globalism Johan Norberg was trying to sell to the world involved an appreciation for hard work at its core.  Something that would undoubtedly make Middletown, Ohio, Great Again.  We want the future J.D. Vance kids and their friends not to grow up and sleep on the couch but to go to work and do great things with a lot of ambition through their actions.  And through that embrace of values, America and the world can be great again because it all starts with hard work and people willing to do it for the betterment of humanity.

Rich Hoffman