Tag: Trump

“The Disrupter,” Jennifer Gross, Gets an Award: Standing up for what’s right when it costs the most to do so

At the Patriot Awards at the end of May 2022, Jennifer Gross, my State Representative, received the Ignition Award. When I talk about Jennifer, I refer to her as “The Disrupter,” and she likes it. I don’t mean it in a negative way when I say it. I think she satisfies a much-needed role in Ohio politics. On the one hand, there is stoic politeness that is part of the process of writing and voting on new legislation. Bridgebuilding with others is very much a part of that process, and often, politicians find that by the time they compromise with everyone to get something done, there isn’t much left of their original idea. And during her first term as a House Rep for the 52nd District in Ohio, she has caused consternation. I wouldn’t say she’s made enemies because she is a very likable person. But she’s too independent for many people’s liking  in the Statehouse.

On the other hand, many are very critical of the political process and see all the compromises that have to go on as evil and part of doing the devil’s work. All the bridgebuilding that goes on with lobbyists and other members of the House and Senate is what many say give politics a bad name because the people they are supposed to be representing are not part of that process. From my perspective, Jennifer Gross does an excellent job threading the needle of all those forces to do what she thinks is an excellent job for all the people in her district, even if they didn’t vote for her. And she is certainly deserving of an award for going above and beyond when it counted most during 2021 and 2022. 

Things did get very hairy several times during the fall of 2021 when Joe Biden, the illegally inserted president who had no authority to do so, issued an executive order mandating that OSHA manage mandatory vaccinations and that all federal employees, anybody who touches a federal contract which is nearly impossible these days because the government sticks its nose in everyone’s business to such a large extent, would have to get mandatory vaccinations. This was a huge problem. It was detrimental for the government to insist that people put medicine in their bodies to work. It was undoubtedly a sensitive exploitation of the standard Chamber of Commerce position of employer sustainability. Employers needed to maintain their rights to regulate their own workforce and impose the things required for their business, such as proper PPE like steel-toed shoes, gloves, and safety glasses. The Biden order made it hard for Republicans to defend employee rights and still support the Chamber of Commerce’s position of employer obligations. Suddenly, the way the Covid vaccine shot was being proposed was meant to split those elements and put them in combat with each other. It was a complicated issue to navigate politically, which was part of the federal plan to take over the entire industry with ill-defined rights. It took months for the legislature in Ohio to respond correctly, and by the time they did, it was too late. The saving grace in the matter turned out to be court cases that were striking down the mandate in federal court as being what we all knew was unconstitutional from the beginning. Yet, that didn’t stop the federal government from trying. 

Before the Biden administration issued their executive orders mandating vaccine mandates, in September of 2021, Jennifer Gross sponsored H.B. 248, the Vaccine Choice and Anti-Discrimination Act in April. It was introduced to get in front of the problem, but it received a lot of pushback. Many legislators were upset by Jennifer’s approach to the bill and her unwillingness to do the kind of team building that was required to get that kind of legislation to move through the House. At that precise time, Jennifer was way in front of what was acceptable criteria for the validity of the vaccines. Many in the House leadership were not comfortable with the testimony that Jennifer was offering showing that the vaccines might be potentially dangerous. Like the election fraud issue, challenging the premise of the mandatory vaccines was a political nightmare because many wanted to believe that an answer to a major pandemic could be solved through institutionalism, not individual free will. So even Republicans were split on the matter.

Meanwhile, the tick-tock of the clock was pushing toward mandatory enforcement, and the House was stuck on how to proceed. Defend the individual person or the company where people are employed. Could people just vote with their feet and leave their companies only to jump out of the frying pan and into the pressure cooker. Either way, individuals were being imposed upon by the federal government. Jennifer’s positions, which sounded really radical at the time, turned out to be correct, which is the contents of the Robert Kenndy Jr. book, The Real Anthoney Fauci, where the danger of the vaccines, the government position on Covid, and the origins of Covid under bioweapons direction from the Department of Defense have all turned out to be true. At the time, nobody but Jennifer Gross even considered doing anything about standing up for individual people in a case of blatant government tyranny and extreme overreach.   

Jennifer can afford to be a disrupter, upset House leadership, and challenge them healthily. She has a nice husband. They are not in debt, and she has no care in the world at all to become wealthy. They are a happy couple who are not beholden to many people in the world and are free to make their own personal choices, which made Jennifer free to take a position on the vaccine mandates. When things really got heavy in those challenging moments of government overreach coming straight out of the White House, Jennifer showed what kind of person she was, and we are lucky to have her. There were a lot of lessons learned during that episode that everyone is much more prepared for going into the future. When things got really heavy, and it mattered most, Jennifer Gross was willing to disrupt a process that the Biden administration was clearly exploiting for power grabs meant to erode away the constitution through the nature of the bureaucracy of state government. And without Jennifer, there wouldn’t have been much discussion about pushback. When federal judges were thinking about what to do on this executive order ruling, there is no question that the national debate that Jennifer Gross was a part of bringing the legal questions that they had to consider to the front of the discussion. And when those judges saw how the case was shaping up, with state representatives like Jennifer Gross pushing back against vaccine validity when Ohio State University was going the other way, its clear that the value wasn’t in the legislation that would be passed in the House to become actual law, but that the debate was in constitutional validity which the judges saw would shape how history remembered the matter. And when it was most dangerous to have those opinions, Jennifer wasn’t afraid of the consequences. She did what was right, even if it cost her to do it. So in that context, Jennifer Gross, “The Disrupter,” did Ohio an excellent service. And the political world is much better off for it, and she certainly deserved the award she received at the Patriot Awards. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Darbi Boddy Gets the Sam Adams Award: What people want out of school boards

It was ironic to attend the Patriot Awards at the historic 20th Century Theater in Oakley, Ohio, to see Darbi Boddy get the Sam Adams Award for constitutional preservation and outstanding patriotism while the radical elements of Lakota schools were petitioning a judge in Butler County to remove her from the Lakota school board. Two different views of the world couldn’t be further apart. Since Darbi entered her first term as a school board member at Lakota, activated due to her concern for the way things had been going in public schools, the politically left-leaning elements of the union-controlled Lakota were irate toward her very existence. And they have been pushing to have her utterly destroyed. Yet, there are lots of people happy to see Darbi Boddy fighting on their behalf, and here they were on a Saturday night during Memorial Day weekend, giving her an award for doing exactly what was making the radical elements of Lakota so angry. Darbi received her award and gave a nice little speech that clearly indicated she wasn’t about to resign from the school board, as the school administration was pushing for her to do. At the heart of the matter was a battle for who really controls public schools, elected officials or hired administrators. And the hired administrators were obviously fighting to maintain their assumption that they were in control and that the elected members of the school board were just token sentiments. So the battle lines were drawn up in Lakota schools for an issue that had emerged to be a national one most clearly expressed in the newly elected Darbi Boddy.

The teacher unions have established themselves as being in charge of all public schools. There has evolved a kind of mutual understanding that nobody questioned so long as parents had the free babysitting service of public education. A superintendent would be inserted to be a mediator between the progressive radicals of the union and the school board elected by the public. As soon as school board members were elected, they’d join the Ohio School Board Association and would learn the rules of conduct that the public would see. And the labor unions would then advocate for a more progressive political world shielded by the superintendent, who would take over the management tasks from the school board. While the school boards worried about all the rules of their endeavor, the radical progressives in the labor unions were putting the focus on pay, benefits, and whether or not there were gay rights celebrated at the school, and all references toward God and country removed from the instruction of the children. I’ve been pointing these things out for several decades, and it’s taken people a while to accept these conditions as a reality. I knew at some point there was going to be a wall that the whole thing would hit; I figured it would happen during the Trump administration. But really, it took Covid to bring it out, as mad moms saw what was really going on in the classrooms because the lockdowns broke the cycle of free babysitting that had been occurring. Parents had time to think about how serious the problem really was in public education. 

For all those who hate Darbi Boddy, I can report that there are many like her out there. Darbi is one of the best that I’ve run across who may be able to save some aspects of public education because she genuinely cares about the school and the kids in it. And their parents. But the fight to go back to what labor unions used to have, a superintendent who would run cover for all their bad conduct and continue to ask for perpetual raises regardless of performance, is over. Getting rid of Darbi Boddy won’t put that mess back together; it was always destined to hit the wall of public perception. Darbi is just the first brick in that wall they’ve come in contact with. Like bell-bottoms and disco attire were come-and-go fashions from the 70s, this period of union control of public schools will be viewed as archaic and embarrassing in hindsight. The future of public education is not in the union’s control of them. Like all institutions that labor unions have controlled, they have driven them out of business because they insist on the organization’s management control. But they do not make management decisions; they make emotional ones, so their efforts fail everywhere they are tried, especially in public education. To hide their failure, they use the superintendent to hide their incompetence behind high wages and get the school boards to chase their tails through rules and regulations—something I call “procedural camouflage.” Well, that’s no longer acceptable, and taxpayers are finally figuring out the story with public schools; they aren’t worth the money, aren’t teaching kids the right things, and are open sores in their communities for progressive politics. While the school boards try to play by the rules, the crimes of public schools are hidden behind the rules. 

That is why there was so much anger at Darbi Boddy for immediately going around the rules to get to the heart of the matter, in challenging the power structure of the superintendent and his protection over his flock of unionized teachers. Within the culture of Lakota, of course, Darbi was hated. And voters cast in her favor because they wanted her to do that particular job. They wanted her to seek media attention to get the story out so that it couldn’t be contained within the structure of institutionalism and concealed from the view of voters. And while she was being vilified at school board meetings and in the halls of the schools the way most bosses are by incompetent employees, at the Patriot Awards, Darbi was getting applause for patriotism under fire and doing what many didn’t have the guts to do, stand up to the corrosive elements of public education and dare to ask questions that nobody wanted to answer. I tend to see Darbi Boddy as the best thing that has happened to Lakota schools. Public education, in general, is undergoing major changes. The labor unions will not be able to remain in control as they have been. Soon, the public money that the schools divide up like pirates after a robbery on the high seas will go to the kids. It will only take the next Republican presidential administration with a Republican-controlled House and Senate that will take the power of the Department of Education away completely, as Ronald Reagan had promised back in the early 80s. His failure to do that has caused much of the trouble we see today, which new politicians like Darbi are coming forth to challenge. Soon, it will gain national steam, and the political capital will be present to change the entire structure. There are already 1.5 million kids who stepped away from public education because of Covid. That number is increasing due to the obvious CRT teachings and the transgender politics that so many parents find objectionable as a public policy. Public schools have done it to themselves. Lakota will be glad that they had these disputes with Darbi early in the future. Maybe they can use this conflict to get in front of the inevitable, and Lakota can find a way to be relevant in the ways of the future. Holding on to the past where the unions ran everything, and the superintendents ran cover for the unions is over. And that wasn’t the fault of Darbi Boddy. She’s doing what the voters want.   Lakota schools were the ones caught going in the wrong direction.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Great H.B. 99 by Thomas Hall: Making schools safe by empowering decentralized security

It’s been in the background for a while; it’s how good legislation is done; H.B. 99 has now passed the general assembly and is headed to Governor DeWine’s desk for signature with a few minor tweaks. And with that signature, Ohio will step into a leadership role in solving the mass shooter problem in public schools. The bill itself was sponsored by Thomas Hall and has become known as the School Safety Bill and will essentially set a roughly 24-hour minimum training limit on allowing teachers and other adults to carry firearms in a public school setting allowing for first responders in the event of mass shootings which are all too frequent these days. Thomas Hall held a press conference for the event on June 2nd, 2022, once the vote had concluded in the senate the day before, to discuss the details, which started well over a year ago. It had been considered controversial by the same types of people who have left schools so vulnerable to attacks by essentially making them gun-free zones, which isn’t practical these days. While school resource officers are always preferred, we have seen that their effectiveness is not always stable, such as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where official police were unsure how to deal with the crisis. The truth of the matter is that security is best when it is decentralized, as is the case with the general practice of concealed carry. Having public schools gun-free zones or limiting security to institutionalized options have not been successful. H.B. 99 creates a decentralized option that is the key to future gun safety everywhere in America. It was the hard work of Thomas Hall in working with a lot of people in Columbus to make it a possibility. 

The best way to think about the situation is to consider a house cat that has been declawed because the owners of the cat do not want the pet to rip holes in the furniture. But then the owner finds the shedding of hair to be something they don’t want to clean up, so they put the cat outside for convenience. That might cut down on the hair inside the home, and the owner thinks they are doing something nice by still keeping the cat as a pet. But it’s the worst thing to do for the poor creature, the cat. Putting a cat outside without any defense is a death sentence for the declawed cat. Without its ability to defend itself, other more aggressive cats will pounce on the creature without mercy. It won’t take long for the declawed cat to be killed by a rival without an ability to defend itself. Sending a declawed cat outside a protected home environment is irresponsible and vicious. The cat owner first destroyed the creature’s ability to protect itself from other cats for the convenience of life in domestic bliss until it was decided that the owner could change their mind. Sending the creature outside without a means to defend itself allowed the owner to feel morally righteous without acknowledging the hostile nature of cats in general.

In 1990 Congress passed the Gun-Free Zones Act that essentially took guns out of public schools, which was equivalent to declawing a cat and putting it outside. Since that ridiculous law for public schools, gun violence has escalated to levels that nobody finds acceptable. Those who pushed for such a law continue to believe that guns should not be in schools or other government establishments and continue to pursue their efforts without reality attached. Gun-free zones have proven to be a menace to all logic by people who essentially value the furniture of public education more than the benefits of the cat under their care. Public schools have evolved into a platform for progressive institutionalism, and within that worldview, there is a desire to remove guns from society in general. That is just as ridiculous as insisting that outside cats in the world treat each other fairly and not try to kill each other over spilled milk and territory. Yet when that system fails to produce the results that liberal politics desires, a maniac and killer often is born, and the next mass shooting occurs. Thomas Hall has some experience with mass shootings; his father was a school resource officer who stopped a mass shooting in Madison schools a few years ago. So that was a case where the extra security worked in favor of the school. But to be successful, the officer must engage the target. Some paid security have shown a tendency to consider under emergency conditions that life is worth more than the paycheck and fleed the scene. It has happened too often in school shootings not to consider mitigating circumstances. 

The best measure for dealing with school shootings, just as it is witnessed in general society, is to put guns in the hands of adults, educators, and even administrators who are most incentivized to fill the need when a crisis arrives. It makes it much harder for potential shooters to block off their targets when they aren’t sure who security is; it could be anybody in the school. With that simple change in dealing with gun violence, a much safer public-school environment is established. Those against guns in public places, particularly schools, are against guns generally and have ideas that society would be better off without them. That is equivalent to the pet owner who does not regard the nature of wildlife outside the home’s safety, where other cats, raccoons, and coyotes will challenge any house cat with violence and worse at every opportunity they have. Guns and violent people are abundant in the world. Uninventing them and the nature of people who would use them to inflict unnecessary harm to others is not an option. Progressive politics simply aren’t considering the nature of violent human beings who fall through the cracks of their overly institutionalized society. They produce a lot of anxious characters, and by having gun-free zones, they leave lots of opportunities to make victims out of the innocent, all to fill an ideology of political nature that is not conducive to existence in general. H.B. 99 is a remedy to that problem and one of the first in the United States to take such a step forward. And under the current language that the legislature has shaped, Governor DeWine is poised to sign it to make it law. We are presently witnessing a complete degradation of institutionalism in general, specifically with the Biden administration’s problems publicly on all fronts. And the aggressive characters who linger in the world at the edges of sanity have been empowered to act in maniacal ways. Kids cannot be left vulnerable to these failures, so action is needed by our political order and society, in general, to bring real solutions to the matter. Teachers who are willing to take the 24 hours minimum course to carry a gun in the schools and be first responders to the next mass shooting are those most inspired to use those skills in a crisis situation. To be part of a decentralized solution is the best way a teacher can make their classroom environment safer and make it harder for a potential aggressive personality to exploit a weakness that otherwise might provoke them to action. The surest way to inspire that potential for violence is to make the target defenseless, which is what the 1990 Gun-Free Zone Act did. Correcting that mistake is the task of our times and the efforts of great legislation produced by Thomas Hall and the Ohio legislature. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Elon Musk Voting for Republicans: There is no way an intelligent person can support Democrats for anything

The sudden shock of Elon Musk saying that he is now a Republican or that he’ll vote Republican in the upcoming midterms is not a surprise. Actually, as a guy now in his 50s, he’s right on course for where many people arrive during their lives if they have reasonable intelligence. You really can’t be an intelligent person and be a Democrat. It’s impossible to reconcile intelligence with liberalism. Liberalism is a feeling not founded in logic, so anybody who has some level of intelligence will eventually figure out that liberal ideas are ridiculously stupid. Elon Musk has tried to make liberal ideas work. He was successful young and enjoyed the company of idealistic young people. He even smoked pot on the Joe Rogan podcast. But he has never been good with the Biden administration. Biden wants electric cars with massive government infrastructure. Musk has built several companies that are very independent of government influence, even if he did take government subsidies to start those companies. Ultimately, Musk has learned a hard lesson in life that the government wants to run private industry and their means to do that is always through labor unions under the protection of the Department of Labor. So the Biden administration has targeted Tesla with its wrath to protect their own investment into Ford and General Motors, hoping to use high gas prices to drive consumers to buy those dumb electric cars, the fancy golf carts. Tesla was the first, but the government wants them and Elon Musk out of the way because Musk won’t allow unions to run his shops, and a hard lesson has been learned that has caused the billionaire to look to Republicans for sanity.

This path that Musk is on, a gradual conversion over to Republican thought, isn’t new. Ronald Reagan went on a similar track. So did Donald Trump. There are lots of people who used to be Democrats who get to their 40s and 50s and life and realize that Democrats are takers, looters, and every kind of parasite that you can imagine. And they grow up and away from liberalism and become more conservative as they get older. Musk has been saying that he has stayed the same but that the political spectrum has moved radically to the left, which is true to a certain extent. The political left we see today is what I have been saying for decades was always beneath the surface.

But additionally, there comes a time when you realize that doing business with Democrats is impossible unless you give over everything you own to their view of collectivism. With Musk doing so well with Tesla and SpaceX, it’s clear that he will not be able to control those companies and still continue to vote as a Democrat. The illusion that Democrats are anything but professional looters in the world comes to anybody who lives long enough to reconcile reality. You hear a lot of Democrats who become Republicans. But you don’t see a lot of Republicans turning into Democrats. When you look at an electoral map of America, there aren’t many Democrat blue areas. There are massive groups of dependents made that way due to Democrat socialism, but people generally don’t choose to penalize themselves with liberal ideas. That is another reason why Democrats are always looking for young people and illegal immigrants to keep their political base intact. Democrats need people without much life experience or understanding of the American way of life to buy into their collectivist political philosophies because they lose many of their members to Republicans, especially later in life. For Democrats, the political game is just smoke and mirrors. 

Musk’s journey was inevitable. Traditional conservatives may not want to let Musk have a seat at the table due to his beliefs in transhumanism and non-Biblical thoughts. But in the world of ideas, all conservatives have some basic concepts in common, the understanding that government doesn’t make jobs. It simply loots off what others do create. For Musk, there is no way to go to Mars and have a human race that moves into space to live. No socialist community on Mars will be successful, so when you look at things like that, the only way to fulfill Elon Musk’s dreams of going to space and living on Mars is to embrace capitalism aggressively because there is no other way to start a prosperous society or to maintain it without capitalism. All the variations of Karl Marx’s philosophy were always rooted in failure, which is to say all of the modern Democrat party and anybody in the world who calls themselves a progressive. Many people go to college and learn a liberal education. They do all the dumb liberal stuff like party too much and listen to all the wrong kinds of music. They try to dedicate their lives to altruism. But once those people start having families and those families grow up, it becomes quite apparent to most intelligent people that Democrats are the wrong way to go, and they gradually turn into Republicans. I would go so far as to say that you cannot call yourself smart and not be a Republican. It’s not a matter of team politics; it’s simple logic. A person’s journey along a political spectrum is driven by what works in the world and what doesn’t. 

The contrasts between a Trump presidency and now the Biden mess will produce many more Elon Musk types who used to walk the fence between liberals and conservatives. I never liked the murky middle because it allows the looters of the world to hide among the good and hard working. Liberals are like the water boy on a football team that wins the Super Bowl. They get to be part of a winning team without doing much work at actually producing a win. Liberals suck the life out of everything they do, and when you build great companies like Elon Musk has, who are doing great things in the world, the problem moves from cosmetic lip service to liberalism to downright hatred.   Especially when you are the first to actually make electric cars to make all the environmental climate change fanatics happy, only to be shoved out of the market because the local labor union isn’t running the management of your company, once you realize how the game is played and what Democrats actually stand for, there is no way a reasonable person could call themselves one. I watched Donald Trump go through the same basic trajectory in his life. When he was doing The Apprentice for NBC, he was much like Musk, playing on the liberal side of things. But Trump married a conservative woman who pulled him in the right direction, and over time, during his marriage, he had no choice but to move toward the Republican Party. Many people were like Trump and Musk; they might be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. However, life has a way of demanding that fiscal and social policy must be aligned; there is no way to cheat the system. You can’t behave like a liberal at a dinner party and still run great companies, or a great country, or even raise a good family. You have to be conservative to do things well in life, which means that those who want to do well must become Republicans. Elon Musk is a smart guy and, late in life, has figured out the obvious. So it’s no miracle that he’s planning to vote Republican. And behind him are a whole lot of other people too, who have come to the same conclusions. They always do.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Report on the World Economic Forum 2022: They have bad cards and can’t hide the guilt of their crimes

To review this year’s World Economic Forum, from the Desecrators of Davos socialists, scum bags, and global tyrants, I would best sum it up by the harassment that the WEF police showed when they went after Jack Posobiec shortly after a podcast to the WarRoom on day one. Klaus Schwab and the gang didn’t like having Jack outside their Davos meeting, reporting the event to millions of people with the kind of anti-globalist discussion from the WarRoom. They are quite open to sharing what they are talking about at the World Economic Forum on YouTube. But they want to talk to the world, but they don’t want the world to talk back. Jack was fine after they accosted him and his crew, and he continued to report on the agenda events for the rest of the week, even going an hour or so to Geneva to report on the World Health Organization and the Biden deal to give away sovereignty to them in order to cover the next made up pandemic. There was a lot to consider in all these events, but many are wondering what it all means to them. So after watching all the coverage the way I do each year, I will have to say that this year was a bit different. The attempted arrest of Jack Posobiec sort of summed it all up; Klaus and the gang are worried. Their game was off this year in a big way, and they were undoubtedly feeling the pressure. And they don’t do well under pressure. 

I tend to think of all things in life like a poker game, and these guys had bad cards, and they weren’t doing a good job of hiding it. If you read Klaus Schwab’s books, you will quickly know that he’s likely insane. His views were formed in the vacuum of intellectual debate. All the people who go to Davos to participate in the Forum he organizes lean to the extreme political left. They find security among themselves in their schemes for global domination. But those schemes fall apart quickly when opposition confronts them because their ideas are not very well fleshed out. Klaus Schwab and the other Desecrators of Davos have been doing this kind of thing for a long time. But they have made their global moves over the last few years, and for the first time, the masses know about them. A year ago, there weren’t many people in the world who could even tell you who Klaus Schwab even was. But now, after a couple of books, Woke, Inc, and Glenn Beck’s The Great Reset, now many millions of people around the world are onto what the World Economic Forum has been up to, and they are now paying attention in ways that they never have before. And that was best reflected by the WarRoom coverage hosted by Jack Posobiec. Socialist countries, which all of Europe essentially is, don’t like the idea of freedom of the press or even any form of free speech. They want to be the world’s managers and want the world to be sheep. They want control, domination, and a very powerful administrative state. And there is no plan B. 

The Desecrators of Davos are not ready for prime time. They may own the Biden administration, which they clearly control. But that administration is not respected by the people of America, and that was not part of their plan, and they are not sure what to do with it. After watching many hours of Davos coverage, the sum of all the parts was that they didn’t know what to do next but to complain about conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine types pushing back against the Bill Gates agenda, who was there to speak his part of the story in very unconvincing ways. And what was most alarming, given the radicalism of Bill Gates, was that he wasn’t the craziest one on the panel. The big administrative state agenda that the members of the Forum abundantly communicated functioned like academics theorizing in a classroom of their peers, without understanding how they were going to sell it to any kind of public. It’s like that scenario where you take someone on a date, you take them to bed, but the next day it’s like, “what now? Do we get married? Do we buy a house? Do we have kids? Or do we just sleep together, which is a pretty pointless relationship?” All the effort from the Davos people was in getting to bed with each other without a plan on what would happen the next day. And they certainly didn’t want any American media there to report just how ill-prepared they were.  

They are pretty far into the process to be so ill-prepared, which brings us back to poker. They have gone all-in with some really bad cards hoping to bluff their way into a victory. But many in the world have held their cards, especially in the United States. The Desecrators of Davos are certainly behind the election fraud schemes in America; Mark Zuckerberg, this time, paid the money to steal the election through mules shown in the movie 2000 Mules. He’s one of the Davos types. And Bill Gates made his move by buying up the media to push the dream of the administrative state; the vaccine mandates to cure a virus that they made in the Wuhan lab with the help of the American Department of Defense. There are a lot of very bad characters who got caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

The only reason that none of them have gone to jail yet is that they have so much money. Collectively, they have bought the political system in America and other countries, and they own the media like a cheap whore in a sweaty brothel in Nevada. As long as the drinks keep flowing, the whores will love you. The moment any of that stops, the whores will move on to a new love. But what they did to the world to give the administrative state more power over the sovereignty of all global people was well planned, evil, and ruthless. But it was also done in a vacuum of thought that does not hold up well at all in real-life scenarios. Clearly, the Desecrators of Davos people thought that Joe Biden would be accepted in America as an alternative to Trump and that they’d gain control of the Beltway in America, but that’s not happening. And they don’t know what to do about it. The world called their bluff, and now they are holding their weak cards sheepishly, not sure what to do next. Personally, I think it’s pretty funny. These people have ruined countless lives; they’ve killed people, especially in what they did with Covid and the suppression of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine to stop the global pandemic they created for the purpose of all these global takeover plans. Laughing at them is perfectly healthy as a reaction to how they’ve played the game. But to know how to deal with them based on what we are seeing, they are not as scary as they appear. They are holding a losing hand, and they know it. So, it’s up to us to clean their clock and make an example of them. We are justified to do it, and it’s the only way to deal with their intentions against America so as to alter their behavior for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Intentional Government Terrorism Behind Raised Gas Prices: The Weather Underground still working in the background

We know they lie; the government lied about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, which was proven a fake by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The birth certificate that the Obama people produced was a digital one that could not have been made at the time of Obama’s birth because that kind of technology wasn’t available then. Even though Obama, who is still working in the background of the Biden administration, had his career start in the living room of Bill Ayers, a known domestic terrorist, we ended up with eight years of Obama and all his government tampering with markets that caused prices to go up on goods and services. I remember about Obama most about high gas prices and light bulbs that didn’t work. And the reason it’s relevant now is that people didn’t vote for Obama, honestly. He was pushed on us so our way of life could be stolen from us. So, of course, they did the same thing with a continuation of Obama, the Biden administration. They stole the election to go back to their attack on American infrastructure because that is precisely what is happening with gas prices. We learned the method during the Obama years; then we learned just how rigged the game really was during the Trump presidency. America is sitting on so much natural energy that it can be an energy exporter. So all the policies that the Biden administration and the Obama administration before have been deliberate attacks on us all, causing inflation and destroying our economy so that other countries could prosper and our wealth redistributed.   It would be one thing if people actually voted for these people, but in both cases, they didn’t or were misrepresented to the public to conduct the attacks we have been seeing.

I remember when Bill O’Reilly was the big man at Fox News in the old days. I never thought of him as a hardline conservative. He was just a guy who asked a lot of questions. And when he was still on Fox News during the Obama White House, he was constantly wondering why gas prices were so high back then.   Every time a turtle crossed the road somewhere, gas prices were going up, and we gave the oil producers and refineries the benefit of the doubt. But we learned later, during the Trump administration, that all that was nonsense. Gas prices were artificially propped up, the oil companies were able to jack up their prices because of government tampering with their market, and everyone got something out of the deal, except for the end-use consumer. Bill O’Reilly was pushed off Fox News during the early part of the Trump years. We saw much of the same kinds of lies, manipulation, and scandal go after anybody associated with Trump, unleashed with much more ferocity than occurred to put Obama in place the first time. But the game was obvious this time because gas prices were under $2 per gallon under Trump. They had been lying to us all along, just as they did, about our role in Europe, the real threat of Russia, North Korea, and many others.   Trump did a great job as president, and it ended up exposing just how much Obama and Biden have been lying to people to attack the core infrastructure of our nation for acts of climate terrorism once again. That was, after all, the core goal of Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground back when he was organizing violent terrorism against America during the 1960s. 

Gas prices have been an act of terrorism in reaction to a fake crisis in climate change to justify the theft of American wealth and industry for the specific act of terrorism against us all. The terrorists have shown us what they are willing to do in the past. As soon as they were able to get Biden elected with fake votes paid for by Facebook, they went right back to manipulating the markets to attempt to destroy the American economy. We would call this an act of war at any other point in history. But they have taught us in our public schools, which they control, that we shouldn’t judge and, therefore, that we should not have an opinion about the terrorist intentions of radical climate terrorists to attack the infrastructure of America. If this were World War II and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, which was a strike against the mainland of America, then the nation would have declared war on the aggressors. But these enemies are not the kind of enemies we were taught we are supposed to wage war on. So the thefts occur outside the understanding of the crimes, just as was done to steal the White House several times now. We know they were willing to do it with Obama. And as if there were any doubt, they did it outrightly with Biden. With Obama, they used the fake birth certificate to get by the rules of becoming president. With Biden, so that Obama could be president in the background, they just changed the election laws so that fake ballots could be counted during a fake pandemic designed by all the people who wanted gas prices in America to increase for all kinds of terrorist reasons. 

The point of the matter is that the pain we are all feeling now at the gas pumps is the result of terrorist activity instigated by a government not properly elected by the people but by insurgents who want to destroy the concept of America in every way they can get by with it. It’s not an honest mistake in policymaking. It was purposeful theft of the American way of life. And as they did with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, and ultimately Trump, with the same lies they pushed into the public over the Obama birth certificate and the election fraud conducted to create a fake Biden administration, the crime is being done right in front of our faces. They are daring us to do anything about it. Because the implication is that if we stand up to it, then a worse fate will await us. At every level, the conduct is unforgivable and hostile in its intention. But these are not the days of Obama where we wondered about these things and whether or not they purposely lied or even if they would. Now we know they will and have. The birth certificate was always crucial because Obama didn’t meet the basic criteria even to be president. Yet, they did it anyway, and if we questioned it, they called us a racist. And because they got by with it, they have done much worse since then, leading to what we are seeing with Biden now. So think about that every time you get gas because we put up with it over all these years and gave these terrorists the benefit of the doubt. They have unleashed terror on America by directly attacking our basic infrastructure in ways that can only be viewed as acts of war. Many don’t want to believe that their government is so corrupt, but the evidence over the years has been overwhelming. There simply isn’t any other explanation. These are not people on “team” America. They are our way of life attackers, and they are out for blood. And blood is what we have at our gas pumps; intentional terrorists meant to destroy our way of life. And they think it’s funny because they continue to get away with it. Behind it, all is still the terrorism of the Weather Underground as they set in motion the schemes to destroy America, just as they started to do in the 1960s for all the same insane reasons. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The World Economic Forum is Just a Front for Treason and Sedition: Using election fraud to rule the world the way drug trafficking in America has shown how

There have been mass attempts to obtain money in the easiest fashion in every age, leading to criminal life. It’s far easier to take money from people than to just earn it. And that is certainly the case in this internet world where you can fly anywhere in under a day. When we are all so easily connected by technology, it shouldn’t be a surprise that criminals would find a latest scheme to conduct criminal activity, which is clearly the case with The World Economic Forum in Davos. I watched all the coverage, and what you have with them is an administrative state out of control and using the tapestries of process management to conduct massive financial theft across the world with the same justifications that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid robbed stagecoaches in the Old West. The intent to capture the world’s governments under the umbrella of a massive international mob in the fashion of Al Capone’s from Chicago is unmistakable. From the Desecrators of Davos crowd, we are dealing with a massive international mob disguised behind names of good intentions, such as what Klaus Schwab is operating in Davos, for the simple goal of wealth confiscation and personal enrichment based on radical leftist ideology. These criminals sat in front of the camera and broadcast to the world during the last week of May 2022 just how they planned to commit treason and sedition against the most powerful country in the world openly and without fear of any recourse because they had a secret that they are utilizing to ensure their success, election fraud. 

It’s not a mystery; their method has now been well studied. The Desecrators of Davos types have watched how drugs were illegally trafficked in the United States, and they have devised a way to perform the same kind of activity when it comes to election fraud. In the 2020 election, Facebook, a member of these World Economic Forum criminals, paid for the mules who stole that election. And the people who don’t want to talk about it are just like the media and politicians who silently allowed Al Capone to operate his famous mob. In modern times, many people just want to live their lives. They want to take their kids to sports events and maybe an occasional movie. They don’t want to think about all the illegal drugs flowing into the country and what impact that might have on society in general. They’d rather look away from all that ugliness. Well, the Desecrators of Davos types have watched this behavior and have now exploited it for their global theft of the world’s wealth. They are quite well aware that what they are doing in Davos will infringe on the national sovereignties of the world’s nations. But they are pushing for a borderless world that they control, so they don’t care about crimes like treason and sedition because they are already invested in the change state. Rather, their plan is clearly to steal elections around the world and to take power away from the people’s vote to enact their plans, and they plan to get away with it because of what they have witnessed in the drug trade in America. 

In the movie 2000 Mules, it’s ballot trafficking that was happening. Facebook is a Desecrators of Davos member. Bill Gates is too. So is George Soros. They all want to overthrow traditional America and acquire power for their globalist intentions. So, of course, they were involved in making a virus that would be unleashed worldwide by their methods. They own the media so they could control the coverage of what was reported, what the methods were in dealing with the crises that they were creating for the eventual goal of creating chaos to overturn election laws and steal the results, as they clearly did in 2020 to get rid of the people’s pick.

The whole effort was conducted in the same manner as has proven successful with drug trafficking. And everyone knows how drug trafficking occurs. The CIA knows who the drug lords are, where their mansions in Mexico are, and how the drugs flow into America. Who buys it, who uses it, and for what purpose. Every now and then, they arrest some poor fool to give the public the illusion that anybody really cares about illegal drugs. But the truth is that everyone is in on the action, the American government, the drug lords, the cartels, and the mules that haul all the drugs to cities across America. It has worked so well that the Desecrators of Davos have used the same methods now to steal elections. And now that we have seen this activity, because of the overwhelming proof from the 2020 elections, it’s likely that this election fraud by these globalists has been going on for decades. Much of our current congress likely were illegally picked by election fraud, which raises all kinds of trouble for the legality of everything they have been doing as a legislative body. 

The crimes have been committed because the Desecrators of Davos know that people don’t want to see or hear about it. They may not like it, but they consider themselves too small to do anything about it. These are the problems of big governments, not the kind of thing some little ol’ nobody from small-town USA can stand up to. So knowing that’s how people are, the Desecrators of Davos have sought to take over the governments of the world and to run them from Davos, through the roots of finance, and to conduct massive crimes against humanity on a scale that is beyond the reach of most people. And that’s how they have gotten away with these crimes, and crimes they certainly are. Crimes that are punishable by death penalty. And over time, as they have found that their ballot-stuffing crimes got them the results they desired, they have become bolder in how they go about their business, which has left behind plenty of evidence for us to act on if only we had to courage to do so. But their gamble is that nobody will, just like nobody stands up to the illegal drug trade. People would rather do just about anything in the world than confront vast evils right in front of our faces. And that’s why it keeps happening. Good people are certainly in the majority, but they don’t want to look at the evil a minority is conducting because they are too busy and too scared to confront it. So, of course, there will always be some latest version of international criminal who will exploit that trait for their lazy gains of wealth, so they can have the ornaments of money, the things that money can buy, without doing the work of actually earning the money. It’s much easier to just steal the wealth of America rather than work to compete with it to be the next superpower. From the point of view of this new criminal class, the Desecrators of Davos, they would rather destroy the only superpower left, rather than compete with it, and that in the aftermath of that destruction, they could rule the chaos behind charitable foundations and feel good think tanks, which is, in essence, all the World Economic Forum really is, a front for treason and sedition that is in full support of open criminal conduct on a vast scale. And they have no fear of being caught because of what they have learned from the American drug trade. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trump Swings For The Fences: The Kemp win in Georgia only means the President can afford to take chances

I always thought that the David Purdue race for governor in Georgia would be an uphill battle. Trump’s endorsement has a lot of power, and his record is outstanding. Still, it would be a stretch in Georgia to beat the incumbent Brian Kemp for many of the same reasons it was going to be hard to beat the establishment RINO Mike DeWine in Ohio. It’s hard to beat an incumbent for one because they have the power of the office to run from. And it takes a real organized effort to knock someone off the top of the mountain, and David Purdue didn’t have that. Trump’s endorsement was a revenge pick, more than a practical one, and down the stretch, the money didn’t line up with the passion. If Trump didn’t have a personal vendetta against Kemp, he likely wouldn’t have put his name behind Purdue. David Purdue never was able to define his campaign as anything other than fighting election fraud, and voters in Georgia were obviously looking for something to vote for, not against. There’s a lot of funny business regarding elections in Georgia. Still, as I said leading up to the primary election, the establishment types were betting everything they had on Georgia, so it would be tough to do anything there. In many ways, I would point to this circumstance and remind everyone not to take anything for granted when it comes to the general elections in the fall. The SWAMP is not going to go quietly in the night. They have everything to lose and will fight to keep it; whether it’s money, cheating, lying, stealing, whatever they have to do, they will do it. And it will take more than what David Purdue put forth in Georgia to beat them. 

https://truthsocial.com/users/realDonaldTrump/statuses/108362568823326243

The media was all too happy to underline the loss of Trump’s endorsement. They ignored all the other wins he has had, which was to be expected. The Never Trumper types are hoping this means that the Trump brand is damaged forever and that they might be able to put up Mike Pence, someone from the Trump administration but isn’t Trump. To me, it’s obviously wishful thinking. David Purdue was never for what Trump is and always acted as a person drug into the race to challenge Kemp rather than someone who was passionate about winning. So the Trump endorsement has its limits. Trump can afford to swing for the fences, and he does. That has given him more home runs than not, so the essence of the Kemp win isn’t so much a strikeout but rather the affordability that Trump has to take risks on candidates that might not otherwise have a chance. Obviously, voters liked Kemp in Georgia and needed more to take a turn from him. They needed more than election fraud to drive their passions.

Yet there is a more sinister tone to the haughty banter after the Kemp win, the hope by the media and Never Trumper types that election fraud was not something that voters cared about. Purdue made it a one-issue race, and after the primary election, it’s clear that voters wanted more than that. Election fraud is hard for people to admit to, like acknowledging that a loved one is an alcoholic or that a spouse is cheating on you. Mainstreamers want to believe that they can vote and that it will be counted honestly so they can return to their lives without worrying about it. So there is a natural reluctance to put the thought out of their heads. While most believe there was election fraud in the 2020 election, they don’t want to live with the knowledge that it will require them to do something more severe, like scrutinizing those who count the votes. They want to believe that Brian Kemp is a good person because to admit otherwise will require work on their part that they aren’t willing to commit to. People are prone to ignore an injustice if it means they can live in peace. And obviously, there are many in the Beltway culture, Mike Pence included, who are counting on that timidity to allow them to stay relevant in the political world. It should be remembered that Trump picked Pence to be his Vice President because he wanted to drive a wedge into the Never Trumpers, to begin with, to put one in his administration. Trump did that with a lot of people because he thought the strength of his personality could convert them over to justice. I would say that, for the most part, Trump significantly improved the conditions around him. Still, he was never going to be able to use his sizeable positive personality to change the behavior of those who insist on keeping their minds below the line. 

The hatred for Trump is to hate the concept of Making America Great Again. Instead, the Never Trumpers, including Mike Pence, believe more in the survival of institutions rather than in reshaping them for positive outcomes. So it wasn’t a loss for Trump that David Purdue never could get that message across. If it had been Trump running, the priorities would have been different during the campaign. Trump would have been “for” things rather than just stating that he would fight election fraud, which few people want to admit is a problem, especially those who have committed it to preserve institutional power. MAGA is powerful as a movement, but you can’t use it as a golf ball driver when you really need a short putt. You might still be able to make the shot, but it’s not the best tool to use. In truth, Georgia, in the decertification process, isn’t needed. There is plenty of criminal conduct already proven in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, with governors who will get behind the decertification movement. Georgia was the last refuge of the Never Trumpers, and we learned a lot by watching them in this primary race.

In many ways, watching all the anti-Trump forces spike the football over the Kemp win is like a football game where the losing team has been down 60 to 0, and they get a field goal at the end of the game. The crowd cheers because there is something to be happy about, but they will still lose the game. The disappointment for the MAGA voters is that they wanted the shutout. They wanted as much of a perfect record for Trump as possible. But, Trump is willing to take chances. He does not play it safe. And as a result, sometimes there will be misses. Trump has playing golf seven holes in one, and you get that by hitting the ball hard and trying to skip all the little putts that get you to the green by hitting over the obstacles or through them. Sometimes that means that the ball will go into the rough. But if you play it safe, as many people do, you won’t get those holes in one. So by force of personality, Trump has an excellent win ratio. He can afford a David Purdue here and there, and all it means to the political world is that the Trump brand is so strong that he can take risks others can’t afford to. It doesn’t mean that the Never Trumpers will start winning, and MAGA is on the decline. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Power of the MAGA Movement: Government can’t hide their crimes like they used to

It’s safe to save that Dr. Oz won his primary against the challengers because of the Trump endorsement. I thought David McCormick was the better candidate for that senate seat in Pennsylvania, but President Trump picked the tv star, probably more out of sentiment than practicality. Otherwise, Dr. Oz wouldn’t have had a chance, and now no matter what happens with the election count, people will always remember that he won. The same can be said of the David Purdue situation in Georgia, with all the early voting and interest from MAGA, even as the establishment forces have lined up for their own version of the Alamo, going all-in on backing Kemp to keep the election fraud there under wraps. What is astonishing to many is the power of the MAGA movement, which the Biden administration has finally realized isn’t going away, so they have been attacking it increasingly. None of the political insiders thought Trump picks would be doing this well into the primary season. They desperately hope for a loss that can embarrass the movement and chip away at Trump’s endorsement power. But the action itself is far more complicated than Trump. Trump didn’t make the movement; the movement made Trump. I have been following the freedom movement all of my life. Specifically, the Tea Party days directly merged into this change state with Trump at its head. But I could additionally point back to the late 80s going into that 1992 election. I campaigned for Ross Perot back then, so this pushback against establishment politics isn’t new. It’s been around for a while, and no matter what we call it, MAGA, or Mega MAGA, or King Maga, or whatever, acceptance of global institutionalism has been on the chopping block for most of the last century. It is culminating to this point in history. 

In many ways, the crimes we have seen in government which have everyone on edge, were always going on. But the pressure of Trump and the MAGA movement itself has created these unforced errors. We always knew Hillary was breaking the law with her emails. We knew she was trying to sabotage the election of 2016 with the Russia hoax and her disciples in the liberalized media. For many years they denied it, but now it’s coming out in court. The same is happening with election fraud. Criminals tend to deny, deny, deny, even when caught. Our prisons are filled with people declaring their innocence, even though most were convicted with hard evidence. We have trusted politicians too much, and they have evolved into an oligarch class, and things got out of control. And to keep the other crimes they have been caught in suppressed, they have had to commit even more crimes, to the point we are in now where all the ugliness is out in the open for all to see, and we can still see them saying, “nothing to see here.” As the world burns behind them. The latest crime is this adherence to the green agenda religion with deliberate sabotage of the American infrastructure to destroy food supplies and drive up energy costs.   The whole scheme is a last-ditch effort to destroy the American economy before there is another election where they will lose their leverage by controlling all the houses of congress. 

Never underestimate what the bad guys are willing to do to hide their massive crimes. I will remind everyone that they have openly killed people and destroyed their lives to hatch their plans, specifically with Covid. They will try the same thing before this upcoming election, especially as they see the kind of candidates that still support Trump this far from the 2020 election. What the political world sees coming from the MAGA movement is terrifying to them, like any criminal would if they knew the cops were about to catch them.   They will fight with everything they have in the tank to avoid another election in America where the people actually speak. They have been caught stealing the 2020 election, and obviously, many others and people are waking up to it, and the pressure is terrifying to them. It’s so scary that the pressure is causing them to make a lot of forced errors, leaving us scratching our heads at how stupid much of it is. But when you see them reading from the playbook in such desperation, it’s obvious how guilty they have always been. The crimes are coming in so fast now that people just can’t process them fast enough. The testimony by Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, was a major dagger into her guilt. But it goes much further than that. And to cover up each of these crimes, most of the Beltway culture is looking more and more guilty, meaning their coverups have to be more ostentatious by the week, even the sell-out Republicans like Mitch McConnell. He is really struggling to find his place in this new MAGA universe.

But I would say that it’s not new. Trump could come and go, but the desire by voters would be the same. I remember passing out 10,000 Perot promotions on Fountain Square in Cincinnati during lunch in 1992, just four years after Reagan left office, and the country was only so-so on George Bush, the elder. The Karl Rove types loved Bush because he stood for the two or three issues that they thought represented conservative politics, support of businesses, and a stance against abortion. But the need for good conservative, “American” politics was so much deeper than that. People always wanted a party that represented America first. It just took many decades of evolution to get it. The extremes of the Obama insurgency shaped the parameters into usefulness. It shocked people into supporting their own shock and awe president, the TV star and casino owner, Donald Trump.   It would be a similar personality in the future, but the rules of conduct are the same. America first, and to fly the flag proudly. That movement is not going away, and for those in conventional political circles, things are never going back to what they thought they were. The MAGA movement is growing by the day, and with each failure by the current government. The supply chain failures, high gas prices, and woke politics are all things that Americans will not accept. And they aren’t going to accept the new lockdowns that the government is planning to stop the fall election with the Monkey pox outbreak or whatever else they manufacture as a bioweapon in some Chinese lab.

People have been burnt by this recent American government and the world’s governments, and they want freedom from their stupidity. The more the governments hang on to loot off the efforts of the good, the more resentment there will be. That is why the Trump endorsements are doing so well. There are a few here and there that Trump reached.   But the effectiveness cannot be denied. Yet it goes way beyond him as a political figure. The big-government types and overbearing institutionalists have not yet figured it out. No matter what they do, people will not be compliant with an out-of-control criminal government. The only path they will accept is justice, which will be a painful future for many. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Root Cause of all Political Problems: Playing the cards to win, not letting the cards play you

One of the reasons I had to talk about superstition in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, is because one of the failures of Lean manufacturing, which has become the industry standard in process improvement across the world, is that it fails to recognize the most important detriment to all process failures, human behavior. Rather than deal with the detriments of human behavior, Lean seeks to create processes that remove human variables and build group consensus around those resolutions. Because the main problem with human behavior is that in the East, and even in Europe, workforces are much more compliant naturally due to their long histories with kings and overbearing governments. But in America, a different kind of human being emerged. And we can easily see those differences in the type of card games that we play. I specifically use the differences between Tarot cards and poker cards to accentuate the point often to clarify the differences in thought. And this is spectacularly important in our present time specifically because globalists have assumed, as many have with Lean manufacturing, that all people are the same. If the same rules were imposed upon them, then a universal kind of sameness could emerge and could then be easily controlled. But that has turned out to be vastly untrue, and the failure which follows is what we are seeing playing out in our present time. 

Lean manufacturing, as it turns out, which is a problem I have always had with it, is that it was a kind of pre-ESG score way to bring eastern thoughts to western cultures and then launch a global approach of sameness to all industries. I have taught Lean for over 30 years and have always run into the same problem; American cultures tend to push back on it while those in Europe and Asia tend to be much more accommodating. This has been a mystery to all involved because they failed to consider the most important aspect of human behavior and how they transact with their peers. So in my book, I break it down in ways that people can understand, which essentially comes down to tolerance for superstition in a culture and how those beliefs manifest into a business climate or a political one. In the book, I give a history of superstition across the world and talk about the use of horoscopes and Tarot cards to predict the future as some fortune teller might professionally do around a crystal ball. The thought was that people were helpless to the greater scheme of things and could seek help in the stars or in the spirit world of card reading to better navigate through the complexities of everyday life. When a string of luck occurs in business, even the most resolute executive might say, “knock on wood,” hoping not to jinx a project into failure when all has been going well. Behind such thoughts is the fear that humans are not in control of their destiny and that they must subjugate themselves to some “greater good” to function at even basic tasks in life. 

But in New Orleans, during western expansion, the card games of Europe evolved into something much more conducive to the lifestyles of Americans. Poker was invented, and over the next hundred years, the very American game of Texas Hold Em’ emerged and is extremely popular presently. Poker tournaments are common on sports programming such as ESPN, and every casino runs a Texas Hold Em’ game. Likely, they are running dozens of them. Meanwhile, the fortune-tellers are always on the outskirts of such activity at the fairgrounds and sidewalk attractions which offer a different kind of game for the more faint at heart, Tarot card readings. It is often interesting to go to a casino and witness the types of people who play poker and the kind who line up to have their fortunes told to them by someone else. The point of the matter is that the poker players can win the game even if they have a bad hand. The poker players play the cards, whereas the Tarot card reader allows the cards to play them. The fortune is in the cards, but the game is played to win in poker even if the cards are bad. Both are card games, but their rules of conduct are magnificently different to reflect the cultures that play them. 

In the movie Titanic, still one of the most successful movies ever made, this idea of making one’s own luck was a centerpiece of the story. Many women loved the love story between Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet; they could relate to the overbearing mother, the “too perfect” fiancée who was projected to be a great and wealthy business leader. It was, in essence, an East meets West story, where the business leader was a person who made their “own luck,” which he actually says at the end of the movie as his projected wife leaves him for the unfocused exploits of the hero played by DeCaprio.  Only to find herself floating on a door in the freezing north Atlantic after the Titanic sank and her lover sacrificed himself so that she could live. The story’s villain was one who self-determined his reality while the heroes surrendered themselves to circumstance. We see those same politics playing out daily in our news cycles, in our business process improvements, and certainly within our own families. But what the American poker players figured out was critical to the truth of the universe.

Even when you are losing, you can still win, and poker was invented to reflect that new way of looking at things from the perspective of an American, which much of the world admires, but secretly resents because they don’t have the courage for it. It is much safer to have the cards tell them how to live, consult a horoscope, and look to the stars for guidance. But to the American, not all of them, but to the bold ones who figure it out, every moment of every day is an opportunity. Even bad luck can be turned into fortune if you know how to play the cards right. But failure often happens because people let the cards play them. They don’t live their lives in a way where they play the cards. That is why Lean manufacturing always falls short, and companies end up throwing vast amounts of money at process improvements when they should be dealing with the psychology of interpersonal relationship failures. This is why Republicans and Democrats essentially can never work together because they have entirely different ways of dealing with the same problem. One is passive, and one is very active. And this is also why the MAGA movement is growing, why people elected a casino owner with a supermodel wife to the White House twice, and why much of the swamp hated them for it. Politics wants to read the Tarot cards. Trump supporters want to play to win. And those approaches will never go together. The problem was never one of simply political belief. Instead, it all comes down to superstitions and how to manage them. Do we let the cards play us, or do we play the cards? In America, we play the cards. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business