I know it from years of professionalism, and most people with common sense understand it, too; you don’t sacrifice effectiveness for niceness. Now in a leadership role, I think the most effective communication is with honey rather than vinegar. People are more willing to do things in their life of their own free will if given a chance. However, they often need leadership to help them figure out what that is. And they often need a kick in the pants to reside beyond their sense of laziness to aim for higher things in life. It is up to leadership to define the goals of an organization. How people get on board with that strategy is up to them. But complacency and drag assing are not options. Often there will be resistance to the goals established by a leader, and sometimes, they will have to employ methods of motivation that might be boisterous or otherwise. This is not the same as being a bully. Our culture understands this subtle nature well; we’ve seen it in movies like Back to the Future. We all have our Biffs in life and could cheer on George McFly when he punched the bully in the face at the end of the movie to win his future wife and start a good life for himself. We see it every year in The Christmas Story where Ralphie gets tired of getting picked on by a group of bullies coming home from school, and he beats the crap out of one of them, which solved that problem forever. In my own life, I poked a big-time bully in the eye with a pair of scissors when I was in the first grade. I had to, and yes, I got into a lot of trouble. But you can bet that it was worth it; it changed many things for me for the better. There are many bullies in the world, and the focus of our academia has been to avoid conflict, which has only empowered them. And it was the wrong approach. From his years of experience, Trump understood what leadership was supposed to look like, and we saw it daily in what was called “mean Tweets.” But look what happened in the world when he could no longer provide those mean Tweets; when Twitter took down his account and through election fraud, he was removed from office. How is the world doing now?
We all had our stories of bullies when we were young, and we either dealt with it or looked for some protection in group behavior to hide from them. And yes, it’s that simple in the world. Those who never learned to fight back against their bullies joined groups such as political parties to do their dirty work for them. It is clear to all that the Democrat Party has offered a chance to be a bully on their behalf with collective salvation. We see it in our businesses when consensus-building exercises stifle any attempts to impose work standards by a strong leader. People who want to hide their timidity usually do so by hiding in groups, and from there, much evil is launched. Humans trying to avoid this reality have built every part of their civilization around the idea of a democracy for just this very reason, to hide their lack of courage, leadership, and zeal for day-to-day life. With a democracy, pack hunting, they believe they can hide their soft souls from the world and do OK, just as long as they are not exposed as phonies. They go to school to get pieces of paper that tell the world that they have proven their worth academically. They join clubs so that others will say they are notable within the context of the group. They do anything and everything to hide the fact that when they had a chance to punch their version of a bully in the face, they didn’t, and they grow up bowing to every kind of corruption that there is because they essentially are terrified of conflict.
But most people understand the value of leadership, so we put President Trump in office because he had a reputation of standing up to bullies and fighting back. We saw it on television and read about it in the media for several decades, so we gave him a chance, and it worked out great. America First was a plan people could rally behind. The world was not acting aggressively toward the United States in any way. Trump had brought peace to the world one mean Tweet at a time and survived what aggressions were thrown his way by an endless stream of media and activist groups. It didn’t matter, Trump was successful every day he was in office, and the world was better off for it. Many who didn’t like him felt the way they did because they were averse to conflict, not that Trump did anything wrong. People felt that Trump should have been more “presidential,” which is just short of saying, “we want to steal your lunch money, so let us do it.” It said more about the state of other people’s minds than it did of Trump. People showed by electing him twice that they wanted leadership in the world, not the collective shield of group-oriented behavior. People in America wanted to win at life, and to do that, leadership needs to be present to set the objectives. And once those objectives were set, people also needed to be pushed to achieve those goals. We had that type of President over the last four years, and America was winning. Look what happened in just seven months after it was taken away. The world is literally on fire from every quarter of it.
We could talk all day about the malcontents around the world who want a weak American president. Without leadership, the bullies from every quarter of existence emerged to push people around, and a kind of tribalism that is entirely destructive occurs. It is the most understudied aspect of liberalism that there has ever been, the need for individuals to stand up to bullies not to join groups to seek protection from them points to the ultimate failure of their plight. The world and everything in it needs leadership that pushes individuals toward greatness. Not where groups provide refuge only to become bullies themselves spreading evil upon the earth. There is nothing good or just about a Democrat Party who protects the weak and meek by allowing them to join the masses to become the bullies themselves. And there is nothing good about a Republican Party who lets them do it the way George McFly did in Back to the Future. Allowing evil to grow is just as bad as perpetrating it yourself. With that said, I do not doubt that we are learning our lesson right now. Even if they weren’t Trump supporters before, many people are craving the mean Tweets of the Trump administration. It was better to win in the world than cower in the corner and hope that something terrible didn’t happen. We have to stand up to the bullies of the world, and we can’t become bullies ourselves along the way. Being a leader is not the same as being a bully. Our academic system needs to learn that for future prosperity. But in the meantime, mean Tweets or whatever their replacement becomes will do just fine.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 