I know, it feels like the Lakota school board was laughing at us and sticking their tongue out at us like a bunch of spoiled brat kids in the back seat of a car after their Monday meeting, where they essentially declared their superintendent guilt-free despite the protests from the community. I read the situation differently, but I understand how it feels. I’ve been doing this kind of stuff for a long time, and I think I’ve seen every ugly thing humans can do to each other many times. But I remember how I felt when I was just getting into some of this stuff in my 20s and 30s. I was so upset about it that it essentially started my writing career. I wrote my first book, The Symposium of Justice, as my contemplations after some very nasty business in the city of Mason, where my wife and I had been raising our children. It is painful to realize that the systems we thought were put in place to serve the public and make a better society are just organizations of malice meant to give adults all their fantasies of power and manipulation to satisfy the worst in human nature. It is extremely deflating to learn that most of our institutions have been built to serve sheer evil and that none of them work the way we thought they did or how they were portrayed on television. I’ve dealt with crooked cops all my life, and I wrote about those experiences in my book. Not all cops are bad; I think many get into the business for the right reasons. But I am not surprised by how things occurred in Lakota, where many thought there should be criminal prosecution of the Lakota superintendent, and all that ended up happening, in the end, was that the school board, the public employees, the police, and the media seemed to laugh and mock our efforts at justice.
I’ve told the story years ago about some of my early years, and when I uncovered a drug distribution network in one of my old neighborhoods, I thought the police would be happy to hear it. I took the case to the mayor of Mason himself, and before it was all said and done, it involved even public officials in the city of Cincinnati mayor’s office at the time. It involved the FBI too and the media. For a while, it was a full-on war that eventually, the police came to my home to talk sense to us, and they said to my wife and me in our living room, “if you want to live in a nice neighborhood, why don’t you move to one.” Which, at the time, we thought was a pretty good neighborhood. It was a starter neighborhood in Mason; we liked the school. My wife was a volunteer there. And we wanted to help keep our community nice. But a percentage of the police force found easy money in selling drugs or allowing teenagers to sell drugs, and they facilitated it. And some good cops wanted to do a good job, and they would tell me that their hands were tied. When the city’s mayor wouldn’t prosecute hours and hours and hours of drug deals I had on tape filmed from the living room window of my house across the street where they were selling, I knew I was in trouble. I remember how it felt, and I see those same feelings coming out in young people in their 30s and 40s who don’t understand why the Lakota schools would take the position they have on the bad conduct of their superintendent. And why would the police and prosecutor not take the situation seriously?
I’ve asked those same questions, and I wrote a book to propose what could be done about it. I have learned that many of our society’s institutions are contaminated with diabolical evil, and they want to keep it that way. They try to convince us that it’s not so. But we see it playing out everywhere, whether it’s our national policies, global problems, or local school system. Evil grows in institutions where good people are told to put on the blinders and trust the authorities. And the truth is, you can never trust them. It’s not that people start out in life as evil, but with each new bad decision they make, they become more so with each one. They seek refuge in the teacher’s union or government institution. Bad things turn into everyday things, and the basic collectivism of an administrative state defines itself as the facilitator of what is bad in the world by its very nature. And evil protects itself from the judgment of people who haven’t become that way yet. And even worse, people who are in those systems don’t see themselves as evil; they think any attack on the system they serve as evil, so it’s not hard for them to have a good laugh when they have pushed back against our judgment for thinking what they were are doing is wrong. I didn’t listen to those Mason cops for about two years. We stayed in that little house longer than we needed to, but we eventually moved. It was the right thing for us, but I hated giving the impression to them that we were giving them what they wanted. But my family was miserable with all the constant fighting. Every time we left our home to go someplace, it was like there was a party where the entire street would celebrate our departure. It was a horrible thing to go through, and when we did move to a home where we had a lot more space and could control our neighborhood much better, we were much better off.
But should it be that way? Of course not. And I took what I learned from those experiences and have committed myself to a continuation that fights on the ground that I control, and that’s how it will always be for me. I would say that if you want good in the world, you have to work 1000X harder than evil to have just a little bit of good. And that it’s worth all the work. And when evil mocks you, as they clearly are in Lakota schools over their display of a rigged system against the taxpayers, a system that they control, and are supported by other institutions committed to the same Liberal World Order, understand what you are looking at. If they hate you, you are serving the side of good. You are showing kids that there are options in the world and that there isn’t only one decision, to be pushed through the meat grinder of liberalism and to have their intellects destroyed before they even have a chance at a good life. The system may be rigged for the efforts of evil, but that doesn’t mean we are helpless. It just means that fighting for what’s right is much harder than they told us growing up. They don’t tell stories about how it is on television or in movies. They don’t write songs about how evil works in the world. So many people are broad-sided when they have to confront it. Only the church deals with this issue; many people don’t have a relationship with the church these days, and when they do, they can’t see how to apply it to their daily lives. But remember, when you see them mocking you, remember that the information you learn from them is far better than the results you hope for. And buckle down for the fight and know that you will have to work much harder than them for positive results. Then knowing that you will be much more prepared to do what’s right for the world. It’s worth the fight, even though it doesn’t feel that way most of the time. But it’s a lot of work. Many people don’t want to work hard to do what’s right. It’s much easier to cave to the pressure of evil, which is how it spreads.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 