What am I most thankful for on this Thanksgiving of 2021?  Well, it’s something I said last year would be happening when I said not to fret, not to despair over lying hiding, Joe Biden.  That Trump was still the president as far as I was concerned and that he didn’t need to be in the White House to act in that fashion.  Instead, he could run the country from his Winter White House down in Mar-a-Lago, which is what he has spent the last year doing.  And the result has been the creation of the America First Policy Institute, a collection of like-minded people intent to make an America First agenda the policy of the United States for many years to come.  This is, of course, something that you probably didn’t hear about in the media, so I have included a few videos from them in this article for context.  Needless to say, I am very thankful to see them emerge as a political powerhouse that will shape all future elections and build on the more than 75 million voters who voted for President Trump in the last election who have been ignored, scandalized, and tormented ruthlessly since President Biden was put in place to protect the swamp and all the deals made there from draining the filth the way we have wanted to do for a long time.

I’ve been talking about shadow banning more lately because I have been thinking a lot about the AFPI.  I came to know about them because I joined in Big Tech’s Trump lawsuit, which I essentially view as criminal conduct.  Google doesn’t own the internet, nor does Facebook or Twitter.  Yet, they have acted like it.  The internet is essentially a public utility that our government developed for our use.  Google doesn’t own it, yet I have become one of the most shadow-banned people on the internet.  Considering how much content I have provided over the last decade, I should be getting millions of hits per week on my work. Instead, it’s just hundreds, or thousands, depending on what’s going on.  The only real people who see my content are subscribers, as search engines deliberately shut me off from the world.  It’s pretty ostentatious, to be honest. I’m not one to cry about it, but when I had to fill out my paperwork for the lawsuit, it brought it all to my mind just how mad I have been about it.  If it were simply a competition issue, I wouldn’t care.  But this is a free speech issue over a public utility, and these companies that I didn’t elect have chosen to disrupt the operation of our republic toward political positions they favor, and that isn’t acceptable.

I can see where all this is headed by getting to know the AFPI people a bit, and it will only grow.  I have been thinking of them much like the original pilgrim colonies of Plymouth Rock.  I was reminded recently of my trip to Westgate in Canterbury, England, with my wife, where we went to see the cell of Robert Cushman.  Cushman was the original commissioner of the Mayflower on behalf of the Pilgrims. They were fleeing Europe due to the tremendous religious persecution from the Church, the state, the royalty, and their continuous power struggles.  The protestants wanted to be free of that persecution.  Robert Cushman, after all, just wanted to run a little grocery in Canterbury, but the Church insisted that he believe in their style of religion, so they shut him down and threw him in jail.  Essentially, it’s what we are seeing today, where the state insists that we believe in the gods of Covid, in climate change, and that we do what they say needs to be done, or nothing else.  Its tyranny to consider Covid vaccine mandates or to be put out of business.  But that was how it was in the times of Robert Cushman, around the 1620s, before and after. 

That hunger for freedom from tyrants has always been part of the human race.  America was founded on it, first from the pilgrims, then again during the Revolutionary War.  I would say today, with the election of Trump, the creation of the American First Policy Institute, and the political upheavals of our times, we are going through all that once again.  There is nothing new about tyrants wanting to capture people to make them think and do what they want them to do.  We see an example of this tyranny every day with the shadow banning.  It’s one thing for me to say it’s happening to me.  But one of the strongest examples is that of Jonathan Karl from the Disney-owned ABC News regarding his latest book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.  That book has been quoted by most mainstream media outlets as if everything in the book was a fact.  It is the narrative of the captured press, but they are still a minority opinion, and to maintain that illusion, they have to shadow ban other views.  In this case, it’s the Peter Navarro book In Trump Time, written by an actual Trump insider in the White House.  Jonathan Karl was just a reporter.  Peter Navarro is the real deal.  His book is selling great, underground.  Just as my material gets out, underground, black market style, but the attempts at shadow banning couldn’t be more apparent.  The New York Times took Navarro off their Best Seller list not because it wasn’t selling but purely over political ideology.  The belief of the political left is just as the kings and popes of Europe thought about the protestant movement, that by ignoring why people wanted something, that something would go away. 

Just as the pilgrims came to America under great hardship and settled a new country founded on Christian sentiments, the America First Policy Institute was formed by a need to correct what happened to Trump and his voters during the 2020 election.   The government that pushed Trump out of office was not going to get away with just shutting down the thoughts and speech of those they disagreed with.  They were not going to be able to intimidate compliance.  Just as it always is with humans, the consequences would be harsh for those seeking to control them.  No matter what period in history we look at, we see people fighting tyranny.  If they can flee to get away from it, they will.  But in a world like what we live in now, where every corner of the world is occupied somehow, leaving no place to flee to, the only alternative left is to fight those who want to control us.  In reaction to that, the America First Policy Institute was formed to do just that, starting at the ballot box.  It won’t take long for the AFPI to grow into a much larger and influential organization, especially with the kind of people who are in the leadership. It’s a natural reaction to a very long story, and if I’m thankful for anything, it’s in the human response to the last couple of years, which is the birth of the AFPI.  Whether it’s the pilgrims or the front-line policymakers at Mar-a-Lago, it’s the human need for freedom that continues to endure and is what the real meaning of Thanksgiving truly is.  And this year especially, there is a lot to be thankful for because of the AFPI. 

Rich Hoffman