Tag: Democrats

My Opinion on the Debt Ceiling: America is bankrupt, and its time to file it

What do I think of the debt ceiling deal that the Republicans just gave the Democrats, the crazy Biden plan for perpetually more spending and a substantiation of more out-of-control costs? Obviously, it was a horrible deal, and a default on the debt would have been far better and would have avoided a lot of pain coming down the road. It was irresponsible to make a deal with the Democrats, Kevin McCarthy got played giving away negotiating points that he didn’t need to, making it easy for the Democrats, and now our federal government has signed up to balloon our national debt to over 50 trillion dollars by 2030. It’s reckless and destructive, but I’ve been warning everyone about it for a long time. Our government does not represent us; it represents globalism, driven by international finance and the Open Border insurgents. This isn’t something that any government that plans to stick around would ever sign up for. This is precisely what Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were worried about regarding losing sovereignty to the global banking clans, which was very much the centerpiece of his presidency. This deal only helps two groups of people, those who want to destroy the concept of America by choking it off with massive debt and Democrats who want to stay in power by giving away stuff to a voter base and then to pay for it all with interest to those same hostile parties. It’s like a credit card company giving a teenager infinite lines of credit to rack them up in debt so that those same companies can live off the interest rates due to the irresponsible spending. That’s what this debt ceiling negotiation in 2023 was all about. It took the issue off the table until after the next presidential election so that all the current parties could stay in power and keep from having to discuss all this until after the next election, and when we do have that discussion, the next president will be seriously shackled. So, in short, it was a disaster. 

But not a surprise. There aren’t enough Freedom Caucus members in Congress yet to make changes like this, and even some of those were too tempted to play nice with Kevin McCarthy to avoid the bad headlines from a media that was cheering this massive financial destruction. The value of this debate was on whether America would not pay its bills. Instead, it should have been, why are we spending so much money? There just weren’t enough politicians articulate enough to make that point when the headlines were pointing in another direction. Of course, the world wants to make a lot of money off the interest loaned to America and to have politicians in their hip pocket who owe them, like Joe Biden does, as revealed by the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop. This is why all those politicians are rich; they didn’t get that way by doing the right thing, but by selling out their offices to investments, by making policy decisions that were only good for those who put money in their pockets and allowed those politicians to buy mansions, in multiple locations and live a lavish lifestyle. What was expected in return is that all those politicians who signed on to this debt deal would vote in favor of endless spending and debt to provide easy incomes off the interest to those global insurgents. They think Americans are suckers and have no respect for us. If they can all get rich from the destruction of America, then they will be very happy.   And after signing this debt deal, many people are thrilled.

I was surprised to see positive reviews of the debt ceiling negotiations from my congressman Warren Davidson and fellow Ohio congressman Jim Jordon. They thought initially on paper that it was a responsible thing to do to beat the June first deadline artificially created by Janet Yellen. Like most crime families who have been doing this kind of thing for a long time, the Biden administration set a bunch of artificial deadlines to drive the sentiment, and the Republicans fell for it, pure and simple. Once the story of value became all about meeting those deadlines and not reigning in irresponsible spending, the negotiations were over, and that’s what I heard from my local congressman. The value they were working to was simply the wrong one. They believed they were fighting for the right to be honorable in paying our bills. But these are bills that America shouldn’t be paying for. And essentially, all this just sets up a final apocalyptic resolution, a judgment day in the very near future. I’m not signing up for this mess. This is not my government making these decisions. These are people working for hostile foreign intents. The Freedom Caucus is growing and will continue to. Not before we have to have a standoff on the debt crisis. Thirty trillion in debt is too much. I remember when we thought 16 trillion was out of control. So all this is just out of the realm of sanity, and the only way out is a massive global war between globalism and nationalism. 

This only makes President Trump more attractive. He’s personally been through this before with his own finances, and he solved that problem by defaulting on his loans and declaring bankruptcy, and that’s what America will have to do to get out of this massive debt. Of course, the people who loaned us the money, such as China and other prominent bankers, will be upset. They have a nice set-up with collecting interest from America that they won’t want to give up. But America will have to default on the loans, declare bankruptcy, and completely restructure our government, which most people aren’t quite ready for. Yet eventually, that is the only solution on the horizon, and nobody has been talking about it in the media, which makes it worse. There will be a lot of anger once all this hits the fan and people realize the economic impact on their private lives. Really, we should have had hard talks about the debt ceiling way back in 2016. Trump was doing what he does, and that was to spend America into growth, which would have worked if his presidency had not been interrupted in 2020 by a hostile coup by our intelligence agencies. Now the way out is to become the number one generator of fossil fuels, default on these high-interest debts, and renegotiate entirely the trade deals with all the foreign powers. And recognize this financial situation for the military threat that it actually is. It’s about crushing nationalism in favor of globalism. And we will have to flip that script for our own preservation, which will be the hot story in the next election. All this mess could have been avoided if only we had enough responsible politicians in Washington, but we don’t. We have a bunch of sell-outs, and they sold us out with irresponsibility and a commitment away from American sovereignty, and they did not do their jobs. They did not represent me; I can say that. And I’m not OK with the deal they signed; that battle is now on the horizon. And I’m not with them. That’s for sure.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

18 Years in Prison for the Oath Keepers: Defeating the Enemy with unstructured resistance

Watching the government throw the book at the Oath Keepers, giving their leaders 18 years in prison, is essentially the SWAMP fighting back against those criticizing it. It’s a manipulation of the rule of law that benefits the acquisition of power itself and points to the root cause of the evil that has corrupted our government in extremely unhealthy ways. To see the Oath Keepers and all January 6th prisoners harassed the way they have been is corruption that we have to deal with as a society. To see them prosecuted while leaders of Antifa continue free, waiting for their next assignment from the government to burn down a city block, is preposterous. But it’s also very revealing. We are better off knowing the forces opposing us, how deeply they are rooted in our government, and what their motivations are. And at least now we know. The people who protested on January 6th were mad over election fraud, a process that removed the president they liked from office. I think it says many good things about our society; that it wasn’t worse than it was, and more people didn’t get hurt. At the time, it wasn’t so apparent the amount of election fraud that our intelligence agencies obviously supported to keep the power they had acquired from being drained away by an outsider like Trump. But once the lines in the sand were established, a much clearer picture of what the problems were that emerged, and this prosecution of the Oath Keepers displayed it without any doubt as to the level of evil we are dealing with embedded in our own taxpayer-funded government that has spun out of control with corruption. I wasn’t surprised, however, based on my own personal experiences. 

Along with the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys have been at the center of many of these Pro-Trump protests and have actually been confronting Antifa in the streets, meeting aggression with aggression. I told some of the story before, about how after Trump was removed from the White House through election fraud, early in November of 2020, I actually signed up for the Cincinnati chapter of the Proud Boys and started the vetting process. My concern was that Antifa would be emboldened by putting Biden in the White House, and we would have to fight these people in the streets. We had seen elements of BLM attempt to organize in Cincinnati, fanned on by area reporters wanting to see a fight in the streets of Northern Cincinnati where conservative politics has collected itself and to harass people in their comfortable homes. Given the kind of aggression we saw from these radical liberal groups, a fight was undoubtedly on the horizon with guns and busted heads as part of the violence that would surely follow. So I signed up officially to be part of that resistance, and I wanted people in the FBI to know that my name was on the list as one of the leaders. I wasn’t playing around; I was very serious about it. 

Over the following weeks, though, I lost interest because it was obvious that some hazing was going to happen, and I’m not a group consensus kind of guy. They used the word “brother” a lot, as they were a unified brotherhood, and that just wasn’t a fit for me. If there was going to be violence against government-sponsored insurgents looking to overthrow our American Constitution, then that was one thing. But I wasn’t looking for a military brotherhood, and we had a lot of conversations about uniforms and the right to wear the colors of the Proud Boys before anybody had been adequately vetted by the group. So I lost interest quickly in that kind of talk. I’m used to being completely in charge when I get into something, and I was not about to prove my allegiance through hazing rituals to a bunch of 30-somethings. And submit myself to some regimented command. I didn’t put up with that stuff when I went to college. Military life wasn’t for me because of those kinds of things. I would not ever submit to a drill sergeant and the regimented ranks of that kind of life. So officially belonging to the Proud Boys and falling into the ranks as an initiate wasn’t going to work for me. And that’s what they were all about. Yet I learned through that process that they were very concerned about FBI infiltration, which is why they did have a vetting process, which was obviously very much a concern. I went through all this before the Ray Epps situation on January 6th. So they were fully aware that the government was trying to join their ranks with spies to manipulate everything behind the scenes. That’s when I knew the Proud Boy thing would not work for me, and I stepped away from the application process. There was too much trouble with officially joining anything; it was wasting my time, which I’m never in favor of. 

The best way to fight the SWAMP and its creatures is with unstructured volunteers, something a structured enemy cannot join and manipulate in a structured way. And that is what was attacked by the Oath Keepers, the ability to create a structured resistance to the evil intentions of a government that no longer reports to the people it is supposed to represent. Structured attacks are something they understand and control through processes. Unstructured attacks are where they are most vulnerable, and that’s why they hate President Trump so much because he is so unstructured. That lack of structure is actually where I am happiest, so I know how to handle things from that perspective. I thought that by joining the Proud Boys as a 50-something might send a message to the FBI to get on the right side of history. And that maybe it might avert a fight in the streets. But what became obvious was that it was too late for that. This is why there are prosecutions now where the book is being thrown at these Oath Keepers, J6s protesters, and Proud Boys who have suffered dramatically since those days of my application process. The bad guys control the structure of political society, so you never want to attack them where they are strongest. You want to attack where they are weakest, always. And in this case, it’s in their desire to rig the system in their favor and defend the ground they control, Washington D.C., the coastal media, and the courts. I met many well-intentioned people while I was joining the Proud Boys. But their vulnerability was in the structure as the FBI set up and controlled it. Instead of planning to defeat the globalists forces behind Antifa, most of the conversations were about trying to root out spies from the government sent to infiltrate their ranks and rot the whole effort from the inside. And that was only possible by controlling the structure itself. That wasn’t how America would be defended from these hostile forces. If you play that game, then the system is rigged to defend the SWAMP from scrutiny. And that’s precisely what has happened to the Oath Keepers. Their only hope is that President Trump will be re-elected and can give them a pardon, which is the plan. But before that can happen, the structure that the government uses to protect itself has to be eliminated. And that will not happen by attacking where they are well prepared. They must be hit where they aren’t, which is why I’m not a member of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or any organized group. And never will be.  

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Synagogues of Satan: How anti-Semitism has been weaponized by the political left

Out of all the people in the world, I had a group of radical lunatics refer to me as anti-Semitic recently, which clearly indicates that the people saying it had no idea what they were talking about. And it is yet another reminder of the schemes of the political left that they use to attempt to separate America from its Biblical origins. Just because someone like George Soros has a Jewish background, regardless of his alliance with the Nazi party, we are seduced into thinking, based purely on ill-defined definitions, that any criticism of him is anti-Semitic, even though those same people are the ones preaching against the Ten Commandments in classrooms, and religion in all public places in general. People who don’t really understand what the word, anti-Semitic means, are quickly lured into a frozen state of debate because they allow the terminology to stall in them through guilt. It could be said that this is how the lawyer Satan works, as a play on words to confuse the rational mind away from debate. This is undoubtedly what Saul Alinsky was doing with his Rules for Radicals book, which is the Bible of the American left, and how they attack conservatives. Stopping criticism of an obvious domestic terrorist like George Soros because he has a Jewish background is yet another way that vast evils are hidden behind made-up social rules formed on a flimsy understanding of history. And when the political left feels most challenged, they use those proven terms to stop debate and gain some invisible moral position built on ignorance. But in my case, I know what anti-Semitism means, so it doesn’t have an effect on me.   

Jesus has some great words to say about the Jewish people in “The Book of Revelation,” well, those who were behind writing the book. But it has Jesus as quoted saying it that the Jewish people were the “Synagogues of Satan.”   And it would be understandable why Jesus and his apostles would have thought that. After all, the Jewish people representing institutionalism at the time plotted and killed Jesus, as they did his mentor, John the Baptist. But, the story of the Bible is the story of the Jewish people, the line of Jacob who became by the name of God to be the Land of Israel. Israel was their promised land after being held slaves in Egypt. And during the entirety of the Bible, the Jewish people who were the Hebrews from Moses and God’s rescue of those people out of Egypt, whom he had given the Ten Commandments and cared for after many tribulations against Baal worship, finally arrived as a respected power within the structure of the Roman Empire. And the Jews certainly didn’t want some rebel coming along and screwing it all up for them. Jesus was a Jew himself, and he was performing miracles on the Sabbath and putting himself equal with God, and all kinds of things that the Jewish people at the time could not deal with. So, they plotted to kill him, which they, of course, did. As a trick of the political left, or even going further, the forked tongue of Satan himself, in his play on words by the vastness of evil permeating all existence, the way to separate people from their Bible is to freeze their thoughts on such judgments. You don’t have a Bible without the Jewish people. But yet, the Jewish people killed Jesus. So any critical discussion about the matter is off limits, which means that the entire value of the story is tossed out only to have the political left provide a whole new class of definitions supporting their insanity. 

The conflict between the Jewish church and the teachings of the Jewish person, Jesus, is one between institutionalism and individualism. Jesus was questioning the order of the day, which would eventually lead to the creation of America by decentralizing the religious concept. The idea of a godhead or an individual achieving such a position as an individual was a radical concept at the time. So it’s a good debate. The criticism of the Jews was that they had broken the covenant with God too often over the years, and they weren’t about to look the other way as Jesus openly did violate their laws. Yet, the laws were meant to be broken, as most laws created by dumb people should be. However, these were the Ten Commandments, which God gave them and were meant to be cherished. And along comes this young thirty-something who is claiming to be the son of God himself. And people were following him. Jesus had to go. In the modern context, because of the history, the desires of many countries to return essentially to Baal worship that predates the Bible, to use institutionalism to cater favor in the power seats of Europe and the Middle East, there has been lots of scrutiny about the Jewish people, which climaxed during World War II. The creation of Israel was controversial, but it all traces back to the story of the Bible and the creation of Western civilization, which came directly from the Bible. Without the Jewish people, there would be no Bible. So the anger toward the Jews is essentially anger at the core of Western Civilization. 

Then it becomes even more ironic when the same people who want to bring down Western Civilization, to destroy the concept of America, then use the name of the Jewish people to stop debate. On the one hand, they want to remove the Bible from every part of public life and to separate any trace of Christianity from American civilization. But then they are openly seditious when it comes to using the Jewish name to freeze all criticism in the world and to use the Bible as their weapon of choice against conservatives who don’t know any better how to think about these kinds of things. But the real debate isn’t about the Jewish people as a whole but of the factions within factions that either perform good or evil based on individual merit. Jesus was preaching something new that was outside the lines of institutionalism, and the institution’s participants sought to protect themselves from that change. However, the political left is all about collectivism, so they can only see groups and their names rather than the individual criteria of their behavior. So, they have weaponized debate because most people don’t understand the definitions or history leaving them paralyzed to have an opinion otherwise. Without the Jewish people, there would be no Bible. So, anybody who loves the Bible can’t be said to be anti-Semitic. Those two definitions can’t be applied together. Yet that is the position of the political left and a trick they have been using for quite a long time. Which only works when people don’t understand history well enough to know better. The political left fully intends to separate Western civilization from their Bibles, but this is one of the many ways they do it. That is how they have been hiding the vile actions of people like George Soros, who works diligently to destroy everything America stands for, every day of his life with all the vast wealth he has acquired. And as a mask for the behavior, any criticism of him is called anti-Semitic so that the true evil at work is never dealt with. 

Rich Hoffman

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Peeling the Old Potatos in the Basement: Kristi Ertel presents 18 months of crises to the West Chester Tea Party

You could peel the skin right off some of those old potatoes as Kristi Ertel gave quite a presentation to the West Chester Tea Party regarding the last 18 months of Lakota schools. Kristi has been considering joining Darbi Boddy on the controversial school board, especially after learning of the bad behavior that its employees have performed. Darbi has done a great job after her first year, and it has become grossly obvious that she needs help, and Kristi is considering taking one of the two seats on the school board that are coming up this fall. And this kind of thing isn’t just happening at Lakota schools in Ohio. It’s a national trend where moms have learned what has happened in these public schools for decades. They are getting elected onto school boards to help do something about the gross level of liberalism and Democrat policies that have infected them to the point where we now have entire generations lost to the horrible things they have been taught. And to make matters worse for many of these public school advocates drenched in liberal politics, many of these young moms joining these school boards are the kind of women that other women tend to be very jealous of. And in Lakota, as we have been exploring the root cause of the radical anger that has been thrown in the direction of Kristi, Darbi, and someone who works a lot in the background, Vanessa Wells, they are women who don’t look like leftover potatoes laying in the basement too long on one side. 

Public education issues have become a refuge for bad parenting and people looking for government solutions to all their insecurities, and with very high-quality people like Kristi Ertel critiquing the school system in front of the Tea Party, which has a lot of influential people who serve as members, it was too much for them, and they tried to lash out. When the liberals found out Kristi was going to do a presentation, they attended and retreated to many of the methods of intimidation that have given public schools a bad name in the first place. After the meeting, some of them criticized Kristi and the West Chester Tea Party in general, which tried to justify them all as radical right-wingers who threatened society. This particular group politically is to the left of Karl Marx, called Stand for Lakota. But it sounded petty and lost as many of those arguments were just lost sentiments from the past decades. I’ve been saying how detrimental these public schools have been to children’s minds for a very long time.  But after Covid and many of these young moms had to pull their children out of school over mask mandates or CDC policy rules for social distancing, they learned the harsh truth about public education, and now they are on a crusade to provide a solution. I know Kristi Ertel quite well; I don’t think she has decided to run for school board yet. And her interest comes primarily from seeing how badly the radical union elements have treated Darbi Boddy and Vanessa Wells over the last couple of years. And she has a problem with the level of evil represented by the Lakota schools. We all pay into this school with our property tax money, and it’s become reprehensible to know that we are supporting such a political machine of liberalism that intends to teach children to be Democrats, and radical ones at that. 

Coming to the West Chester Tea Party meeting was a kid named Landon Meador, who also appears to want to run for the school board, and he’s trying his best to mimic me for the cause. He’s been utilizing some of my methods to attempt to dethrone Darbi Boddy because they have tried everything else to force her to resign to absolutely no effect. It was interesting that Lynda O’Conner came to the meeting with a well known radical leftist on the school board, Kelly Casper. So these characters are really worried about Kristi joining Darbi on the Lakota school board and gaining conservative strength, which has been a refuge for liberal activism funded by taxpayer dollars. The poor kid Landon has picked a fight with Vanessa Wells that he has bit off too much. He will turn out like many of them that I’ve seen over the years who get pulled into these fights only to run out of gas when he learns just how weak the liberal politics he learned in school really is when matched up with reality. Right now, school board members who want to see transexual bathrooms, rainbows in the halls as propaganda of the religion of the Cult of Ishtar ruining the minds of children everywhere, and the Democrat policies of the teacher’s union like Kelly Casper and Julie Shaffer are trying to find some way to push back, so they are trying to copy what has worked for me over the years. They see this organized effort against their social incursions, and they have managed to cheerlead this Landon Meador into essentially a buzzsaw. There have been so many suckers over the years that they have tried to push into social activism to protect their refuge within public schools, and they have all failed, as will this one. They can’t win a policy debate, so all they ever have is to intimidate and harass their opponents. Only with this current set of moms, like Darbi, Kristi, and Vanessa, that kind of thing will only dig them in deeper, which then causes more people to join their conservative positions. Because Lakota schools are in a very conservative area, and most people sympathize with the politics of Kristi Ertel. 

The argument that Landon Meador, Stand for Lakota, the members of the current school board, and the radical teacher’s union all of them are fighting for something that actually died years ago and was recently revealed in that condition during the Covid lockdowns, and it will never return to its previous position. Going all the way back to a radio debate that I had with one of those current school board members, Julie Shaffer, that view of the world that she has, which is consistent with many who work in and around public education, was more of a refuge for a liberal view of the world than it was for the benefit of children, and that scam has been now revealed to a larger audience, which Kristi Ertel is now a part of. And what it essentially all comes down to is the protection that public education has given Democrat-leaning people from the harsh realities of life, hidden beyond massive spending stolen from the taxpayers to shield them from public opinion as they hid all their insecurities behind the innocence of children. And the truth is that every year from now on, more Kristi Ertel types will join these public education debates. These young women are the new leaders in our community, and it is terrifying to the standard model of public education for lots of justifiable reasons. Especially considering the potato in the basement metaphor. But the message of the future will be much different than the one in the past that young people like Landon Meador are trying to dust off. That old message failed for a reason, and it’s never coming back, especially when people get tired of being bullied and decide that for morality, justice, and concern for their community and its children, they choose to fight back.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Conversation with Representative Jennifer Gross: Fighting the Big Bad Wolf of Government

Rather than just talking about what she has been doing over the last few months, Jennifer Gross and I decided to meet on camera to share with an audience her latest achievements. As an Ohio Representative for the 45th district, Jennifer has a lot going on regarding the legislative agenda, and I think she does an excellent job of keeping the dialogue vivacious. If Jennifer and I didn’t meet like this, many people would never know some of the really good things she is working on because our current media culture is garbage run by young kids and editorial departments worshipping at the alters of Karl Marx. They often don’t understand the issues someone like Jennifer is working on and can only judge job performance based on some leftist ideological radicalism. When people talk about freedom, rights, and the Constitution, it is lost on them what Jennifer Gross is talking about. It is saying it nicely that they aren’t sophisticated enough even to have a conversation about these types of things, such as the validity of digital currency and its dangers, government health care being out of control, and the trouble with 5G bandwidth that is being pushed onto the world to allow for a massive corporate surveillance state. The theme of the discussion between Jennifer and me in this particular meeting was the challenge of having a viable government with limited powers that don’t end up like the Big Bad Wolf in the Little Red Riding Hood story, where the wolf eats grandma and is laying in wait in her bed to next eat the kid. I enjoy these kinds of meetings, so I thought it would be a shame to have it lost to just a couple of people talking about these things in the privacy of a meeting. Instead, sharing these things with the world in how they choose to digest the information might help people learn more about what’s going on, so Jennifer and I turned on the camera and just talked, letting people listen to everything we had to say.

Because the media situation is so bad, a path to correcting our social dialogue will require outside-the-box approaches, and I consider what I do to contribute tremendously to that objective. The present media doesn’t have the mind to cover some of the topics Jennifer discussed with more than a few hundred words of media coverage and some choppy clips to fit into television coverage. Instead, my approach is that people interested in these kinds of things have lots of mass media available to them to consume, so when they make a choice, they expect a lot more from the source material than they would otherwise get. One of the significant disadvantages for Jennifer is that she has a lot going on; she is a representative for the freedom movement as a State Representative, but how can you fit the complexity of her political position against a backdrop of social tyranny and big government expansion that seeks to hide its goals with rapid change, centralized authority, and a controlled opposition through the media? It takes time to explain many of these things to people, and through the traditional media, the details never get to the ears of the people who want the information, which is also by design. So I do what I do to help bridge that gap, and people obviously appreciate it. 

And the talk Jennifer and I had was very informative, especially regarding the Big Bad Wolf metaphor. That is essentially what’s going on with the desire of the government to grow and expand. It wants to eat us all. But, we have to recognize that is its goal and avoid being eaten before it’s too late. The push to impose on all people a digital currency controlled by central banks, who also then control our government is dangerous. And the best regulator is competition and a free market. Of course, corporations want an easy bake oven on financial controls. Just like the Big Bad Wolf wants to eat, the logic and intelligence of the human race should then indicate otherwise. That is, the purpose of government is to function for our needs as a civilization, but we need debate from representatives like Jennifer Gross, who will question whether or not grandma is actually grandma or whether it’s truly a wolf in disguise. Where Jennifer is on most of her issues, from digital currency, health care reform, or broadband resistance driven by government instead of private sector options, is in noticing that grandma has some big teeth. “My, what big teeth you have, Grandma.” Of course, the children’s story is very relevant to our current condition, and the wolf wants to ease our minds about its dangers. Because the wolf intends to eat us all, it’s what wolves do, and we should always be cautious in dealing with them. They expect us to trust them and play that against us for their own recourse. And it’s up to representatives in government like Jennifer Gross to keep those big bad wolves in check. Of course, the Big Bad Wolf of government will want to placate our fears, to call our alarms a conspiracy theory, and to attempt to diminish our caution in favor of their intentions. But the Big Bad Wolf has already eaten Grandma and intends to eat the rest of us, and often all we have left to our defense is someone to ask the obvious questions and disrupt those intentions with caution. 

It would have been a shame to relegate a conversation like the one Jennifer and I had to just a lunch meeting. So we shared it with the world for the world to advance itself accordingly. Not even corporate talk radio gets into the weeds of these types of matters these days, so using outside-the-box media methods, such as this one, can let everyone know what Jennifer Gross has been doing as their representative and what the reasoning behind her actions is. I think the digital currency push is one of the most dangerous we have seen in our lifetimes. China is making a power grab in finance, technology, and medicine to collapse America essentially and to pick up the ashes with an already built infrastructure of a police state, which is what they presently have. We are being seduced into compliance. They intend to eat us all, unsuspecting and debating social fairness while they prepare for our ultimate destruction through the lazy minds of the masses and a representative government that can’t even explain it to the public what is going on because the media culture is already sympathetic to the Chinese objectives. Often, like Jennifer Gross, all that stands between complete annihilation and civil society are representatives who fight in the trenches for our best interests. But people never get a chance to know what she is doing to that effect. Yet, the video meeting we had together showed a side of Jennifer that a lot of people would never see otherwise, and to understand what she is doing to keep the Big Bad Wolf of government, an already captured asset of the Chinese government, in a lot of cases, from eating us all. And I am proud of the work she is doing and that she continues to want still to do it. Its people like her and the willingness to ask the obvious questions to the Big Bad Wolf that keep us free and viable as a society in that constant struggle to work with the government for the benefit of the people but to keep the government small enough so that it doesn’t eat everyone in a complete act of destruction and mindless hunger that can never fill its belly. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Bud Light Should Go Out Of Business: Corporate Communism was never going to work

Even non-political people are upset at Bud Light’s move to put the little Pee Wee Herman guy on their beer cans to promote alternative sexual lifestyles. It’s no surprise that beer sales for Anheuser-Busch are way down, catastrophically down, but it’s entirely something to see that impact in an intimate way. Recently I was at the Back Porch Saloon in West Chester, Ohio, where it’s a popular drinking spot for the business world, and people I spend a lot of time with, who are usually avid Bud Light fans, were refusing to order the brand, instead picking anything but, because of the embarrassing marketing campaign that has clearly backfired. These people order buckets of beer that come in an actual bucket of ice full of beer to be set on the table for rapid consumption while dealing with the world’s problems. These are monster truck, deer hunting, American football fans who tag beer to their lifestyle choice as an associate garment to express the values of their existence. And having the little gay guy on their beer cans was a bridge too far, and they did not want anything to do with the brand. To see this behavioral change up close at a recent dinner was a bit stunning. It’s one thing to hear about it on the news; it’s quite another to see people you know change their behavior entirely so quickly in retaliation. I could have told the Bud Light people not to do it, not to listen to the goofy Klaus Schwab loser from the World Economic Forum. But the Bud Light people got caught hiring woke people to manage their brand, and they bought the bait that people wanted their product so much that they’d overlook any social justice message the company was going after to get a better ESG score. Instead, people voted with their dollars, as any market economy should expect. 

The Disney Company is going through the same mess, they went openly woke several years ago, and it is impacting their brand. Looking at their money and health, it’s not a good story. It costs something in the neighborhood of 5.5 billion dollars to operate that company, and they just don’t have the kind of revenue that they are used to getting coming in because of their commitment to woke political causes, the gay lifestyles, the Democrat political position of the global citizen movement, and other non-American values that come from the bullet points of the World Economic Forum. If you really trace back the behavior to single point causes of switching from money market management, where dollars represent a vote for the value of a product, and the transition to ESG value systems, then it’s BlackRock who has made the biggest move to switching public sentiment. The plan was to switch all these economic values away from the dollar and onto ESG, and now we are seeing the backwash. Disney is in real trouble so long as people are out there who refuse to buy Bud Light beer because of the push to accept transsexual social issues. The mistake came from corporations’ attempts to assume that they controlled public sentiment and that people wanted their products so severely that they’d accept social positions to get that product. Disney is learning the hard way with seriously declining revenue. They don’t have many billion-dollar films on the horizon to cover their operating costs as they did during the past decade with animated films, Star Wars, and Marvel. Now that they’ve gone full woke, as they certainly did in the monstrosity, The Eternals with actual gay kissing in the movie, they have destroyed their brand, and the revenue shows it. The decision-making behind the choice for woke films is the same as Bud Light. And the market results were predictable. 

When you hire people to run these companies for purely woke reasons because they are women and open to progressive ideas, then it should not be surprising that they lead their companies down a destructive path of revenue generation. The arrogance of many companies buying the World Economic Forum nonsense, and the BlackRock political activism, is that people are suckers and will buy whatever companies want to sell them, which is obvious. The game’s rule is that spending money on a product is a vote. Companies would have to work hard through advertising to build a brand; then, people would show their appreciation by buying the product. But in this new communist view of the global market, corporations want to do as little as possible to compete, so they seek the safety of government alignments under communist controls to make it easier for lazy CEOs to show quarterly profits to shareholders by tricking them into this smoke and mirrors ESG garbage, because they had to hide that corporate communism was actually hurting their market growth, and they couldn’t show shareholders continued increased projections. So they tried to sell this social and environmental score stuff that average people have no desire for as a new value—then thought that if they could enforce corporate policy through BlackRock to control most corporate boards, the public would be forced to support them if they wanted their beer or their entertainment options. Instead, what has happened is that people moved as they always do toward choice. So long as there were choice options in the world, people would always move in that direction. But the stupidity of the Desecrators of Davos types, the Larry Fink’s of the world, the Klaus Schwab insanity, was that so long as progressive politics controlled the big brands, like Disney, like Bud Light, that people would then be forced to embrace their woke ideas, and that has turned out to be very wrong.

Communists tried this kind of thing with the Berlin Wall, they tried it in Cuba, and they tried it in China. Communism has consistently failed, and this rebranding of the communist idea through corporate cultures will also fail, just as seen with the Bud Light brand. And governments, in partnership with this communist push, are trying to make it hard for competition to exist so that people don’t have other market options to go to. They thought they had it all worked out, that the transition from capitalist markets driven by shareholder values would merge seamlessly into ESG scores that would make corporate communism the taste of the day. And the little gay guy on the Bud Light cans was an ostentatious dip into the cold pool of reality. And that reality destroyed a brand that many assumed was foolproof. Beer sales are almost as common as water in America, and the corporate pinheads from the World Economic Forum thought so little of the buying public that they thought they’d buy the beer no matter what was on the can. But quickly, they found out otherwise, just as Disney did when they put gay and trans characters into their movies, only to have the public massively reject those efforts. And that splash of reality that market share would still go to those who most reflected what the public actually wanted was a scary reality. One that I knew would never work, but one that apparently all those woke people at the corporate boardrooms were disconnected from reality and didn’t understand. Well, they do now; everyone is learning that this ESG attack on capitalist markets wouldn’t fly. And that became most obvious at the local level among people who are largely not interested in politics. That’s when you know the people behind the movement are in serious trouble, and they seem to be mystified as to why.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Fox News Cutting Tucker Carlson: Corporate structures failing everywhere and trying to hide why

It was no surprise to me that Tucker Carlson was removed from Fox News, even as the number one guy. I’ve been saying it for weeks; it’s almost as if Tucker was trying to get them to fire him so that he could be free of that corporate structure. We are all getting ready to go through a highly unusual period in world history that was a long time coming. There is a belief, especially among the communist-minded, that they could be as rulers, the center of all thought and activity. And that if only they captured the corporate structure, they would always capture economic flow. But the truth was that corporations existed to fulfill market needs and that invention was only part of that discovery. The condition always existed; people needed food, recreation, security, and social and intellectual advancement, so it was the problem of corporate structure to fulfill those market needs as they presented themselves through the measurements of money. Money, particularly capitalism, was the best measure of this incentive-based economy, so corporations would rise to meet those needs and attempt to make a profit from those efforts. Since America had the capitalist system, it obviously made more money than the rest of the world, leaving other economies struggling to figure it all out. But there was a problem; it was getting harder and more complicated year by year for CEOs to stand before shareholders and explain a lack of quarter-to-quarter increases. Because if an economy doesn’t continue to expand, such as in America, where our 19 trillion dollar GDP continues along an upward spike, then CEOs can’t tell shareholders where those subsequent profits will come from. 

Over the last several years, CEOs and corporations, in general, have turned toward globalism to reach new global markets and continue to expand that upward trajectory of profit-based reporting. But the problem was, the rest of the world didn’t think like America. They were struggling with some balance between outright communism, complete centralized control of their governments, and socialism, where the “state,” a collection of mindless bureaucrats who have yet to prove anywhere in the world that they can do anything right, is going to control the means of all production. So there has been a collision that most in America haven’t noticed too much because they only really care that they can get a Happy Meal from McDonald’s at will when they want it. So long as they could do that, they didn’t care much about globalism, communism, the World Economic Forum, or what John Kerry said latest about worshipping his long lost mother, Earth, with a sacrifice of our capitalist economy to the gods of communism. And along this process grew the belief among corporate circles that they controlled social fulfillment and not the other way around, where market forces were determined by social need. Communists have always gotten it wrong. Yet more and more, our colleges, our board rooms, and our CEOs have read all the wrong books, listened to all the wrong people, and have turned more and more inward to share the belief that it was corporations that decided the fate of economies. Not something they had to work with to find their place in it. And that’s what has happened to Fox News. They started their organization as an alternative to corporate media, dominated by CNN and the mainstream outlets that leaned politically left at the time. Fox offered a center-right option that Americans were hungry for. They put on some attractive news anchors and turned loose a market need that was much in demand, and they had success until they tried to change that formula. 

That formula really began to change when Glenn Beck was removed from his 5-6 slot over ten years ago, mainly because the billionaire tycoon George Soros was tired of Beck doing stories that showed what he was trying to do to America through finance. Fellow billionaire and progressive pal Rupert Murdoch listened to Soros and the New York Society of upset progressives sent Beck packing. A few years later, they would do the same to Bill O’Reilly, another number one talent that they removed essentially because they felt that Bill legitimized Donald Trump by allowing him to announce his presidential campaign on his show. Then from there, the ball really started rolling, whether it was Dan Bongino, Rudi Guiliani, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Ed Henry, the list goes on and on. The more effective the MAGA movement was, the more desperate progressive radicals who always intended to spread communism worldwide and into corporate structures became. Like self-centered children who believe the world centers around them, they thought that Fox News had created Donald Trump, and it was Trump’s sales of capitalism that were interrupting the plans of globalism most, and they had to destroy that means of communication. 

That government beast serving globalism is very attractive to the American intelligence agencies who were caught allowing election fraud in the 2020 election, so they had to do something to attempt to bury their complicity in that massive crime, so they blew on the mind of Ray Epps to provoke an insurrection on January 6th. But people saw it for what it was, and Epps has been well hidden from the public since that January 6th event in 2021. After Tucker Carlson did some excellent reporting on Ray Epps and the general condition of government activism around January 6th, it was evident that Fox News would cut him too. They didn’t care if he had the number one show. They had fallen into the belief that they “Fox News” had made Tucker Carlson. Not that Tucker—and those like him—made Fox News as is usually the case of market-driving influencers. Then Fox News had to settle the Dominion lawsuit because they were actually all complicit in the election narrative, which would have been exposed in court, so they settled a massive payout to keep the case private and not released under the lens of public exposure. Remember when Fox News called Arizona for Biden when people were still in line voting for Trump in 2020? Yeah, there’s that and much more. So 60 Minutes doing the work of the Deep State, globalists who are terrified that Trump will win the Republican nomination played their part in resurrecting the Ray Epps story so to set up the next lawsuit against Fox News, which showed itself to be willing to settle lawsuits making it a prime target for everyone who has an ax to grind to get a little money in their pockets, so the rest was history.

The next day after the 60 Minutes story, Tucker was released, and the political left cheered, thinking they had done something substantial. They had eliminated the voice of the MAGA movement, and now they would be one step closer to keeping Donald Trump from winning the nomination. But that only shows how stupid they all really are. I’ve said it and said it over and over for many months now; Fox News was holding back Tucker Carlson. Tucker would be better off away from Fox. Fox was lucky to have a guy like that. But Murdoch knows he’s not going to live very much longer. His kids are radical New York lefties who will destroy Fox anyway. So now is a chance to sell off Fox News before they screw it all up. Likely Murdoch has in mind Larry Fink’s group at BlackRock because through Fed activism, BlackRock, Vanguard, and StateStreet own most of all the corporate boards that are out there, and they are all equally failing to meet market trends versus the imposed ESG measures. So Fox is ripe for buying, primarily if they can protect themselves from another lawsuit, this one coming from Ray Epps, and sell the company while it still has value before the kids destroy it anyway. And the progressive radicals, like Larry Fink, can hang the head of Fox News over their fireplace. And they all think they will have then stopped the MAGA movement. Yet, in reality, all they will have done is decentralize that MAGA movement, which will then make it much more powerful and less restricted. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Getting Away into Natural Bridge, Kentucky: The ultimate kind of Rebellion, Kindness, and Defiance

April is my birthday month and is always a positive benchmark for me. It’s always been my favorite month with all the life that returns from a long winter, and I always use the month as my own gauge into successes that need to be celebrated and things that need to be improved. But as a treat to myself, I wanted to go on a camping trip to Natural Bridge with as many of my family who could go and get off the grid for a few days in a place I grew up enjoying. My grandparents were from that region of Slade, Kentucky; during prohibition, my grandpa and his family ran moonshine, which I respect. I view moonshine differently than drug dealing for several reasons, even though I dislike intoxication of any kind all the time. I like to see independent and free people pushing back against a tyrannical government, and during prohibition, the government was out of control and deserved to have pushback, and that my grandfather and his father certainly did. Currently, we have a very dangerous government that is way beyond acceptable tyrannical tolerance, so for my birthday, I wanted to revisit a state park from my youth nicely nestled in the foothill mountains of the Appalachians and recharge. Over the last few years, my favorite mode of travel has been RV camping, so I wanted to take ours and live out of it for a few days, which is precisely what we did, and it was a wonderful experience. One of my sons-in-law brought their own camper, so we had a nice little family get-together down in the hills of Natural Bridge, Kentucky, and get away from the government for a bit.

Slade, Kentucky, where the Natural Bridge State Park and the world-famous Red River Gorge are located, is unusual because they have a particular hostility toward big government. Many census takers have found it impossible to do their job because the local residents simply don’t like government. So when you want to get away from big government and deal with people in a traditional Christian background setting in the Bible Belt, there aren’t many places in the world better. I’ve been to Natural Bridge a lot over my life, especially as a little kid. It’s been about ten years since my last visit. It’s not that it’s hard to get to; it’s very close to Cincinnati, Ohio, where I live. But my schedule has been busy; since my last visit, I have traveled around the world a few times, been to many countries, and experienced unique cultures. My opinion about the Slade, Kentucky region isn’t for lack of knowing anything else. But instead, it’s because I’ve seen a lot of other places that I appreciate that one of the best travel destinations there is, in my opinion, one that I knew well from my youth, was literally in my own backyard. It was a lucky experience to have, out of all the places in the world I could have gone, to have such a relationship with literally one of the best places there is. Our camping trip was wonderful, we had a nice campsite nestled in the hills, and we lived off the bare minimums and were able to let the world go for a bit, which was the present I wanted to give myself this year for a well-deserved birthday.

My wife and I started RV camping during Covid, and we will likely never do anything else again. I like hauling around my hotel room, bathroom, and refrigerator. It makes traveling so much better to step away from the grid as much as possible. I have a TV in my RV that we can stop and have a snack to take a break from driving and relax. Camper traveling with an RV has been a great experience, so doing that kind of camping at Natural Bridge brought together parts of the world that are favorites. It was all a gratifying experience. A lot of my family was able to come along, so it was nice to be around them and celebrate life while stepping away from the world of problems that traditionally come from government interference in our lives. Living out of a camper for a week in April of 2023 was enormously rewarding and recharged my spirit considerably. As a family, we had a good trip, and we were all grateful to have it. 

My wife and I had an interesting experience, a few actually, but one that reminded us just how good the world is without government in it. And people still live and get along without the stupid government imposing themselves into our lives. People left alone by government tend to do the right things without having a parental authoritarian in the form of government looming over our shoulders. For example, we went into town for some ingredients for smores and other snacks. And one of the items we needed was more firewood. So we were going to pick some up from a gas station down by the Mountain Parkway with a nice store. But the nice clerk there was a mountain woman from Appalachia, of course, and she told us that the wood that the gas station was selling was too expensive and you didn’t get very much. So she told us to go down the road around 400 yards to a tire mechanic with a little shed behind a Subway restaurant. He was selling a whole-wheel barrel of firewood for ten bucks. So we went down there to see him, and he loaded us up with firewood for our campsite. He had a rough mountain man accent; I would have needed subtitles to understand what he said. But we paid him the ten dollars, and he gave me a very large wheel barrel of wood to load into the back of our hatchback.

We couldn’t understand each other, but we quickly became good friends. That region is famous for many campfires, so he has many customers for his little enterprise due to the many campers who come to climb the world-famous Red River Gorge. It’s kind of a hippie culture, the rock climbers. More libertarian than anything. We probably wouldn’t agree on presidential picks or even drug usage. But we all do share a love of independence. Many of them come and camp with four people in a one-person dome tent with hundreds of others who can barely rub two dimes together in their pockets. And I find them refreshing, especially at Miguel’s Pizza, where they hang out. I’ve had pizza from everywhere, and the pizza they have at Miguel’s is a real treat. It was wonderful to pick some of it up and take it back to our campsite, where I had my reading chair set up next to the fire as all the kids played and enjoyed each other, and I had a stack of books to read well into the night as the sun set outlining the mountain tops and the dark sky stars made themselves obvious. It was a nice place to be, and it was certainly a great birthday present for me. No matter how much money you throw at recreation, it never gets better than that. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Don Lemon Thinks Michelle Obama is Better Looking than Melania Trump: The Attributes of a good person

He’s said it before, and it’s come up again recently wherever he’s working these days. It used to be CNN. But Don Lemon thinks that Michelle Obama is better looking than Melania Trump, and that has reemerged as a controversial statement for whatever reason. Not to defend Don Lemon in his preference, but we all know that the controversial news personality from the extreme left is wired differently than most everyone else, and there is certainly room in the world for diverse opinions. After all, Lemon is a known gay man, and it could be understood that looking at a hairy rump and wanting to have a piece of it sexually naturally would make him more attractived to Michelle Obama. Many still think that Michelle Obama is actually a man, so that would make sense that Don Lemon would find Melania Trump, an ultra-feminine fashion model who made her way in the world as one of the most beautiful women well before she was married to Donald Trump, not attractive to an openly gay man. Don Lemon’s opinion is skewed toward an unusual, minority sexual opinion, so it’s not controversial. It just expresses that so long as there are differences like that, where liberals who are addicted to sexual deviancy can’t agree on what an attractive woman looks like, then we certainly will never agree on serious policy, such as whether or not a new road should be built, or what the debt ceiling should be. When you can put one of the most beautiful people in the world in front of someone like Don Lemon, and he wants to argue the base of the merit, then it’s evident that people like him will never agree on anything. 

I’ve had the benefit of meeting Melania Trump in person; as far as beauty goes, she is about as good as it gets. She looks even better in person, which is rare for celebrities who often benefit from makeup and camera lenses. But I’ve often said about Melania that there is more to her than just beauty, which is only skin deep. When we say a woman is beautiful, we essentially talk about them like a beautiful flower. The amount of beauty is a mutually agreed sentiment among the bees of sexual existence. Do we all agree that that flower would be worth pollinating? If yes, then we would say that it is a beautiful woman, all the sign stimuli are there to evoke such a process, and we can appreciate the opinion as a shared expression. But then there are other elements to beauty, such as the development of intellect and personal expression, and Melania Trump is probably the most beautiful in this category. She’s a woman who took a large section of her life to personally raise her son, Barron, as a traditional housewife, which had the feminist movement in quite an uproar. She does not like communism, as her family came from a communist country, and she has an almost Ayn Rand hatred for it, which was clearly reflected in her marriage to Donald Trump. I’ve often said that she brought out the best of Donald Trump. And that is true of most great women; they make people around them better, whether it’s their husbands, children, extended family, or community; their inclusion in the world makes the world better for several reasons. And that is how it has been with Melania Trump; she made everyone around her better just through her sheer personality. And when you meet her in person, that is what emerges most, which doesn’t show up so much in the pictures of her. 

President Trump has tried marriage three times, and I’ve said it before, he would not be someone I would have voted for before he married Melania. Sure, he wanted to insert himself among his competitors as the alpha male who could attract the best-looking females to mate with. This is an attribute that Democrats have been trying to remove from our society because most people aren’t that pretty to look at, and they consider it unfair that people like Melania have access to all the best things in life just because she’s a beautiful person. She could marry anybody she wanted to literally, and women who look like the bottom of a foot are obviously going to feel disadvantaged. So they beat on that drum of equality, inclusion, and all the progressive diatribes that go into skin-deep judgments. But when it comes to Trump, and I have always read his books, I watched a change in him happen in his marriage to Melania that I think made him a far superior president. I wouldn’t like President Trump if he was not married to Melania. And regarding any rumors of affairs with other women while Trump was married to Melania, I see the situation as a weaker man trying to be better but often falling short. Other women are easier to live up to, so affairs with them are tempting when a man is feeling bad about himself. 

However, the power of beauty, both inside and out, Melania has clearly had a grasp, and she has kept herself as an object to behold, almost living in a remote world of her own rather than caring one bit what lesser people think, and that has forced Trump to be a better person. That’s also why extreme leftists hate her, not just because she is beautiful, but because she knows how to use it to evoke exceptional expectations from the rest of the world to appease her in the classy way that women have been known to do. Even though she was one of the most accomplished fashion models on earth, it was not a surprise that those trying to reshape the world toward equality would want to suppress obvious exceptions from consideration. And when they are looking for ugly people that aren’t threats to the averages in society, Michelle Obama is often confused as being a guy, so women aren’t threatened by her ability to take their men to bed on a whim possibly, and she makes them feel more comfortable with their own insecurities. That’s understandable, even if it’s not factually rooted in truth. It’s a shame that Melania wasn’t first lady during a time when America would have appreciated her more, such as was the case with Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Reagan.

Regarding first ladies, Melania Trump is unquestionably the best-looking in the young history of America. And among all similar women in the world. She is undoubtedly in the highest category of beauty when compared to anyone, anywhere in the world. And when Trump married her, he was looking for the best-looking woman to beat his rivals, which is superficial at the essence of it. But through that exchange, something good happened; Melania improved Trump. And Trump made America better. And that made millions and millions of individual lives better. Then for a political left that wants to destroy America, of course, they would resent Melania Trump for being a good person and using her gifts to make the world better because they want to destroy it.

In comparison, Don Lemon may look at Melania Trump and not see a beautiful flower like other men. The hatred of the left goes far beyond that. This makes Melania Trump one of the best-looking people on planet Earth in the history of civilization, both inside and out. And a significant character that will still do well for the world many years into the future. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Beer Drinkers and Wine Tasters: A reality in politics that the Never-Trumpers haven’t figure out yet

A stark contrast was evident to me during a very expensive dinner I was at with many very smart people from all kinds of political backgrounds. The people who were trying to argue for Ron DeSantis being a good alternative to Trump were also the same people claiming to be experts on red wine, white wines, and their various vintages. I’m not a drinker at all, by any means. There is a running joke in my family that I enjoy only three kinds of beverages; the first is water. The second is milk. And the third is Mello Yello, my favorite soft drink. In many ways, I have never grown up to think of adult beverages as something I value. I still drink like a pre-teen, and I have no desire ever to change that. But at social occasions, I will sip on a beer or wine to experience life as its presented. I’ll do that to some extent with alcohol, but when it comes to other things, such as marijuana, in any shape or form, I have a lifelong policy against it, and I will never join in the behavior. I have never done that kind of thing privately or in a group setting, and never will. But I’ll try what they offer with beer and wine and listen to people tell me why one wine is better. Yet I don’t know the difference between vintage wine or new wine from Kroger that was plucked from grapes last week. It all tastes the same to me. And to that point, I’ve never been a small fork, big fork kind of person either. Which fork do you use for your salad, and which for your main meal? My sophistication on these kinds of things is to pull out my pocketknife, which I always have on, even when wearing a $1000 suit, and stick it into my food to eat as if I were at a campfire. 

That’s when a very smart and highly educated guy who was trying to help me told me that I was drinking my red wine in the wrong glass as one of our waitresses wanted to pour me some from the most recently opened bottle. I put a wine glass in front of her to pour; she hesitated as this guy explained to me why. “You are supposed to use the wide-rimmed glass, not the narrow one; the red wine likes to breathe.” I then looked and noticed a difference, so I put the bigger glass in front of her and she poured away, and everyone at the table giggled at my expense, which I played up. I have no desire to know those kinds of things, and I think it’s funny that people think those kinds of things are important, and to them, it is. I prefer to think about really big things, and those kinds of topics seem small to me. But jokes caused by the circumstances are opportunities to find common ground, so we were all having the costly dinner dressed in our best attire, and we had a little fun at my lack of knowledge on these things. In my world, I am happy to offer other people some emotional leverage on me because it makes all the other discussions easier. My thoughts are rigid, so a social perspective concession helps make hard conversations more digestible. But because of the news of the hour, I noticed something about this event, which was paramount to the trouble with politics.

Even after all the trouble Trump is in, the RINOs and Never Trumpers are mystified as to why people still support him. The wine-drinking Democrats who locally can be found in my area at Cooper’s Hawk but generally are found at wine tastings at Martha’s Vineyard, Mackinac Island, and other highbrow places are mystified as to why Trump is leading in the polls and he actually gained in strength after the Alvin Bragg indictment. With the same skill that they put into worrying about what silverware to use during dinner or which glass the wine goes in, they are making decisions about politics that do not represent the beer-drinking public, the general people out there who actually vote. The same people who will drink a warm Bud Light out of the back of a pickup truck on a night at the local demolition derby. People do not want aristocrats who understand the difference in wines when the world is falling apart. People don’t want to be ruled by some dumb rules as to which fork to use during dinner. Most people will never have a chance to attend one $500-a-plate dinner in their lives and think about the difference between white wine and red wine. And they certainly don’t want to be ruled by people who do, and when you peel back the layers of the “hate Trump at all cost” movement, they haven’t yet figured out that people don’t like them because of their aristocratic wealth or access to the finer things in life. People want a government that works for them, which is what Trump has offered. And they’ll crawl through broken glass to get it. 

It’s the beer drinkers who decide elections. And in a world where people work hard to be elite so that they can work their way into social respect because they know what fork to use or what glass the wines go in, they expect some kind of payoff, which has been ingrained in us from thousands of years of evolution. But that’s not what people want out of their elected representatives, and much of our political class has never figured it out, and realizing that destroys assumptions they have had about life their entire lives. It’s not that the finer things in life aren’t fine, or shouldn’t be enjoyed. I enjoy them when I get a chance to experience them, even if my idea of eating a finely cut steak is to punch it with my pocket knife and to stick it in my mouth like a skewer. The key to political victory is in the beer drinkers who are just as happy with a warm beer out of the back of a pickup truck as with a fine bottle of white wine. Or maybe not even drinking at all, and would prefer a glass of water to intoxication of any kind. The masses are not running for a path in life to aristocracy. And they don’t want to worship people who are so pretentious. There will always be people who will want to take those extra steps in life, but that is on them, not on a social respect that they expect will come with their knowledge of fine wines and cheese.    Even though he is very rich and can afford the best things in life, Trump is just as happy with a bucket of chicken as he is with a great steak from an expensive restaurant. And that’s why no matter what the aristocrats of society throw at Trump, people will vote for him anyway because he has shown a disdain for those pretentious types, not a reverence. And that is ultimately why those who have spent much of their life thinking about such things, like James Comey and many others, hate Trump so much. Because Trump represents a rejection of everything they value as a civilization. And Trump is a reminder that that is what voters value as well, and that realization hurts their feelings and dictates their political persuasion as RINOs and Never Trumpers who will never understand until it’s too late for them.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business