Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 205

I Can’t Wait to Vote for Mark Welch: Sad to hear, Jennifer Gross has been a Never Trumper

After watching the debate performance at the West Chester Tea Party Candidate Forum between my pick for the 52nd House seat in Ohio Mark Welch, and his rival Jennifer Gross I was very impressed with both of their answers on the 2nd Amendment. I have known Mark for many years, before he ever ran for any office, so I know clearly where he stands on things and he has not been a disappointment. He’s had some temptations come his way as the West Chester Trustee who worked with George Lang to bring so much prosperity to the area and I know that I can trust him in Columbus where things get quite a bit more difficult. My comment to Jennifer was that I wish she wasn’t running against Mark because I’d love to vote for her for some other position. For me she was a bright spot of the evening and I enjoyed talking to her. Apparently, our paths have crossed in the past on projects and so talking to her after that event was a real pleasure. However, as an employer getting ready to vote for a new hire for an important House seat that means a great deal to our area, Mark is still my guy without question. And here are the reasons.

There is a lot of talk in this election about the establishment being some kind of maniacal force that must be overthrown, especially from Candice Keller. But I could write several books about all the work that has gone on behind the scenes with great leaders like George Lang, and Ann Becker to push out the RINO Republicans and build an Ohio Republican Party that is firm behind President Trump’s administration. That is why we recently had a big party for Trump in West Chester that drew a large crowd and Lara Trump herself came to Jungle Jim’s in Fairfield recently to help raise money for the Butler County GOP. Todd Hall as Chairman has done a great job in shaping the current GOP along with Sheriff Jones. I have done my fair share to help shape the kind of people we wanted in those positions and I am very proud of the result, of the people who are now office holders that would never have been if we didn’t start working to get real conservatives on the Central Committees. If there is anything really good that came out of the Tea Party movement, it was that, and the result is that we now have options at high office in the Statehouse like George Lang and Mark Welch, who were born out of the Tea Party movement and are now part of the Trump Administration as far as policy at the local level. So the establishment isn’t so bad anymore, I would say its actually quite good and I have no problem naming myself as a proud, Trump Republican.

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It breaks my heart to see that Jennifer Gross was a never Trumper #gop #trump #politics

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on Mar 6, 2020 at 8:44am PST

In fact, I was never anything but a staunch Republican, no matter how much disagreement we may have had within the party, success does unite people in a great way and Mark Welch was there when it wasn’t cool, and he has done all the right things, and learned all the hard lessons to run that 52nd District seat wonderfully. But after checking out Jennifer’s background, I am not so sure about her yet. I’d need to see her vetted a bit before I’d vote for her in a key spot, something like a trustee seat, or even the school board. I really like her, she is a good personality and a sincere person, but her history as a Never Trumper concerns me greatly as indicated by some of her online postings shown within this article. I’m certainly never one to push away a potential friend or partner, even from former rivals. People learn things in their own way, and I am not rigid in accepting people who have seen the light into being part of a solution in the future. There were a lot of people who were Ted Cruz supporters in the last election that had a problem with Trump. There are of course the Ron Paul types whom I never was a blind supporter. I have never called myself a “libertarian.” I am a Republican in the purest form of it and likely always will be. But I don’t expect everyone to have those firm convictions.

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Another interesting comment from Jennifer Gross #gop #republican #politics

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on Mar 6, 2020 at 8:42am PST

That brings up my other issue with Jennifer, with all that said, she has made comments that she doesn’t associate with being a Republican which is a deal killer for me. It’s not just about party, but its about values. She obviously by some of her messages has some strong feelings about Mark Welch who is my friend because he has many of my shared values. Mark will clearly represent my Republican sentiments in Columbus the way I want to see. But since Jennifer doesn’t care much for Mark and obviously has stated that she no longer identifies as a “Republican” it breaks my heart to see that she’s not where I’d like her to be in life so I could give her a vote. Because I think she has the talent, certainly the charisma. But I’m not sure she can hold a note under pressure on the big stage. I’d need to see her support this current Republican Party and survive some pitfalls first. I understand that sentiments change and with success under Trump, things are much clearer than they were for people coming out of 2016. But I’ve always thought the same things and I know Mark Welch has too. He’s never been a different person. My experience with him is that he holds back a lot, he’s more a man of action than of talk so he doesn’t sell himself enough. But he’s relatively new to this political game himself. He started off as a trustee and has worked his way to where he’s now poised for a more complicated office. And its not about just straight up votes, its about team building for bill passage, and that means that you need to know how to work with the party in charge and not be some outcast that screws everything up. It’s a tough business and it takes a very likeable, and charismatic person deeply rooted in their own belief system to navigate the lobbyists, the pressures in the hall outside the chamber and the constant stream of negative emails because you didn’t vote this way or that. It always takes knowing how not to stumble over the media when they are trying to twist every word you say to play the gotcha game. I know Mark can play that game. Jennifer in my thoughts needs some practice.

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An interesting comment from Jennifer Gross #politics #gop #republican

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on Mar 6, 2020 at 8:40am PST

When the smoke from this primary on March 17th is over, I hope to see more of Jennifer. I’d like to see her work herself into a party endorsement and to start building some bridges which is what a republic style of government requires. It wouldn’t take much to make me vote for her, just consistency and to fit into the team that has been building in Butler County in the GOP. While individualism is the key to representative government the passing of laws and the art of representation requires those extra team building skills, just as every corporate environment demands. Being a solid individual is needed to fend off the wolves who want to turn every politician into a corrupt specimen. But you must be able to win people over to your way of thinking in a republic and that isn’t easy under the best of circumstances. Its wonderful to say we should never have party politics, but in Columbus we have majorities and minorities and that is needed for all kinds of checks and balances, and that is the framework that anybody going for a State seat must navigate to do the good work that needs to be done. I can’t wait to vote for Mark Welch, he has worked hard and deserves it. And I look forward to getting behind Jennifer Gross at some future opportunity if such a chance presents itself.

Rich Hoffman[image error]

The Misleading Candice Keller: There is no stronger politician on the 2nd Amendment than George Lang

I kept wondering all during this campaign in Ohio for the 4th Senate District seat why disgraced Candice Keller would say so emphatically, and so often, that George Lang, her political rival was such a liar. I’ve known George Lang for a very long time, and through all kinds of times, good and bad, and I’ve never known him to be any kind of liar. So I was happy to hear Candice on stage at a debate with George at the Tea Party Candidate Forum that was held at the Life Church just outside of Mason, Ohio to get context to her thought process and she spilled it during a questioning session over support of the Second Amendment. Its hard to imagine a stronger pro Second Amendment candidate anywhere in the world than George Lang, even the cowboy hat wearing politicians from the northern plain states. Lang is very pro-gun, especially for what people like Crazy Candice Keller calls, “establishment types.” I was pretty surprised that Keller tried to sell in a church of all places that George Lang had supported red flag laws in Ohio, and that it was those kinds of statements she had been trying to paint on him to punch holes in his credibility and call him “Lyin’ Lang.” I was curious how she could even suggest such a thing and I received my answer during the clip shown below.

What Crazy Keller does with information that is long in the wake of a big time politician like George Lang who is involved in all types of discussions with literally hundreds if not thousands of people every week is take things out of context and try to shape them into something supportive to her world view. In the case of the red flag laws support that she says George had written down, she’s talking about a Toledo reporter who knew Lang was as pro-gun as anybody in the Ohio Statehouse and she tried to paint him in a corner shortly after the Dayton mass shooting, the way many in the media were trying to play “gotcha” with pro Second Amendment supporters as an act of liberal activism on their part. George first gave her a blow off scenario which she took and ran with, which was completely fake news, in the same way that the media treats the Trump Administration. George Lang would never support red flag laws, so I knew as soon as Crazy Candice Keller said what she did, she was manipulating information to try to cast doubt in voter’s minds about George. But taking that same assumption, Candice should know all about how the media plays that game because they essentially destroyed her with her response to the Dayton shooting. What she said has destroyed her within the Republican Party. It is literally “crazy” that she would expect people to understand her situation, but wants to use fake news media reports as the voice of record when it comes to George Lang. The liar certainly wasn’t Lang, it was Candice Keller and it shocked me that as she has sold herself as the “church lady” that she would from a stage in a church openly lie about Lang and expect it to stick.

When I bought my .50 Desert Eagle carry gun a few years ago George was the first person I called to go shoot it with me. As I have said, I’ve known George Lang for a very long time, well before he was running for senate. I called him because I knew he would appreciate the gun for the work of art that it is, and he understood why that was an exciting moment for me to have, so it was he whom I called. We went to Premier Shooting in West Chester which is a place we both enjoy and spent a lunch hour shooting the new gun and just enjoying the atmosphere. He is as pure of a Second Amendment supporter at a political level that anybody will ever find and as he shot that big gun he was as at home with it as any seasoned veteran. So, it was quite insulting to me to hear Candice Keller try to paint George Lang as some greasy politician in bed with lobbyists and was wishy washy on red flag laws. To suggest Lang was anything close was an open lie stated consciously which was reprehensible.

In fact, it pissed me off so much that I had to ask George about it after the debate. I was wondering if maybe he floated supporting red flag laws to the Governor in order to strengthen the stand your ground bill floating around Columbus and that maybe having such a conversation might lead to a misinterpretation. As it turned out, it was just fake news from another liberal reporter/activist trying to put media pressure on politicians to take a stand against gun ownership. When you talk to as many people as George does, its easy for a reporter to take pot shots and be forgotten, which was clearly the case in Toledo. Candice Keller during that same debate was proud to announce that she didn’t know the name of a single lobbyist which is to say that she really hasn’t put in enough time into her job as a congresswoman to really know anybody. She should know the names of lobbyists, not to get money from them, but to actually know who to look out for. What she has done was demonize everyone, so anybody actually doing work in Columbus is some kind of devil up to no good, at least that’s how she presents herself. But she should know the difference about what a radicalized reporter might do to a pro-gun politician, or even how negotiations over bills can be taken out of context. Anybody who really does political work at any level knows that negotiations are not beliefs. They are positions you take to get something you want in a strategic fashion. President Trump does it all the time, throws out a position he may not want or believe in at all to learn what the other side values so he can whittle away at that to bring the negotiations to where he wants them.

The good thing is that I was at least able to get context into how Crazy Candice thinks. When this whole senate race started, I thought I might like some of Keller’s positions, as a conservative. But I’m not so sure she’s a conservative after other things she said at that debate, which I’ll get into with more articles. Sure, she says she’s pro Second Amendment, she seems pretty pro-life, but she is strangely pro big government especially when it comes to what role the EMS and firefighters in general play in budgets. And the way she distorted the Toledo reporter who was obviously an anti-gun activist trying to paint George Lang in a corner to force red flag laws on weak Republicans in Columbus, Keller should be ashamed of herself. She should have joined George in that fight if she was really a pro Second Amendment supporter. But I think she is using it as a mask to hide some deep closet liberalism she is afraid of getting out to the public. That doesn’t give her a right to lie about people then to attempt to paint them as the liars when it was she all along doing the deed.

Rich Hoffman[image error]

The Radicalism of Candice Keller: What she has in common with streakers and other rule breakers

You can learn a lot about people by watching how they deal with pressure, so for that very reason I am a big fan of conflict. I think it’s the only way to really vet an idea, or a person beholding an idea. So when it comes to elections, debates are important ways to determine the right candidates from those who voters should pass on. With that said, there was a good debate hosted by the West Chester Tea Party on March 3rd at the Life Church at the corner of Butler Warren road and Rt 42 just south of Mason, Ohio that involved many of the candidates for the upcoming primary election that will be on March 17th so the timing of it was critical for voters to make their decisions and learn what they could while there was still time. And in the clip below a summary of the debate evolved into a tense exchange between George Lang who is running for the 4th District Senate seat in Ohio and his challenger, the disgraced fallen angel from the Statehouse Candice Keller. To George’s right was Lee Wong who couldn’t hold his excitement for Keller’s attacks on George while on George’s left was Keller who broke the rules of the evening by refusing to keep her comments within the time limit as she patronized the obvious front-runner like a mother scolding a baby, part of her strategy of attacking the establishment structure of the GOP itself as if she was ordained by God himself to step over the rules of mankind just to get her way. It is an interesting psychological performance that says a lot about all three candidates.

Now when it comes to rules, it is people who are on flimsy ground who need to break them. For instance, if I wanted to get rid of all the bad guys in the world, I would just take my guns out on the streets and shoot down everyone I thought was bad, and from my perspective, that may be a heroic thing to do. But its against the laws we have created as a society. Obviously to prevent that kind of violence from happening I instead elect representatives to create laws that we all somewhat agree to so we can have a stable society where rules prevent that kind of violence. So while people were clapping in the audience that Candice Keller broke the rules of the debate by going well over her time limit, she essentially stated that she was willing to break any rules thrown her way if it meant she could make her point. What she does as a legislator or as a potential legislator in the senate is not relevant if she feels God gives her some permission to break the laws of mankind to serve some master that is over the governing bodies of elections. And like the Ding Dong that Lee Wong is, he was there clapping with the other radicals in the audience who applauded Candice Keller’s attack on George Lang and the GOP establishment in general as a symbolic gesture that went far beyond acceptability. What if God said to me to hit the streets and shoot all the drug dealers, all the abortion practitioners, and all the people of corruption whom I might meet that day? That kind of testimony doesn’t hold up in any court of law, but it would certainly label such a person as a deranged lunatic.

The strategy that is clearly unsaid between Lee Wong and Candice Keller was on stage that evening and their attack, their beef with the world is that they are not part of the establishment, and if given a choice would like to be. George Lang is the front runner, the clear establishment figure in this election for senate so any shots that they can take at that formidable wall they consider a success. Lee Wong has very little shot at winning this election but his history with George Lang goes way back to over a decade so he and Candice hope to peel away enough votes between them to bring down not only an establishment candidate, but to bring harm to the GOP itself. However, their placement on the outside as opposed to the inside were results of their own decisions. They chose to be where they are in life, and now they find themselves looking in from the outside where politics is clearly a collaborative sport. You must be able to build teams, not just vote up or down. You must live within the rules you vote on; you can’t just do whatever you want and not give the mic to the next person when your time limit is up. Of course Crazy Candice received an applause for her actions, just as a nude streaker gets cheers at a ball game for breaking the rules, stripping off all their clothes, jumping the fence and running around for as long as they can until they are captured by security. That was essentially what Keller did at the debate as George, who was clearly playing by the rules, was clearly at a disadvantage within that audience to the spectacle.

You can’t call yourself good if you can’t be successful within the ground rules of the game, and in a debate where people are making decisions about you based on your skills to make rules and follow the rules, when you can’t follow the simple format you are announcing to the world that you will do what you want when you want no matter what it costs. It might look like a little thing to just a casual observer but Candice Keller and Lee Wong are both on the outside clapping for the downfall of the establishment because they have not shown themselves skilled at being politicians within the rules of the game, so they want to bring the game down because they can’t be successful within the established rules. Its also healthy to challenge the rules but that’s not what Candice was doing, it was in breaking the rules that she hopes to appeal to voters who just want to bring down the established politics of our times, and this is a person who wants to go to Columbus to make rules. The problem is obvious and watching that clip, you can see the normally mild mannered Ding Dong Lee Wong show his true colors by gesturing to Candice’s disrespect for the format structure and attack at that wall which divides insiders from outsiders with the same enthusiasm as an ANTIFA anarchist.

George Lang has been very successful at following the rules and creating them. All he could really do even under pressure was sit there and listen to Keller go on and on because she was obviously outside the format of the event which he wasn’t willing to follow. He could have broke a whole bunch of rules and taken action against her to shut her up, but Candice knew that as the established candidate to beat, George had everything to lose, while she had nothing, so it was no skin off her back to go on some radical rampage using her pro-life work as a mask of civility to justify her breaking of the rules that evening. If George had done the same, he would have shown himself to be as desperate as Lee and Candice were, so he sat there and took it the best he could even though it was wrong at so many levels. He held his composure well and people saw what was going on and that was why the event was a good one. Pressure certainly showed the good from the bad and voters had a clear view of who could live within the rules and who could be trusted to make new ones. But more than that, the reason that Candice Keller is being thought of as crazy is becoming clear for people. People may clap and cheer at the streaker showing their rear, but in the minds of everyone, they think they are crazy. Everyone who has to step outside the rules of society to make their point will be thought in this way, and that is particularly destructive to those running for an office that actually makes rules.

Rich Hoffman[image error]

Crazy Candice Keller Debates George Lang: A mask of righteousness to hide sheer incompetence

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What a cool ad. #politics #gop #maga

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on Mar 3, 2020 at 6:48pm PST

I had gone to the Candidate Forum for the West Chester Tea Party at a nice little church in West Chester hoping to get a chance to talk to Candice Keller and to convince her to get behind George Lang to salvage her political career. Instead what I found there was a bitter woman afraid of the world, claiming the opposite, which is quite evident during her closing statements at that debate shown below. I know that George Lang, her rival for the senate run for the 4th District had been trying to keep it clean, but Candice and her followers would not stop with the negative punches on their Facebook page and on that same date Friends of George Lang decided to punch back, hard with a mailer depicting Candice Keller in what would be confirmed at that debate, as a crazy, terrified, conspiracy theorist who believes that the world is out to get her and to blame everyone else for the many bridges that she had burnt. George Lang tried to play it straight with her, even during his closing comments for the night, but anybody with half a brain could see that George was all that Candice could think about, and even deeper than that, had psychologically become her pin cushion for all the mistakes she had made which was now culminating in a short lived career as a 53rd House of Representative member at the Ohio Statehouse.

The truth of the matter was that Candice Keller had caught a fellow Republican sleeping when she won the 53rd District as a Tea Party type and she was on her way to the Statehouse to legislate. She believed in conservative ideas, however her ability to practice team building and really a true understanding of what a government representative is supposed to be doing was anchored to a kind of radicalism that might sound logical to church goers on Sunday, but were not connected to reality all the other days of the week upon a more general audience, and by the time she arrived on that stage just outside of Mason, Ohio as a candidate for the 4th District, she knew of no other way to get there but to burn down the Republican Party to hide all her missteps along the way. After hearing her talk for and hour and a half I didn’t want her endorsement of George Lang any longer to save her career. I just wanted to never see her again because she’s that kind of person, a revolting specimen who blames everyone but herself for problems that she created.

Even during that clip shown above, her son was sitting in the front row of the audience mouthing intimidating gestures to George as he was talking on the stage. You can see George responding to the kid in defense, trying to keep it as light as possible. But it took me by surprise. After the debate I talked to Todd Hall, the Chairman of the Republican Party because during the debate Candice had called out to him from the stage as if to paint a target on him for the other members of the audience. Then at the end during her closing statements she indicated that she wasn’t afraid of the Republican Party or Sheriff Jones—which clearly established herself not as a Republican but a fringe radical that she had painted herself into being. That was what I was hoping to help her fix upon going, but it was quite clear that too much damage had already occurred, and she was too far gone. What Todd told me was that his phone was full of intimidating text messages from Candice Keller herself. The case was pathetic to people who know better, he certainly wasn’t afraid of her coming to try to beat him up, but she certainly meant to imply that if she could, she would because things had not gone the way she had hoped they would as she entered the Senate race. She got caught saying some bad things that forced the Republican Party to distance themselves and she didn’t give anybody time to recover, she just kept piling on until she alienated everyone. Then she sought to bring George Lang down to cover her own indiscretions. So yes, George Lang has every right in the world to fight back, and I think we all would expect him to.

Even more than that, many people whom I spoke with wanted escorts to their cars because they were concerned that Candice’s son might assault them in the parking lot outside the church. I offered to help make sure they could get to their cars safely, but why would they even think such a thing? That is not how you get elected into a high office, you can’t punch and scratch your way into a victory and try to intimidate everyone in your way. That might work for some small election, but not for a big district like the 4th. Sure, sometimes you must fight, but only when everything else falls apart. Its obvious that Candice and her supporters think fight first then burn everything to the ground second, then hope something works out last. The biggest bully in that room that night was certainly Candice Keller who had pushed and pulled everyone around her to suit her own ambitions and to hide it from the world, as she attempted to put that mask on everyone around her, and in this instance, it was George Lang because he was running against her for that senate seat. And if he didn’t like it, her son was in the front row letting George know he was watching him.

Of course, after the debate, things were pretty normal. Everyone broke off into their own circles of influence and there wasn’t any conflict. But that so many people were concerned about it says a lot about how Candice Keller has presented herself to those outside her circle. She was thought of as a bully and not in the good way, certainly not as a freedom fighter for the people in the Statehouse, but an uncooperative stone thrower who refused to hear anything from anybody who did not agree with her and if they didn’t, then they were the spawns of Satan and agents of evil from the armies of Hell. And just a note, most people don’t want to deal with people who think that way—they come across as crazy. And in the case of Candice, if you follow how she handled her House seat from beginning to end each year that she held that seat she has dug herself into a deeper and deeper hole since 2016. By the end of it just four years later not only the Republican Party of Butler County but the Ohio Republican Party didn’t want to deal with her, and that isn’t good.

People who screw up in life usually blame others for their problems, in the case of Candice Keller, it’s the establishment. Candice blew the chance to help the establishment get better so of course all she can think to do is rip it down so there is no reminder of her failure. Its easy to blame the establishment and to attack it. I do it all the time, but in doing so, we must have solutions. You can’t just destroy; at some point you have to build something. I’ve known George Lang, and good people like Mark Welch, Ann Becker and Todd Hall for a very long time and I know them to be good people who want to do good things. Good is a relative term of course depending on belief systems and all types of considerations, but good from the perspective of understanding. The measure is whether or not people can buy into that understanding of good and that’s what elections are for. What makes Candice Keller crazy is that she insists quite the opposite, that anybody who doesn’t agree with her is a devil or part of the conspiratorial establishment and she uses those designations to hide her own lack of skill in helping the establishment solve problems with truth, justice and the American way. And that is why she has lost all support around her and is headed toward another embarrassing moment in this upcoming election, for which she and her family will only have themselves to blame.

Candice said it all during her closing at the debate on March 3rd, 2020 when she spent the whole time essentially talking about George Lang and nothing about herself other than showing how different she is from him. Gas as of this date is $1.95 a gallon and knowing that was the path, DeWine wanted a gas tax which the legislature negotiated down to pay for things as we go. DeWine thought it was responsible, people like George kept him in check and kept the door open to work with the governor on gun legislation that is pro Second Amendment. All Candice did was say no. The energy deal she went on and on about was a tie to greenie weenie tech that would have went into place if the support was not voted on to contribute to financial health. George’s vote to support was to help a business struggling against a lot of forces that wanted to bring in Obama era energy policies that had set that business up to fail. All Candice said to the matter was no. As I have pointed out, firefighters belong to huge international trade unions and have funds that need to be managed, which Keller completely ignored. According to her, just because firefighters are willing to run into a fire while the rest of us run out, we should just pay them infinite amounts of money. That’s not a very conservative position at all. But more than that, Candice showed in her closing that she can bitch and show herself a victim to bullies when as it turns out, the only bully in the room was her and her campaign. And as to the things she has said about George Lang before that mailer ever went out, I know they are lies because I know George, for a long time. And she stood in a church and defended those lies with great conviction, and that makes me even question not just her sanity, but her true belief in an almighty God. After that debate, I question both.

Candice wasn’t alone, watching the video notice how Ding Dong Lee Wong sitting next to George was clapping with Candice in her closing. The takeaway is that these are people who are on the outside of politics looking in, trying to appeal to Trump supporting Tea Partiers, but under pressure and emotion revealed who they really were. And in a political system where being a Republican means something, both of those candidates were clapping that Candice was rebelling against the GOP. So, what is their option—anarchy? To become future Democrats? Or to stay as independents? That simple gesture by Crazy Candice and Ding Dong Wong states precisely why the only candidate to vote for is George Lang for more reasons than we can name, but for the one that matters most, because the other options are either crazy, dangerous, or just plain stupid. And those are not traits that belong in our Ohio Senate.

Rich Hoffman[image error]

Yes, Videogames like Call of Duty can Inspire Violance: But they are wonderful to play and a big part of our future

As we watch the results that will shape up the 2020 presidential race from the Democrat perspective it’s a good time to talk about gun control and the latest Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare. I recently bought the game which came out last November, which I didn’t have time for then due to other projects and a much-needed long vacation. But over the winter months and with one of my grandsons showing an interest in the game I went ahead and bought it so I could learn what all the fuss was about. I’m not new to Call of Duty, in fact my particular PlayStation 4 was a Call of Duty: Black Ops bundle so I’m familiar with the franchise and the game play. But WOW, what a cool game and for anybody who is worried about gun control fanatics taking over and outlawing guns, I think quite the opposite will be happening. For a society that is penalizing children for every time a kid pretends to make a gun with their finger, or with a comb and gets detention during recess, these games are the exact opposite. Kids after playing games like Modern Warfare and Fortnite are much more likely to grow up to be supportive of guns, not less so. After playing Modern Warfare online for a few weekends now I have to say, it’s a lot of fun, and no wonder so many people enjoy those games. But there will be a political impact that must be navigated.

I love violent video games, just as I was as a kid, I would play war with anybody with two legs and was willing. The primordial nature of it is essential to the human experience. But make no mistake about it, I have no doubt that video games can inspire violent behavior, especially among the mentally ill or perpetually hopeless. I can easily see young people, or old people wanting to mimic the killing sprees on a game like Modern Warfare in real life because the experiences in the game are so lifelike. Yet, I am not one who thinks that there should be additional regulations on the video game industry, quite the opposite. I want to be able to play games like Modern Warfare and play shoot people at all hours of the night and day in any amounts that I desire, and I want video game companies to be freer to provide even more content. However, saying that, there is a greater need today for an adult population to coach young people on real firearm handling and to develop the healthy respect that is needed when using them to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

The promotion of guns in Modern Warfare even down to modifying each weapon with a gunsmith is intense and is a great way for people to learn more about guns. I would say that for an entry point into the shooting sports, a game like Modern Warfare has tremendous potential to expand gun rights as people are more familiar with guns than ever before. When I was young, we had BB gun wars where we’d try to shoot at each other. We also would throw dirt clots out of the garden because they exploded in a cloud of dust upon impact. At every break in school we had battles with each other on the playground and up and down the hallways. Its something humans need to do with one another like kittens play fighting with each other harmlessly, but to build up the muscle memory of action when needed for some future time when it might matter to defend their families from harm. But it was never so easy than to just turn on a video game console and go into a battle like that with players all around the world on a whim and engage in such an activity without any fear at all of being hurt. This is brand new territory relatively speaking, and it is building in our society whether or not the political forces of government like it or not, a real love for firearms that goes far beyond anything that I experienced as a young person.

I would go as far to say that I found my experiences online with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare heavenlike, it is some of the best fun I can say I’ve experienced in a long time and I can’t believe I’m so late to the party. Call of Duty has been around for a while, but I have been way too busy to play in that world because I thought of it as only being for young people. But it was through my grandson that I have been learning about Fortnite and now Call of Duty in a serious way and I get the fun. I would say I’m a bit more savvy about these kinds of video game things than other people my age, but even for me, its like a whole world that has been out there that I didn’t have any knowledge of. And those people are all potential voters and they will be interested in learning to shoot for real because of their video game experiences, and it is up to those of us who support Second Amendment activities to help guide them through the experience, safely. Yet there is no question about it, these modern video game players love guns and playing around with them, it won’t take much to gain their support for a society that relishes the Second Amendment.

With all the concern that American society might slide into a socialist state, or even embrace communism by those same young people, my thoughts on the matter is that they are confused. Their educations have taught them to embrace socialism and from their point of view, if they have free health care, free college tuition, free housing—free, free, free from government, they would have more time to do something they really enjoy, like play Call of Duty. But in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, or even Fortnite, the rewards for a job well done come fast and often and are the real incentive to continue playing. I found it personally very rewarding to go on a kill streak where gold rewards pop up on the screen with great dramatic effect. To get those rewards it really encourages you to keep playing and is deeply satisfying and a people responding to those neurological conditions are not going to embrace Karl Marx. Those two things just don’t go together. However, some deranged lunatic smoking way too much pot, or any at all, might want to get those same responses in real life while shooting real people, and once they have done so as a mass shooter are depressed that the thrill wasn’t nearly so rewarding and the consequences were life ending. There is a lot going on in our modern society and much of that is quite evident in the new Call of Duty game Modern Warfare. I’m a big fan now and will likely spend some time and effort on that fast-moving video game, because it’s cool, and relatively cheap when compared to shooting in real life. And for anybody who even likes guns a little bit, I can’t think of a better way to spend your free time than in playing those types of games.

Rich Hoffman[image error]

The Evolving Case of Giants in Ohio from Across the World: History as we know is changing forever

I’m not going to spend much time talking about it because I’m still negotiating to get a very rare book about lost races of people who have dropped out of our historic record, but I spent all weekend trying to get it. The book is considered a rare print which is something I feel a lot of passion about, and it was written during the 1800s before what I call the purge occurred. However, I can’t help but see some similarities to modern politics that are coming out of a movement that the rest of the world isn’t ready for. Its very much the same problem where establishment control over information is falling apart in this early new century where personal ambitions and hobbies are doing a better job than the traditional college institutions have, and that is what I would call the greatest mystery the world has been covering up for thousands of years, and its unraveling in front of our faces as we speak, which is why I was working so hard to secure that mysterious book all weekend long going from obscure brick and mortar bookstore to bookstore hidden in obscurity behind the chaos of a media culture that is extensive, and very noisy, most of the time quite on purpose.

I cover these issues from time to time as kind of a fun fill in to the politic discussions that normally are a majority of my work, but to me its all the same problem. Since I live in Southern Ohio I have grown up with an understanding about the mound builders that were traditionally associated with Indians and are tightly controlled by the government regarding research into who the mound builders were and why they built these things. Occasionally I have written very popular articles on the nature of the giant skeletons that were found coming out of these mounds which over time has opened up my mind to the obvious cover-up that has occurred, which the more I learn, has made me more and more angry. When we talk about the government getting involved in weaponizing the IRS or the FBI for political moves that benefit a more centralized government we find the same thing happening in the fields of the sciences. For instance, universities who do research into global warming find grants come easily to them from the government whereas those who are doing more independent research do not get money, so the university system has built their business model around liberalism for all those reasons, and it certainly does skew what research happens in the pursuit of truth and leaves much to be desired toward real inquiry.

However, we live in a time where information has been decentralized and people can talk and find each other much easier than in the past, making networking through the university system much less applicable to the endeavors of science. And more than ever, books published before the great purge of university institutionalism that started to really become a problem around 1915 have lost their power making it very important to go back to times before it and read what people were saying about archaeology and anthropology before money from the government became such a corrosive issue. And specifically, to that topic is the problem of who we are as a human species and what our true history is. I started asking those questions about 10 years ago when I ran across a map at the Mothman Festival in West Virginia that indicated in Ohio the burial locations of several giants, and I have written about them on occasion not as a conspiracy, but as an evolving topic. For instance, I know as I can see it from my front porch the very large Middletown Mound that used to be a near twin to the Miamisburg Mound just up the Great Miami River that within it are likely the skeletons of a giant race of people who lived in North America well before what we call the Indians ever inhabited the region. The evidence collected over the last ten years by many independent journalists has blown the lid off the case and we are in new territory that goes well beyond the skepticism of the television show Ancient Aliens. The government knows full well what’s in those mounds in Ohio, but it is using rules and regulations to hide the contents from society in general and for good reasons of their own. They were part of the purge and they want to keep the secrets that way for as long as possible. But like we see in politics where Donald Trump has become a great president by being unconventional, the establishment wants to maintain their power over history for as long as they can.

I wouldn’t say I have been a maniac about the topic, but I have gone around Ohio studying the various mounds and wondering if history was wrong about the makers and I have chronicled that journey on this blog site occasionally with some speculative analysis. But it was while traveling in England and visiting Stonehenge and the sites around the area where I become very convinced that it was the same people who were making monuments in the Ohio Valley, near my home, which meant that there was transatlantic diffusion by boat over three thousand years ago, well before the Vikings, well before even the Phoenicians, and certainly well before Christopher Columbus and they had an empire in place that extended all the way down to South America well before there were ever Mayans, Aztecs, and Incan people. To admit such a thing would have dire consequences to many forces who have justified their leadership to thousands of years of human civilization and to reveal that we have been living in another kind of Dark Ages, where information was controlled first by the Roman Empire, then by the Church which replaced it as a power in Europe, then by a government using secret societies to steer people’s minds away from the evidence until this present time where full disclosure is inevitable because of the free nature of our country in America and the desire to know things that have been obvious.

The more I have learned the angrier I have become due to the obvious misleading that has been going on for such a long time. I think the most important aspect of the wild fires in Brazil has been the revelation of the many lost cultures that were once established along the Amazon and we are not talking about primitive people but the same type of advanced culture that came straight out of Mesopotamia and migrated by ship across both oceans and settled in the Americas to launch just as complex cities states that have been now listed among the lost races of mankind, which is why I spent the weekend looking for that old book. I want to read it for myself and to start at that point at untangling the web of deceit that is being hidden behind the Native American façade that has paralyzed proper research in America through political correctness and a misguided assumption from the start. I will have a lot more on this in the future, but for the readers here I would direct their attention to the work of a guy who started sending me little messages almost a decade ago when I first published a list of giant skeleton locations, which surprised me when I learned about it. But since, Fritz Zimmerman has published several books on the subject and that has ignited L.A. Marzulli to start making films of their investigations and the evidence is quite overwhelming. I would suggest that it is the biggest cover-up of our civilization, and its something that deserves to be exposed because once it is well understood, it will change everything we know about history and our place within it.

Rich Hoffman[image error]

All The Money in the World: Bloomberg just wasn’t likeable, yet nobody dared to tell him that who wanted his cash

President Trump’s CPAC speech was the best thing to come out of the Saturday primary votes where Joe Biden won in South Carolina, which he should have. South Carolina is a state where even the liberals are more moderate along the political spectrum than in other places in the country. The people there were certainly not going to vote for a socialist in Bernie Sanders. And Sanders said the right things after he finished in a distant 2nd place, nobody wins all the states. Even Trump lost a few states to his rivals in 2016, but Super Tuesday likely won’t see much of a change in the dynamics. Sanders is going to have a good day; Biden is an alternative to those not ready to admit that the Democrat Party is and always was committed to socialism while everyone else is way behind in the horse race and will remain there. Yet it was Trump’s mimicking of Mini Mike Bloomberg that captured the day as something to note. As Trump nearly got on his knees in front of the CPAC audience to reflect on Bloomberg’s stage presence the statement about spending $700 million to get such bad election results is an important lesson. It takes a lot more than just television adds and media support to win elections, you have to have a message people can relate with, and Bloomberg just doesn’t have it, and all the money in the world can’t buy it.

It is very interesting that entering Super Tuesday that the Bloomberg campaign even with all their money to spend—way more than the other candidates—are in such denial as to their real position. Michael Bloomberg just isn’t likeable. He comes across as an intrusive micromanager trying to scam his way under the skirt of some poor woman trying to fend off the sexual advances of a creepy old man. And his attitude was framed well by his campaign when they said that Bloomberg is the only candidate to have campaigned in all the upcoming Super Tuesday states because of his wall to wall coverage of ad buys. Yet all he has managed to do is buy roughly 15% of the vote in all those states and is trending backwards in many of the Super Tuesday targets which means that by the end of the upcoming week, he will join Tom Steyer in being forced to leave the presidential race. The Democrats are going to end up choosing either the communist Bernie Sanders or the socialist/progressive Joe Biden who has attached to him massive corruption that will be exposed in any presidential run. Nobody else is even close to those two which is all the reason in the world that Democrats want there to be something to distract the world from their misery, such as the coronavirus.

This is essentially the problem that Hillary Clinton had where she thought in 2016 that she was going to win without doing all the work just because she had more money in her war chest to buy ads and get her name into the minds of people. The media of course is willing to take a candidate’s money, and that money might buy some support among commentators, but it can’t buy a message. And it can’t buy likeability. We all remember when Hillary Clinton was caught being propped up from passing out at that 9/11 ceremony where her team couldn’t hide her in a van fast enough. The truth of that day was that Clinton wasn’t prepared for a fight with someone with boundless energy like Donald Trump and ultimately the Democrats fear that the most in Joe Biden, that even if he were to win, there would be no way he could keep up with Trump and not come out sounding like a loser. So in some ways they were hoping that Bloomberg would get some traction. They went out and got some celebrity endorsements like Clint Eastwood and others who would say nice things about Bloomberg but just as with Hillary Clinton, it had been shown that nobody really cares what celebrities think about anything. They get paid to say what others think and that has not helped Bloomberg in the slightest. It didn’t help the flat campaign of Hillary Clinton and the political landscape is even less sympathetic now.

It’s a lesson for everyone that money can buy consultants, they can buy kind statements from the media whether its from actors or news commentators, but money can’t make anybody likeable. And Michael Bloomberg just isn’t likeable. His short stature is just part of it, but he’s short in all the worst ways, not just in height, but in his likeability. When Trump poked fun at how short Bloomberg was, it wasn’t just that the media billionaire who could barely see over the podium was physically small, but his thinking is and people can see it. They see him as petty, and overly authoritarian, and nobody wants another boss in life telling them what kind of soft drinks they can have, or where they are going to get their healthcare. People just aren’t that stupid and Bloomberg with all his money couldn’t figure that out, which is mystifying to an establishment that have built all their reputations on that flimsy premise.

And that will be the case when these billionaire candidates do drop out and get behind whatever candidate ends up getting the Democrat nomination. Their money won’t matter because the ads don’t matter anymore in this world where social media has equalized the election process. Money is important as a kind of pre-vote leading up to an election if a candidate can show support from a donor base, but it doesn’t do much to change the opinions of voters in a world that can get plenty of information about people outside of the official channels of mainstream media. Newspapers do not have the power they once did, and television news is so crowded with more interesting content that ad buys really don’t change minds, they just remind people of the name recognition once they are there on voting day to pull the lever for someone. Money can’t buy likeability, it can just get the name out, but if that name is attached to unpleasant thoughts, it can work against a candidate.

That is why Mini Mike Bloomberg will soon be on the way out blowing half of a billion dollars on nothing, and he will likely spend half that amount on the eventual Democrat winner trying to help them beat Trump in the November election purely out of spite. But it won’t matter because while the media won’t be honest with them and tell them how little their money really matters; I’ll be happy to. There is just too much competition out there for news. If a candidate is a phony, or a communist, people are going to find out about it, all the fancy ads won’t help at all. In a time where opinion was much more easily shaped, ads may have worked, but not in this day where media is consumed voraciously and in large doses. There just isn’t a way for an unlikable candidate to come across better by buying likeability. That isn’t for sale and in a free society with an open press, which includes all the Twitter feeds, blogs, and independent videos that are out there screaming for attention, all the money in the world can’t change an unlikeable person into a bastion of sentiment. And if that lesson hasn’t already been learned, it will be before 2020 is over, and Trump will still be the president.

Rich Hoffman[image error]

The Coronavirus and the Road Runner: An overplayed media is frustrated that the stock market hasn’t crashed yet

You could almost hear it in their voices at CNBC as the Dow closed Friday at only -357 points down. They were hoping for another day where the Dow lost over a 1000 points as the previous days had been. Media outlets already had the reports ready to talk about the biggest stock market losses ever as if it pointed to signs that the Trump economy was going to slow and a wonderful recession was in the making which might finally stop the president during an election year. But the Dow rallied a bit to close at less of a loss going into the weekend, and that didn’t sit well with the naysayers. They had been weaponizing the coronavirus as their most recent attack on Trump’s optimistic handling of American affairs, and last ditch effort to harm him in some way for the election in November but just like the Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, the slight turn of the Dow indicated what the rest of us already knew, that this one will blow up in their faces too.

As I said the other day, this coronavirus issue is a hoax designed to cover up the bad economic data from China, and it has spread across the world by market managers who would like to see Trump gone, hoping to incite panic and harm to the American economy. The virus no doubt is real, but the effects have been greatly blown up by the same media that tried to make the “golden showers” story stick, the general Russian hoax, the impeachment scandal and a few years of the Mueller report. In the same way that the FBI had a plan B in case Trump was elected, market investors were trying to incite panic on purpose as to the strength of the virus in hopes to remove a president from office, once again. But the virus is a virus, and it does look big if you only look at the numbers of people affected. However, placed against the percentages of the world population we are talking about percentages near 0%. Most of us have a better chance of being hit by a car, or being hit by a meteor shooting in from space than in being struck by the coronavirus, and if we were by some chance, we certainly wouldn’t die from it. Its always good to be cautious and to take these things seriously, but shutting down the world over it is a bit much and says a lot about our panic driven society.

Coronavirus Hysteria: Art Laffer and @wleeimf agree the U.S. markets are healthy and there are no real problems with the economy under @POTUS. #MAGA #AmericaFirst #Dobbs pic.twitter.com/qjnxNc3adM

— Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) February 29, 2020

But I would offer again, this is the time to buy stocks if you are so inclined. It may be a good idea to see where things bottom out, but the name of the game is to buy low and sell high. I think the true value of the Dow will hit over 30,000 by the summer so anything purchased in this upcoming week could lead to massive gains if you are fortunate enough to invest enough money to see it really make an impact. There have been few times in history where the potential gains were so obvious and the bets less risky than in buying stocks at a time when political pressure purely has been the driver behind massive selloffs. We’re not talking about market corrections; we are talking about a radicalized agenda trying to set off a chain reaction to stop a thriving economy. The failure of that effort is what will cause the Dow to bounce back once people realize that this coronavirus is just a ruse, and really isn’t nearly as dangerous as everyone has made it sound. That makes it a safe bet to pour millions back into the Dow to really get a ROI quickly. After all, there are trillions of dollars on the table to be gained quickly for those bold and so inclined.

You are! https://t.co/YNW8QQnRC6

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) February 28, 2020

The real victim here is that so many people have gone out on the limb to try and spread this panic about the coronavirus that it will be remembered as a crying wolf too many times scenario. People believe this stuff because they have some trust remaining in the system of reporters and officials who are out there reporting on the matter. But once everyone comes to the same conclusion that I have, which they will, they won’t believe in the wolf the next time, and will ignore whatever is said entirely. When there is real danger, people will be much less inclined to trust the sources, and that is the real cost of the coronavirus tragedy. The global media has overplayed their hand in a massive way and ultimately let down their audiences.

Its not all a massive conspiracy to remove Trump from office however. I have been a radio show host and understand how difficult it is to fill an hour with just your voice. I don’t have a problem doing it, but I can see how others would be challenged day in and day out. For people in the media business something like the coronavirus is like a snow day for kids in school, or an easy day in the office, the topic tells its own story once potential death could be the result. That makes those time slots much easier to fill with voice and action while on camera, so the media loves coronavirus types of stories that pumps up their ratings without having to do much research for that day’s material. And that is very much part of the puzzle, once a story like coronavirus is out there, every media outlet knows they need to cover it with wall to wall attention because if a competitor beats them to it, then they will look bad. And most of the producers who work these cable shows and newspapers aren’t smart enough to see through the smoke, so it is easier for them to just jump on the panic train and ride it to wherever it goes. The money managers who wanted to hurt Trump know all this of course which is how they were able to inject panic into the story to begin with. All they had to do is start the process, the nature of media did the rest and that is how the fingerprints of the originators get erased from the evidence.

Twitter was interesting to watch during President Trump’s speech in Charleston, South Carolina Friday night, there was real panic from people who hoped that the threat of coronavirus would paralyze Trump to the White House putting out fires that they essentially started to divert him from his focus on the campaign trail. Trump was giving a normal rally speech even as the world was shutting down its schools and banning travel from one country to another. Elizabeth Warren who is trying to run for president, not very well, introduced a plan to divert funds from the border wall construction to fight coronavirus, yet Trump didn’t seem to care. He did his usual thing in spite of all the panic and I couldn’t help but think of a Road Runner cartoon where the Coyote had painted a fake tunnel into the rock wall of a mountain, only to have the Road Runner run into it as if it were real. Panicked and surprised the Coyote tried to do the same knowing that the painting was fake, but that if the Road Runner could do it, so could they. However, the rock was real and the coyote was crushed. Then to make matters worse a truck comes through the painting and runs them over. That is what is happening with the coronavirus and the general news of the stock market. Its all a ruse, and like all the times prior, President Trump will escape like the Road Runner always did, and the Coyote will be mystified as to why he continues to lose time and time again.

So nice! https://t.co/rnhymmWJu6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2020

Rich Hoffman[image error]

Anthony Ferrill: Workplace violance in a Wisconsin brewery demands more people carry guns

Of course, gun laws shouldn’t change in Wisconsin, or anywhere else. Those are not rights given by the state for the sake of the state, they are individual rights to defend themselves in the face of oppression and tyranny, and in all honesty, the employees shot dead at the Molson Coors campus Wednesday of this past week should have been able to carry concealed weapons. There is nothing for anybody to believe that workplace violence won’t continue well into the future, behavioral needs almost guarantee it, and that is what caused the mass shooting at the Wisconsin brewery where the shooter, Anthony Ferrill shot the people he was arguing with dead at a shift change. Things obviously were out of control between all the employees if Ferrill thought that some of his rivals were breaking into his home and messing with his property, and it sounds like the antagonism was going both ways. Likely there was some mental illness playing into the scenario, but what was the employer supposed to do about that, send Ferrill to a mental hospital out of suspicion? So long as people have conflict with one another, justified or not, killings will occur by gun, by knife, or by fist. A full Coke can fresh out of a vending machine can be a deadly weapon in a fight, it’s the desire to fight that is the problem and no law can protect society from the effects. Especially more gun laws. Its quite the opposite need, gun laws need to be looser to keep the world much more balanced.

But it didn’t take long for the Democrat governor of Wisconsin to politicize the tragedy pointing straight to the Republican majority leader standing in the way of gun laws moving through the senate. The continued belief by Democrats and all gun grabbing activists is that tragedies like this brewery shooting would never happen if only they could get rid of all guns everywhere, which of course is impossible. Most of the people at that brewery likely have enough skill to build their own guns and manufacture their own ammunition with mini machine shops set up in their homes. We can’t uninvent guns, but to defend the good Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, gun laws can be made available to give everyone equal access to defend themselves. In short, if Anthony Ferrill wanted to kill some of his co-workers during this long running dispute, it sounded as if he was smart enough to devise a way. If the guns weren’t available on the market, he could build them, or find someone who could. When you are planning a suicide effort, which he obviously was, who cares if its illegal. But what’s missing is that other workers onsite while the shooting was going on should have been able to stop it on the spot. That is where gun legislation needs to go, not the other way around.

The way human behavior works is that people tend to treat each other better when they know that death is only a trigger away. In a workplace protected by layers of human resource rules and regulations there is a lot of room for passive aggressive nonsense in day to day bickering that can add up to an explosion of anxiety at some point. The best thing to do is to discharge those emotions gradually so that they don’t build up. And when everyone knows that everyone else is carrying guns, the conversations are a lot more polite moment to moment. The way to improve behavior is to have a lot less gun free zones.

But politicians like Tom Barrett don’t really care about the victims, only in that the tragedy happened on their watch. What they do care about is making the state more a part of the day to day maintenance of people, and by removing guns from the society, they believe they can have better management control over the population. It’s a fantasy of course, but it is something that most of them think is possible, politicians who lean toward the liberal end of things. So when something happens like this shooting it is published as a mass shooting that should incite more gun control instead of what it really is, a situation of workplace violence that is much more symptomatic of real problems between people and how they interact with each other.

Really to get to the deeper issues of psychology liberals are frustrated that all their rules and regulations have not produced a safer world, and they continue to believe that they are just a rule or two away from the perfect society. The management of the plant where the shooting occurred should have been dealing with the ongoing conflict, but as we all know by now Anthony Ferrill was a man of color who was making claims of racism, true or not. That nearly paralyzes a human resource department from taking action because overcoming that negative is nearly insurmountable, which likely caused this conflict to brew literally out of control until the deaths occurred. All it took was for Ferrill to have one bad day before he just snapped and had a WTF moment and decided to kill himself and others. There are tempers flaring right now in nearly every workplace across the country, fortunately they don’t end the way Anthony Ferrill’s did. Most people reason through it with just a bit of self-preservation giving us all a buffer from the extremes. But this is all very much a behavioral problem and it won’t be solved with more gun laws. Quite the opposite happens, the more laws that create a victimized status in the minds of people like Anthony Ferrill, the more potentially dangerous they become.

But why would more victimization laws make people like Anthony Ferrill more dangerous, more of a potential killer when the intent is fairness? Well, likely below the surface in Anthony Ferrill, which now that he’s dead we’ll never know, but there was likely mental health problems hiding behind his many good deeds, such as helping his elderly neighbor fix things around the house, or in his employer believing that his good work was indicative of a healthy mind. Rather to the professional mind analyzer, such good deeds are often conducted to create barriers to mental neurosis that is a result of many undealt with tragedies haunting the inner thoughts of a victim. When a victimizing social trend such as racism is introduced to the mind of such people, they now have somewhere to hide their true demons and can now point to racist trends to be the mask that protects them from much needed judgment. And when they feel that mask no longer works, they feel exposed emotionally and act on that vulnerability in a negative way. That’s usually what happens when someone snaps, whether death is the result, or someone just quits their job one day, or they divorce a spouse of 30 years and leave everyone high and dry for no apparent reason. These are the problems that simple political laws can’t deal with and are the reasons why gun laws need to be loosened not strengthened. Once a person arrives at that point of desperation, they must know that the other person is just as armed and that they won’t get a chance to be the most powerful person on the planet even if its just for a few seconds. Because ultimately, that is the only thing that really keeps us all safe, the promise of mutual destruction and the negotiation of peace because there’s no other alternative.

Rich Hoffman[image error]

‘Edison’: The biography by Edmund Morris is a fantastic story on the powers of Home Schooling

It doesn’t happen often but when it does, I do a review on great books that I read and one of the best that I’ve read in a while is Edison by Edmund Morris. Sadly, Edmund Morris died in the spring of 2019, just ahead of the publication of one of his great biographies of people who were above and beyond the norm. He is known for his trilogy biography on Teddy Roosevelt which I have adored over the years, and his very controversial book on Ronald Reagan called Dutch. So, it goes without saying that I was looking forward to reading his latest Edison biography with the kind of eagerness that someone might look forward to a new Star Wars movie or a major sporting event. It was something I couldn’t wait to read, and I had an open window to handle the 700 plus page book just after New Years of 2020, and it didn’t disappoint. I read the book a few times just to make sure it was as excellent as I thought it was. Edison, the book, is one of those rare treats where the contents of a great person in Thomas A. Edison matched the wit and wisdom of one of the world’s greatest biographers in carving out an excellent narrative that was bizarrely articulate. I have always loved Edison, but this biography solved a riddle for me that I had been asking about the man all of my life and to unlock it, Morris told the story in reverse.

The book starts with the death of Thomas Edison in 1931 and it actually ends with a baby Edison contemplating space and matter in his first 9 months of life. The purpose of telling the story in reverse which has caused much consternation among critics and the reading public in general was to reveal why Edison was such a passionate inventor working his 20-hour days and sleeping on his work bench most of his life. He was like most people do throughout their lives trying to get back to those wonders of childhood and for him, he never stopped thinking like a child, always inventing and behaving as if answering the questions hidden by nature were the most rewarding thing in the world to do. Morris had to tell the answer of how Edison became who he was by putting the beginning literally at the end so that everything that had been studied throughout Edison’s long life and many thousands of inventions including the lightbulb, the phonograph and extended batteries for use in submarines, were climaxed by a point in his past that could only be articulated in reviewing a life in reverse, the way a dying person may have their life flash before their eyes. Reviewing history in this way took an almost God-like perspective in the context of universal history that was significant and enchanting.

For me it answered a question I have long suspected, and this is common in great thinkers such as Edison, Walt Disney, even great minds of today like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, a little love from a good mother and some independent input from parents in the early phases of a life where other social elements of standardization are removed from a child’s mind, can ignite in a human being great potential. In the case of Edison, he wasn’t made a genius inventor by any school or upper level academic institution which is a point I make often about society in general, but by a mother who worked closely with him to ignite a spectacular man who literally had never been taught to think in a limited fashion. The reason the childhood of Edison was kept to the end of the book was because that was the key to the making of the man to begin with—where he was in his lifetime the most popular man in the world at his death where every world power took a moment to honor him for all that he had done to advance mankind to a new level.

I was even surprised at how much academia was against Thomas Edison through his early years, until he simply outworked his critics and invented so many new things that nobody could even hope to compete with him. I was also surprised to learn that the famous rivalry with Tesla was not so much true but was more a product of a media that wanted to chronical some sort of horse race to sell newspapers. It was remarkably like the way we call Fake News today in covering the Trump administration. Edison did not have much formal schooling, even through grade school, so he had never learned what couldn’t be done, which is a continued plague among most of our fellow human beings. Edison was remarkable because he had never learned not to be.

Even though Edmund Morris the writer was considered, and still is even in his death, one of the great academics of our times by way of writers, his books have this common theme that he has managed to uncover about people of exceptional ability, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. When reading Dutch, which Morris was invited into the White House to study Reagan for that book, you can see through his writing that Morris was almost disappointed in the man because he was not Teddy Roosevelt, but simply an actor who had learned to take on the character of America and play it in the 1980s to unite the country to defeat communism and unleash the power of our capitalist economy. The man himself was not one of these special people and Morris had to invent a narrative character controversially to give himself emotional distance to the subject to get through the project. That certainly wasn’t the case with Edison. It was obvious that after spending thousands of hours studying Edison to even write this book, that Morris loved the man, and for good reason. After finishing that book, I did too.

I was at a bookstore in Disney World holding this book in my hand thinking of buying it, but we were on vacation and I didn’t have the time for it then, so I held off a few weeks longer. But I was thinking of Edison while at Disney Springs where they have a restaurant there dedicated to Thomas Edison that I was very enchanted with. I knew of Edison all the usual things, that he was in fact the founder of General Electric, and that he had done great things for the war efforts. But I didn’t know he was such a good person, not so much with his wives and his kids, but as an individual who really had just never grown up. Even though he was practically deaf and lacked a lot of compassion for others the way that people measure it, he was authentic and did not waste his time looking in the rear-view mirror at anybody. I appreciated that restaurant while visiting Disney Springs, but I think now I have a lot more reverence for it, and deservedly so. Thomas Edison was a great man, not necessarily because of any other reason but because his mother taught him the love of life and the boundless rewards that can come from a thinking mind, and thus, we are all the better for it. Just imagine if our society produced hundreds of Thomas Edison’s every year instead of every other century.

Rich Hoffman

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Rich Hoffman