Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 259

The Myth of American Racism: Why Lebron James is an idiot

 

Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 4, 2018

There is a reason that liberals are so upset about Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie Death of a Nation. Not that I think of it when I see Dinesh, but the last time I checked, he’s not a white guy, yet his movie and books of recent describe exactly why blacks have been used by identity politics as a kind of modern slave for the socialist Democrats as a last hook into the power of manipulation that persisted in the United States essentially up until the election of Donald Trump. Under Trump all the excuses have been removed, black unemployment is at record lows as black pastors gathered at the White House this week to advance black causes and empower individuals to achieve anything they want under the American flag. No president has done more to make all individuals equal than Donald Trump yet people like CNN’s Don Lemon and NBA star LeBron James see the gas leaving their stronghold on the black population and they are rushing at every opportunity to continue the myth that being black in America is a negative thing. Of course, Donald Trump took a shot at Lebron James after this pathetic interview on CNN. The kind of world that Lebron James is talking about doesn’t exist. Racism is an excuse for blacks to not achieve. It’s not real in America. There is no country on earth that has more tolerance between the races than the United States of America and James should know better. But maybe he’s not very smart, after all he did vote for Hillary Clinton. But to use his platform to perpetuate that racism is one of the number one problems in America only speaks to the Democratic platform that Dinesh D’Souza addressed in his recent film—Democrats need blacks to believe in racism and victimization so that they can have a unified political party, and that’s all they essentially care about.

The ”N Word” is an excuse that Democrats use to not perform at life. It was always Democrats who were the racists, who lynched black people and lobbied to make them slaves, which is well told in Dinesh’s new movie. Trump has every right to call Don Lemon and LeBron James “dumb” because they continue to insist that white Republicans are their enemy and are the cause of all racism in the world when in fact it was and always has been their own political party of Democrats that have advocated racism and victimization as a reason to reach continuously for bigger and bigger government to seek protection from those made up bandits that are always after them. LeBron in his interview with CNN’s Lemon used skin color as an excuse to perpetuate victimhood as a political platform, and they do it by essentially saying that all white people can never know what its like to be black, so we are never supposed to criticize them or question them in any way. And sports are supposed to be left alone to continue advancing progressive ideas to our nation’s children without any kind of debate, and when it does occur these Democrats cry racism in an attempt to shut down the conversation so that the truth can never be found. That truth is shown in blistering detail in the movie Death of a Nation.

It was never Donald Trump and the Republicans who were racist. I’m certainly not racist, and I’m as Republican as Republicans get. I can say that I have never in my life done a racist thing. I’ve probably in fact been close friends with people of color than I have of whites, not out of any kind of identity politics but only because I had more in common with the hard workers and striving intellects of those trying to make the most out of America as opposed to the mailbox money people who fill out job applications only to fulfil a government criterion to get money from a welfare check because they are too lazy to work. Some of the best people who I have known over the years are people like Dinesh D’Souza, who came to America and used the freedom of our Constitution to do great things in life.

LeBron James should be grateful to the United States, he gets paid a lot of money to throw a ball in a hoop. He’s obviously not very smart otherwise he would know that it has been his party of Democrats that still to this very day seek to hold down the black population through victimization. That’s why some blacks who want to be the leaders of modern black victimhood were so mad that Donald Trump held a meeting of black pastors at the White House, because it undermines the myth that the president is a racist that wants to hold down minority groups. It is the Democrats that are trying to do that, including Lebron James. By using his platform to declare that racism is alive and well, and that it is coming from Republicans is to lie to millions of children who look up to him for the pure political purpose of trying to prop up Democrats as the answer to the “N Word.” But it has only been them who have used that word to hold blacks down socially and intellectually.

The Nazis were socialists, not Republicans. Why is Lebron James and Don Lemon considered dumb by the president, because they either don’t know that, or they do know it yet they are trying to sell the “N Word” victimization anyway as a way to corral more dumb people into their Democratic party. Democrats are the political party that Adolf Hitler followed to create his own Third Reich. Hitler copied his party off of Woodrow Wilson, and how Franklin Roosevelt ran America as president. Of course, film critics of Death of a Nation were aghast to learn these things in the new Dinesh movie and they let everyone know it in their film reviews. But that was the truth, and LeBron James is trying to corral more blacks into the party of politics that committed all these crimes to begin with, and that is dumb. We all know he didn’t take school too seriously, and that he used his natural talents to throw a basketball into a net as a platform to success. But if he’s going to open his mouth and talk politics and try to use his celebrity to advance a party over another one, then he should know his history. But he doesn’t, and it’s obvious.

Generally, most people who supported Hillary Clinton and the continued Democratic Party are lazy intellectually, and they don’t want to know or admit that it was Democrats who were always the racists and have tried to separate that truth by shoving their history onto Republicans who ironically were responsible for freeing the slaves and giving blacks equal rights. Donald Trump in the modern age is doing just as Lincoln has done and Teddy Roosevelt did in his first term, he is treating blacks as equals and giving them a shot at the American dream, acquired through their ambitions, not a mailbox check. The only people guilty of using the “N Word” are Democrats trying to put a different kind of chain on the black population, not one of literal chains but intellectual ones. And more often than not, those are the worst kind.

Rich Hoffman

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What is Fake News, and Why its Bad: The lesson to learn from Urban Meyer and Ohio State

I’ll be happy to answer the question that Jim Acosta from CNN asked Sarah Sanders and Ivanka Trump, as to whether or not the media was the enemy within the United States, as he asked at the daily briefing this past week at the White House. Several years ago on a radio show I discussed in great detail the plans that the KGB had in 1947 through 1959 to infiltrate American society with communist propaganda and take over our education, media and entertainment enterprises. Largely we are now seeing the result of that effort—by not only Russia, but every communist leaning nation in the world. Of course, not everyone fell for it, but most did, which was consistent with Donald Trump’s answer on the matter. Fake news therefore is identified as the enemy because they tend to attempt to shape news stories to fit a political agenda rather than just reporting the facts of the matter. When a news organization is concerned with shaping the news to fit an agenda, they could and should be considered fake.

What Jim Acosta was doing in putting Sarah Sanders on the spot in front of everyone watching that news conference was a communist form of consensus building. I’ve covered that many times before as well from school board meetings to local trustee meetings, there are methods of facilitating public opinion in a democracy to urge weak people to follow a majority opinion and that was exactly what Acosta was attempting to do. By attempting to trick her into saying that the news present wasn’t the enemy, she would also be endorsing the CNN was not guilty of the type of propaganda news that they were actually engaging in. So even by advancing that question, Jim Acosta was attempting to shape the news in a fake way.

Of course, everyone in the news is not dirty, and a free press is vitally important in a free society. But much of the time these days, a news and opinion site like this one has more validity toward the news than the corporate media because much like the Koch Brothers who were previously thought to be very Republican corporate media often has complicated ownership overseas or their boards of directors are invested in the globalist aims of modern politics which was started a long time ago with the desire of communism to spread to all corners of the world. People don’t always know why they think the things they do. The same corporate owners may attend an NFL game and be brought to great emotion during the National Anthem and consider themselves very patriotic. Yet they tend to support shared wealth across the world propping up communist and socialist regimes all in the name of a unified world under collectivists values. They never of course see themselves as the enemy, just as they don’t see their media outlets as part of the problem. But nevertheless, that is precisely what they are. They put foreign interests over the interests of domestic America and within that decision is the mess of mixed economies, mixed ideologies, and cultural indifference which is then shaped by Fake News.

Let’s take the Urban Meyer story from Ohio State where the wife of his wide receiver’s coach was allegedly abused by her husband. The wife said something about the incident to Urban Meyer’s wife and everyone is to assume that the wife would then talk to the coach about it forcing him to report the incident. Because he didn’t report the incident he has now been put on leave from the University while an investigation is conducted, so the story as reported is that Urban Meyer has been suspended for some cover-up at Ohio State, which happens to be going on while one of the top college football programs in the country is in their pre-season. The Fake News of the story is to of course advance the #ME TOO movement, which is rooted in progressive politics. It is also to advance the communist notion of reporting to the “state” everything that goes on, and that no single individual is more powerful than the all mighty state. The real news is that Urban Meyer is one of the top football coaches in the country for a very rich university and that in all likelihood even if his wife told him about the abused woman’s story he might not have heard it because he was busy watching 90 hours a week of tape on the upcoming season’s rivals to prepare game plans to. Most people don’t want to get involved in other people’s business, so they tune out things to give privacy to their friends, neighbors and employees. But the implication here is that Urban Meyer had an obligation to rat out his direct employee based on what a couple of wives said to each other and because he didn’t he and the football program at the university are in big trouble. The story is no longer about minding your own business and letting people be people, it’s about reporting to the “state” anything that it might care to know.

The Ohio State story happened because the university has been sucked into the type of progressive politics that Jim Acosta was trying to pin down on Sarah Sanders. A failure to push back against the attempt leaves even giant, wealthy institutions like Ohio State groveling to the press so not to have negative stories that might have an impact on enrollment. The Trump administration understands better than other presidential occupants of the White House what the game is. Lucky for us Trump, who is a master at branding, was able to come up with a term to describe it, Fake News. Calling these kinds of media outlets “fake” pulls away the mask of their real intentions as propaganda arms for progressive politics. That of course is the new name for global communism, which is why there are so many stories about how great and wonderful the Chinese are these days, and why a trade war would be so devastating. It’s not that a trade war will be bad for the United States, but it is terrible for communist China. You might have noticed that even the almighty company of Google had to create a new search engine that complied with the “state” regulations of China’s censors. China for many years has been buying up investments in the United States that contribute to the corporate opinion in their favor, but ultimately, they are a communist country seeking to hide their intentions behind masks given to them by the mainstream media.

Fake News is the news that attempts to shape a story toward a political objective. Real news is that which takes a story to its logical conclusion regardless of who is exposed in the process. The Fake News that is out every day to attack Donald Trump has an agenda to destroy his administration to preserve the progressive gains made in the past, so every story they produce is created to shape the opinion of the event. Just as the Urban Meyer story is not about protecting a wife from an abusive husband, it’s about establishing in people who the “state” has power over even The Ohio State and that if you hear something or see something, you have an obligation to report it. Fake News is about establishing fake power for the objectives created long ago to preserve the need for communism to become mainstream. And what Jim Acosta was trying to do with Sarah Sanders was to get her to endorse their Fake News as a reality, and she denied them of it, which is why she’s so good.

Rich Hoffman

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The Lying, Cheating, Wife and the man who just wanted to Buy New Shoes: Why Trump should shut down the entire Russian investigation

Anyone who has been married to a dysfunctional spouse understands why President Trump has every right to call for the end of the Mueller investigation. People in such relationships, which is nearly everyone at some point in a marriage must navigate the balance of powers that go on between spouses and when a weaker minded of the party feels they are losing leverage in the relationship ultimately go for the “you’re cheating on me bomb.” That’s where one spouse accuses the other of cheating when there is no evidence of it other than the fact that the other spouse doesn’t seem to enjoy their time with their married partner. There is of course no way to prove such an accusation, it’s an undefendable position that forces the other party into a defensive position by default and it completely sucks the life out of the relationship. Psychologists understand that such a tactic is purely manipulative and is the prime motivation of a destructive trend. And such is the case of the Democrats who have nothing to campaign against Donald Trump but a scandal they entirely made up by an investigator protecting the reputation of his friend James Comey, who was fired by the president for doing a bad job and leaking classified information to the press.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a Paul Manafort supporter. But if he’s going to be charged and run through the political torture chamber just for working with Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, then Hillary Clinton should be subject to much, much worse. The only reason Paul Manafort is being scrutinized in a trial for which he may spend the rest of his life in jail is because he worked for a short time on Trump’s campaign and the message from the Deep State to everyone is that if anyone helps Trump in the next election, they may face the same trouble. This isn’t a trial about tax evasion, it’s about busting people close to President Trump and scaring away people in the future who may join his campaign. Trump’s legal team have every right to be upset, and Trump himself is completely justified in calling for an end to the entire Russian investigation. He knows he didn’t do anything wrong, yet he is being forced to defend himself from a negative which has an impact on what he wants to do from the Executive Branch.

The purpose of a spouse to use such an accusation is obviously to obtain leverage over the other person. So by accusing a spouse of cheating it implies not only the hurt of mistrust, but the additional burden of trying to overcome a very negative position. There is almost no good way to answer such a thing, which is why the question is asked to begin with. Cheating may or may not be going on, but that is not why the question was asked. If there is cheating going on there are deeper problems in the relationship that often spawn from a degrading effort on one of the married parties. But the question is usually all about obtaining emotional leverage over the other person so that the guilt whether or not the other party is guilty will have to react in a predictable way to prove their innocence, which is just another form of emotional control.

That is what the Mueller investigation has been attempting to do, and why the media has been complicit in facilitating the assumption of guilt from the outset. The effort was always about trying to control the President of the United States by forcing him into a defensive position. For instance, the pressure from the investigation, which was completely made up has essentially taken President Trump’s Attorney General out of the fight from the start. Trump does not have an AG like Obama had with Loretta Lynch or Eric Holder, he has someone who was forced to recuse himself from day one, which took away an important weapon from the president at the start of his administration. If the goal of the Democrats is obstruction, then of course they have won that fight by using this form of control to keep some weapons out of the President’s column. After all, that is exactly what the Robert Mueller investigation was all about from the start, to disrupt the President’s administration with chaos and a fragmented team. If the Mueller investigation were over it would reopen communication with Trump’s AG. But as it stands now, any communication with Jeff Sessions is viewed by the media as obstruction of justice so Trump can’t speak to him.

This is similar to a guy being accused of cheating on his wife but needing to go down to the store to buy new shoes for work the next day, but his wife doesn’t want him to buy them because she wants to buy new shoes and they can’t afford to do both. So the wife might accuse the husband of cheating to keep him home so that he won’t buy the shoes. By having the Mueller investigation always going on, it keeps Trump’s Department of Justice separated from him, which is the point. The accusations force a change in behavior within the Executive Branch and anything they do puts them into a position to only look guiltier. If the married guy tells his wife that he has to go buy shoes tonight because the ones he has now has holes in them and won’t make it another day, and he leaves, he risks his wife to make a bigger incident that just might be grounds for divorce. The man may buy his shoes but find out that the wife is filing for divorce and that she is taking the house and his kids. Being the man, likely the judge in the divorce will side with her and he’ll lose everything so he’s better off to stay home and not buy the shoes. Little does he know that the wife is not only buying shoes of her own but she’s meeting her new boyfriend across town and they are having illustrious sex and have created fake accounts on numerous dating websites so that they could flirt with each other undetected all the time. After all, that’s why she is ultimately accusing the husband of cheating because she is, and she needs to throw anybody off the trail by putting all the focus on him.

Anybody with a brain knows that Paul Manafort’s court case is a shakedown, and the entire Russian investigation is a hoax to cover the crimes that the Democrats and the FBI have actually committed, just like the poor husband who couldn’t buy new shoes because his cheating wife promised to divorce him if he even thought about leaving the house. Trump has been in the same situation—anything he might do such as firing Robert Mueller, sending a pardon to Paul Manafort or General Flynn, or even pushing Jeff Sessions to shut down everything so that the FBI and DOJ could resume normal activity under their proper boss in the Executive Branch would draw suspicion of obstruction of justice, as if “justice” were the mandate defined by the real criminals. And that is not how things are supposed to be. The entire Russian investigation and everything surrounding it is about trying to control Donald Trump. And that is just not acceptable. We didn’t vote for Trump to go through this. We voted Trump to get rid of all this. I would 100% support Trump if he fired the entire DOJ right now. I think it’s the only right thing to do, just like the man who wants only to buy some new shoes and stay in the same house with his kids should really divorce his lying, cheating wife.

Rich Hoffman

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The Ghost Gunner 2: Everything you need to know about the moral, and legal need to manufacture guns in your home

The Ghost Gunner 2 is a wonderful mini milling machine that can produce gun parts without a lot of machining expertise. It is the device that senatorial candidate for the GOP Austin Peterson of Missouri is giving away to a lucky recipient to make a point on Second Amendment protections. Since gunpowder was first contemplated in around 142 AD in China society has evolved along its advancements. While many think of guns and gunpowder as a destructive device, its widespread use and development has greatly decentralized civilization allowing the concept of an “America” to evolve. Prior to the invention of gunpowder empires largely controlled the lives of mass civilizations through emperors and kings. It took about a thousand years but with the invention of gunpowder and guns slavery was ended in the civilized world, nations were born, and scientific development has flourished. So, guns are not bad, and neither is gunpowder. But to put it mildly to the lefty politicians who clamor for more gun control and stricter background checks, it is not the job of the federal government to regulate firearms. It is the mandate of private citizens to use firearms to keep government in check. So, it only makes sense to have the ability for every household to manufacture their own firearms any time they want and in whatever quantities they desire. The Ghost Gunner 2 makes that home manufacturing of firearms very practical.

In the United States I think the major gun companies are real treasures. I love Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Henry Repeating Arms, Magnum Research—I love every one of them. The people who work in these places are genuinely good people making a great American product and I personally think every American should add one gun to their collection every year to support these fine businesses. But we need to get something straight about all this sudden concern about “ghost guns,” firearms made off 3D printers from plans downloaded from the Internet, the Genie is not going back into the bottle. We can’t “uninvent” guns without destroying society itself. Because honestly, it is the gun and gun powder that has brought about our advanced society. Without the invention of firearms, common people would have never have gained the opportunity to overthrow their kings and emperors and our society would be a much different one today. It’s highly likely mankind would have never gone to space if not for the invention of the gun and the emergence of America as a direct result of personal firearm ownership.

The political concern isn’t so much over the 3D printed guns which produces a kind of hard plastic AR lower that isn’t very reliable, it’s the technical ability of something like the Ghost Gunner 2 that brings very advanced milling machine ability to private homes. That realization destroyed what many left leaning anti-gun advocates had long been fantasizing about. They thought that if they lobbied congress to change some gun laws, or put pressure on Dick’s Sporting Goods and Field & Stream to take guns out of their stores, or that liberal politicians might even shut down gun manufacturers by taxing them and regulating them out of existence, that they might rid the world of guns. What they learned is that as regulations and the threat of them have increased, the ability to manufacture guns at home which have also increased as a direct response and the threat of having millions and millions of guns in society that don’t even have traceable serial numbers on them is even scarier.

I personally have no problem with my guns being registered. But given what we’ve seen out of our own FBI during the Trump presidency and the massive laws that were broken in an attempt to overthrow him through impeachment, it doesn’t take much of an imagination to see why registering guns with the federal government would be problematic. If they were to ever gain the ability to confiscate guns through the legislature they would simply read off their directory and go home to home in a confiscation raid which gives an emerging enemy an unfair advantage. I say an emerging enemy because obviously if a government is seeking to protect its power and wishes to take more from the people who fuel it through taxation, then their ability to disarm the population to protect their advances gives them a terrible advantage. But for the gun owner, the power of their firearm ownership keeps such governments from gaining too much power. It’s not that we should go around shooting everyone, but the threat of having it keeps potential dictators from getting any crazy thoughts. Naturally, being part of a thoughtful civilization as the Obama years made the threat of gun confiscation a very real possibility, companies like those who manufacture Ghost Gunner 2 have found a way to overcome that threat. Personally, I think produced firearms that nobody needs to know that you have so that they aren’t on a target list from some future government is the key to a continued free society.

Of course, political lefty radicals want more laws to legislate these types of personal gun making machines but I’d say to them, who thinks anybody is going to follow the law? Laws will not put the Genie back in the bottle and I would say they will be vastly ignored if they do create such legislation. After all, marijuana is illegal and political leftists have been ignoring those laws for decades. Why should gun owners obey laws just because some politician makes them up to protect their own power? By following the Constitution of our nation, the Second Amendment, and the First Amendment which protects the ability to exchange the knowledge of gun building from one person to another are critical to the continued success of the United States of America. Having a gun that has a serial number on it that the federal government can trace is not important to the right to own a gun to protect civilization from an out of control government. In a gun free world, history shows that governments often spin out of control and we’ve seen it in American culture as well as anywhere, so taking guns out of society and legislating them out of existence just isn’t a possibility. The more laws there are, the more innovation will arise to step around those laws. If there are more gun control laws centered around serial number registration than naturally the human thing to do would be to invent some way to step around the law. It’s that simple.

All my guns are registered, and I don’t worry about any federal government trouble at this time. My kind of president is in the White House and I feel good about where the nation is going. But I personally do have the ability to build every part of a gun from the ammunition to the most complex part of a gun and if society fails for sustained periods of time, I can see a real need to be able to manufacture my own guns from my home. Liberals want the American population to trust their government completely, but Austin Peterson has the right idea, gun ownership is the heart of our Constitution, it is at the heart of all civilized society. Guns aren’t defined by whether or not they have a serial number that shows they are officially recognized by the federal government, they just need to shoot straight, and not blow up in our hands. They need to be reliable, and we need to have them, that is all that is required. That is why the Ghost Gunner 2 is a wonderful invention and I am very inclined to get one just in case someday I may need it.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) talking about banning a ghost gun.

Does he honestly believe guns are all plastic? Rounds included? It's shocking how little politicians in charge of passing laws know about what they preach. It's 100% fear mongering.#ghostguns#VoteRed pic.twitter.com/9BF4mpBUEr

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Welcome to the Long Lost American Demographic of Right Leaning Fly Overs: Where guns and Donald Trump are not dirty words

Blacks for Trump lead a “CNN Sucks” chant at Jim Acosta ahead of .@realDonaldTrump’s Tampa, FL Rally.. pic.twitter.com/oHpddZLUEE

— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) July 31, 2018

I remember all too well when the Koch brothers were considered the radical fringe of the Republican Party—the more libertarian wing. That was sad, because they were our only option as conservatives because they had an open check book and were funding the campaigns of several politicians who they felt embodied their view of the world. Harry Reid thought of them as Satan himself incarnate in politics. Nobody ever mentioned that George Soros on the other side spent a lot more money on liberal politicians, or that the labor unions provided a much less fair exchange of funds going into progressive political candidates—it was the Koch brothers who got all the attention and were thought to be such crazy extremists that the entire political spectrum had been pulled so far over to the left that nobody knew literally what was right anymore. Yet I always knew what was right and that’s why I was an early supporter of Donald Trump and now the differences between then couldn’t be more extreme. The political spectrum had shifted in great ways to the right and it looks like its going to stay there for a long time. The Koch brothers are now nearly considered to be as left leaning as George Soros in comparison and that’s good to see because that reflects the world we live in.

There are reasons that communist and socialist countries have closed societies full of censorship and extreme methods of keeping their people contained behind their borders. North Korea, East Berlin even modern-day China are very closed societies that do anything they can to keep their people suppressed and in place within their borders so not to lose them to another competitive nation. That reason is that socialists and communists cannot compete with open markets and that is why the Koch brothers and their paid off politicians like open borders in the United States and unbalanced trade tariffs because they are all about keeping markets closed to protect their own investments. In the Koch situation over half of their business assets are on foreign soil and the ones they do have in the United States are reminiscent of third world countries. [image error]

For over 15 years I’ve been going every year to the Annie Oakley festival in Darke County, Ohio during the last weekend of every July and I have watched carefully how the politics of the outside world influenced this yearly event. This past year I was at the Ohio Fast Draw competition tent explaining how the shooting worked to some spectators. I had my .45 on my hip along with my bullwhips that I had just used in a show across from my location and the subject of politics came up for the first time in that entire 15-year period. The week prior there had been some considerable buzz on talk radio that the leftists control of the entertainment industry and the press had not converted people in places like Wichita, Kansas into rabid progressives they were supposed to become and that was certainly true in Greenville, Ohio. The people I was talking to around the Ohio Fast Draw tent were never going to be members of the political left. They were never going to adopt left leaning political philosophies. The only reason they were suddenly interested in politics was because for the first time in their lives they liked the president in the White House. Ask them who the Koch brothers were, and they’d think they were the founders of Coca Cola. Ask them who Donald Trump was and they’d say, “He’s that New York billionaire who f**ks Playboy models and lowered our taxes. I love that guy!” Welcome to the long lost American demographic of right leaning fly overs.

There are millions upon millions of these types of people who I described from the Greenville event spread all across the United States, and Trump has reached them directly. There is a reason Fox News is so popular and that Rush Limbaugh has such big numbers. It’s not because they did anything special, only to fulfill a market niche that evolved out of necessity. Since America is a free society, there is always competition for attention and it is the people of the flyover states who live between the big cities who really make up the character of the United States. Those people don’t like government, they want it as small and unobtrusive as possible. Political leftists in order to sell their view of the world must have a society like East Berlin and North Korea where censorship from the state keeps voices from expressing themselves. Given a choice most people will side with the small government conservatives, such as the type of farmers and hard-working people who find events like the Annie Oakley Festival a nice vacation in the summer months of God’s Country.[image error]

During the height of the Obama years there was talk of pushing guns out of the Annie Oakley Festival all together as big city progressivism had seeped into Greenville, unwelcomed I might add. How could you have an event that celebrated one of America’s first female celebrities without admitting that she gained her fame through trick shooting with guns? To celebrate Annie Oakley’s life without celebrating the gun was like celebrating a fine dinner without the food. It just didn’t make sense and the rumor had an impact on attendance at the event. But now that Trump was in the White House everything had shifted in the other direction and now guns were everywhere, as they should have been all along. Even the mounted shooters were strutting their horses down the aisles crammed with people like cowboys fresh off the range packing their guns at their sides for the next show at 3 PM. People came to events like this because they reflected their desires, just as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh gave them something to listen to in the media. If Fox News for instance were to swing liberal to the extent of CNN, these people would just stop watching and something new would emerge to fulfil that market need.

That was the talk of course as Disney acquired 20th Century Fox this past week, that Disney would now be the parent company of Fox News. That was what the guy asking me about Ohio Fast Draw wanted to know. He was worried that Fox News would go away. That’s when I told him that something else would come along and take its place. I told him not to worry about it. Fox News didn’t make people like us who we are. We made Fox News. Just as Donald Trump didn’t make the political climate we are all in presently. We made Donald Trump. It was the Koch brothers who gave us little option, they wanted open borders and high tariffs, so they could justify their foreign investments and they pretended to be hard-line conservatives—and most of us knew it all along. People in Greenville, Ohio and Wichita, Kansas always thought the politicians were phonies, that is until Donald Trump was in the White House. Then we had an option, but prior to that most people just tuned out of politics because they didn’t have a representative. In Washington D.C. leftist thought that meant that they had control of the public sentiment, just as East Berlin thought they could keep capitalism out of that part of the city with a silly wall. By limiting what people saw and felt, the political left always thought they could control society. In the cities, that works to some degree because people must comply with welfare check criteria and close quarter living, but if you give human beings a choice, they usually end up at the Ohio Fast Draw tent asking questions about how to shoot fast, and to express their feelings about what a raw deal Donald Trump gets from the national press.

Guns represent choice and protecting that option from the menacing figures who enter politics and fund that activity only to protect their own financial interests, which is exactly what the Koch brothers have been doing all along is what elections are all about. It is sad that the Koch’s have represented what little resistance conservatives had to the aggressive liberals who truly want to shut down choices in America so that people will have to listen to them. What people really hate about Donald Trump is that he has brought choice back into politics and that has suddenly ignited interest in people who usually pay no attention to these kinds of things. Suddenly they have a guy in the White House and they are ready to protect him, and that is a big difference from the years past. The Koch brothers have been exposed for what they always were, and that just goes to show how bad it was before. And that is how wearing a gun on your hip in public can change a lot of perspectives for the better.

Rich Hoffman

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The Best Article on Socialism that you will Ever Read: Trump will never experience a recesssion while he is president

When economists said that Trump was out of his mind to propose that the United States would ever have a GDP of over 3% again, they were speaking from the failed perspective of a socialist philosophy. Just because a majority of economists were all trained in the same places by the same socialist radicals it doesn’t mean that reality is shaped by a majority opinion that may want to promote socialism from the halls of academia, or network television. The same economists and promotional efforts to insist that they have intellectual knowledge worth listening to are the same as those who are putting the 28-year old girl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on every media outlet that they can find hoping to promote democratic socialism before Donald Trump’s economy puts that fantasy out of reach forever. Donald Trump is a man from a real background in understanding how economies work. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just another young radical stuck on the Marxist theories she learned in her education, like a lot of kids. But here’s the reality, Trump’s economy will continue to boom, there will not be a recession on the horizon, there will not be a slowdown of growth. So long as government is kept from tampering with the economy human enterprise will unleash tremendous economic growth and that is the reality of the 2018 election, for which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t even elected yet. All she did was win a primary, but the media knowing that Trump’s economy is pulling ahead of their broadcasted fears are in a panic to put a young lady that they think is pretty in front of the cameras to promote their global intentions, and it’s not going to work.

I met the type of economists that have been declaring that Trump’s economy would fail or that even the good numbers of today are bound to have a major downturn while I was in college. I thought from day one that the economists in college were idiots. I had read several books on my own before getting to college so I had a reference point, but I also had a lot of real life experience. Prior to going to college, I did many fundraisers for the Boy Scouts of America, I worked for mobsters, I chauffeured celebrities, I was a repo man, a gunsmith, and a car salesman, a male model and I did all that before I was 19. So I had a lot of experience with money and commerce and at that time I started to read serious books on economic matters, so the ridiculous cycles that economists at the University of Cincinnati tried to teach were ridiculous. I knew it then, and I am even more sure of it now.

As a basic lesson of economic reality, I speak often about how much I enjoy the yearly Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Darke County, Ohio every year where we conduct bullwhip competitions for the public with the host Gery Deer. This example could apply to anything, but it speaks to the nature of human beings no matter what race, sex, or age—it is the way that humans are wired which obviously Karl Marx never understood. That’s why he died dirt poor and broke in London with just a few people attending his funeral. Because Karl Marx was an idiot, but the governments of the world thought that socialism and communism might be a good way to give themselves lots of power, they started promoting it, and whenever someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be used as a spokesman, they have tried. But all those efforts will fail because of the basic realities of the human experience. In our bullwhip competitions there used to be cash prizes and big trophies. That brought competitors from all over the world to our event to try to win something that they could put on their mantle at home and be proud of. After all, we all practiced very hard to get good with bullwhips so winning a prize, and or money was a vindication of those efforts. Not that I’m bragging, but I won most of the time, and so did Gery Deer. A handful of us tended to always be in the top rankings so people who didn’t win would get angry. Since Gery was always organizing these events the losers of the competitions would call him a “money grubbing charlatan” because they accused him of hosting these events just to make money. Sound familiar?

So to silence the critics my friend Gery Deer took away the prize money and the trophies and made it so that we would just compete out of the goodness of our hearts for the fun of it. Well, guess what happened, over the next five years attendance dropped from both the spectators but also the competitors. Most of those professional bullwhip artists who practiced so hard just had no ambition to attend a competition just for the fun of it. If there wasn’t money or a trophy involved, they decided to stay home, save the plane fare and do something else. But I still came and so did a few other people. I enjoyed the event for what it was and I really didn’t care if I won a trophy or not. That is what makes me in all things I do in life one of the 1% to 5% who always do things for the right reasons. I would say Donald Trump is a similar personality. He plays golf for many of the reasons I do bullwhip work, because he just enjoys the endeavor, and he likes playing and competing whether or not there is a trophy involved, because of the spirit of doing the task. But when you take away the personal recognition for a lot of people, they just aren’t interested in doing something, and that is why socialism will never work, as it has never worked.

The reason Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can’t tell anybody how her democratic socialism would be paid for, how socialism could give people free college educations, how there could be free healthcare, how we could have a $15-dollar minimum raise is because socialism ignores the values of a task performed. The work of doing something is what generates value, just as resistance can generate electricity in a generator as magnets pass over coils. But if the reward for work is not individualized then the desire to put forth effort is lost. If everyone is going to get $15 dollars an hour, or everyone is going to get a trophy, or nobody is going to get a trophy, then people will do only what they have to, and that means that all the ambition for work is lost to the participants. Socialism under any form assumes that people will work hard and be productive just out of the goodness of their hearts, and that isn’t how people are wired. Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or some hippie college professors might think that humans should behave differently, but reality doesn’t indicate that such a thing will ever happen. Just as we took trophies and cash out of the Annie Oakley competitions the best whip artists in the world stopped coming and the sport itself has nearly gone extinct again. A few of us do the event still, but where we used to have 25 to 30 artists from as far away as Australia come to Ohio for the competitions, now there are only five or six a year. The same could be said about any professional endeavor from the medical industry to building cars. If you take away profit and a reward for achievement, you stop the economy. If you reward such things, then people will invent and work their asses off just for a little recognition—even if its minor in nature.

Trump clearly understands how economics works, better than most economists. The people who speak against him and his new economy want to ignore reality and assume that the socialism of Karl Marx might still happen if they could only plaster the young face of a girl voters might like on the front of it. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just a kid. She’s a nice kid but she has a lot to learn and a lot of experience to gain. I was lucky to have had a lot of experience before I was 19, and it was easy for me to call bullshit on the professors I met in college. Now as a person with a lot of experience in many endeavors, I know the Trump economy is only going to increase. There will not be a recession during Trump’s years in office. The cause of recessions is government tampering and taking away incentives for excellence among a society’s participants. I am one of those people who will do the right thing whether or not there is money or a trophy involved, but I am also one of those 1% people. Karl Marx might have known people like me when he came up with his communism idea, but he didn’t apply it to reality. Most people, 99% of all people, will only do something if they get some opportunity at a personal reward, whether it’s a big wage increase, a new car, or an opportunity for sex. If those potentials are taken away, people stop trying and that is how recessions come about. If you open up the rewards, then there will never be a shortage of people who want a chance at those rewards. And that is what drives economies. More rewards, the bigger the economy. Less rewards the smaller the economy. And that is precisely why China is so worried, because as a communist country, they can only look like a global superpower so long as all other economies were artificially restricted, as the United States was. But under Trump and a new rewards system for innovation and effort, China doesn’t stand a chance.

Rich Hoffman

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Annie Oakely Western Showcase 2018: Adjusting to the heat in the kitchen

As I do every year I look forward to the Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Greenville, Ohio which took place over this past weekend. Most of the footage from this Gery Deer segment on Living Dayton came from me, which gives context to what a cool event it is.

@WesternProps Did you know? https://t.co/dXqJasaX4C. And https://t.co/mcfXdmMuz3

— Gery L. Deer (@gerydeer) July 23, 2018

The event was moved back to the Darke County fairgrounds this year and was set up a bit differently than it had been in the past, which was an improvement over previous years. As my time is usually very short due to a very full schedule I usually show up for the bullwhip competitions at 1 PM on Saturday afternoon and stay for a few hours than get back to my regular life. But most of the performers there stay for the entire weekend and it’s always good to see everyone even if it’s just for a little while. Gery Deer puts on this event every year and he’s about as busy as I am much of the time, but these kinds of things are his business so he’s usually there through the entire weekend. Whenever I arrive in Greenville I can’t help but think of it as the gateway to the west as history remember it, the Treaty of Greenville after the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the efforts of western expansion that took place immediately after. It’s big sky country in that part of the world and its one of the few times I can walk around and eat funnel cakes with bullwhips and guns strapped to my hip and nobody thinks anything of it.

Good crowd today at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase with my friend @gerydeer pic.twitter.com/XDaO1wvVOv

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) July 28, 2018

I felt very fast this year in the competitions which was good. Professionally I had just come off a really tough week. I had been thinking that even the biggest high stakes poker games broadcast on television did not have the pressure I was under. But I wouldn’t have it any other way, I like it in the kitchen with the heat turned up. The more pressure, the better I do. But to manage all that professional stress I rely on the Annie Oakley Western Showcase every year to recalibrate myself. The Ohio Fast Draw Association had their shooting range set up right across from our Showcase area and I spent time with them as well which has been my new thing of late, shooting Cowboy Fast draw which I practice nearly every day. Because of that everything was faster for me and I felt it in the bullwhip competitions.

We mostly do the competitions for the crowd because it gives a good narrative to the greater show that Gery Deer puts on each year. We keep things pretty loose and fun. But for me it’s a step out of a very intense business and political world that I normally live in where I get to wear my cowboy hat and be around genuinely good people who do things for all the right reasons. That for me is very refreshing and that one event satisfies me for the entire upcoming year. If I could make a good career living life in the manner that we do during that western showcase, I would. However, for me the drawback is that it would require being on the road all the time and with the size of my family, that just wouldn’t work.

Gery and I always talk about ideas for the future and how to expand on our experience, but with both of us being so busy the next year usually comes faster than we can call each other to make arrangements, but all that freezes for just a few hours on the last Saturday of the month of July when Darke County celebrates the life of Annie Oakley’s birthday in her home town. As Gery reported to me, every hotel and motel room was booked for the weekend, and under the new location, there was a very large crowd attending to watch us have a little fun with our bullwhips. As I’ve said, I use those competitions every year as a kind of gauge for myself to manage stress. I practice a lot in private but its good to get out in front of people and to perform because the added pressure provides context to all the hours of practicing.

One of the reasons I joined up with the Cowboy Fast Draw Association is to have more of these kinds of weekends in the future. The more intense my private life gets professionally the more I seek these Annie Oakley type of events to balance out all that pressure. I always like to strip things away to the most essential ingredients and nothing does it quite as well as eating a funnel cake under a clear blue sky after sweating profusely performing in front of a crowd with a gun strapped to your hip. I solve more problems under those conditions than I could under any other circumstance. When everything is going well in my head it shows in my performance which is why I enjoy the event so much. Among my bullwhip friends they really can be broken down into two categories, performers and competitors. Performers do the same show over and over again making minor changes, and they travel all over the country making their money off that raw talent. I am of the competitor orientation, because that’s the life I live. There is always someone competitive and pushing, so the pressure to always be the best is a daily thing, and to apply that to a unique skill such as bullwhip work, gives me a chance to work through the process of refining basic skills that carry over into everything.

This past year I had practiced cowboy fast draw nearly every day and that had improved my reaction times with the bullwhips. When your body and intellect is working well, it feels good, especially when you get up over 50 like I am now. You tend to take those things for granted when you’re younger, but life has a way of chipping away at you, so knocking off all that buildup so that your body and mind is functioning efficiently and in an optimal fashion is very satisfying. In that way I think it would be good if everyone found something like that to do, where they pushed themselves to perform better and carried over the results into their private and business life. What’s encouraging to me is that even after all this time, I’ve been going to the Annie Oakley Western Showcase for the past 15 years, there is still room to get better, faster, and to learn new things. Learning the cowboy fast draw had improved everything for me, and it felt good. And that’s why we do those events, to push ourselves and spend time with people who are doing their best to live the best life possible within the framework of traditional western arts. I am proud to know knife throwers, bullwhip artists, and gunslingers as some of my closest confidants. That was the way it was in the early days of Ohio as a state which was the gateway to western expansion and it still is. Sure technology and modernization add layers of complication to the modern life of business, but if you strip it all way to the basic essentials, those elements are always present at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase and I always leave their feeling recharged for more heat in the hot kitchen.

Rich Hoffman

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Come join us at the 15th American Western Arts Showcase during Annie Oakley Festival July 27-28 at the Darke County Fairground in Greenville, Ohio! Whip contests, knife throwing shoes and… https://t.co/YbB9ByBQWJ

— Gery L. Deer (@gerydeer) July 22, 2018

The End of Facebook: That is a very good thing

I first heard about Facebook while I was on a movie set in Hollywood, California. We were shooting an all night firewhip sequence for a studio project and since I was the expert bullwhip artist every take during that 12-hour shoot involved me. That left lots of time for the rest of the cast and crew to talk and it was during these many conversations that started and stopped so frequently that I first heard about Facebook. It was 2008 and Facebook had just come out and was competing with Myspace as a new social media platform. I had a pretty fancy Myspace page that featured my bullwhip work and since it had been invented essentially for start-up music bands to get noticed, it had also worked for me to get noticed by Hollywood. I understood the power of this new social media thing because it had literally made it possible for me to do work for Hollywood while still a resident of Cincinnati, Ohio. Typically, if you wanted to work for movies you had to live in the Los Angeles area to network, but not anymore. With social media celebrities could talk to anybody and people of all types of backgrounds could suddenly be in contact with each other.

Yet there was something I didn’t like about Mark Zuckerberg. One of the actresses on set who had recently done work for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies had been a tester for Facebook and she knew Mark. Facebook was recruiting celebrities to help push the new social media platform so to take out the previous Myspace rival and she was one of them. At that time, she was very enamored that the young 21-year old Zuckerberg was already a billionaire. I asked her why he was a billionaire for a free service for which she didn’t have an explanation. All she cared about was that Facebook could get her more work around town. As she said, a few sexy pictures of herself on Facebook would get her an opportunity to get meetings with dozens of producers for new movie projects and leap her ahead in the audition process. So she thought it was great and that Facebook was going to be the wave of the future.

I was upset to learn later that RealD 3D had no intention to use the movie footage we shot for the film but had sold it to CGI artists for movies like Iron Man 2 and The Immortals. I stayed in contact with many of the people who worked on that set for several years, especially the stunt coordinator. There was a real temptation to start a Facebook page and attach that actress as a friend which would have instantly put me on the doorstep of every entertainment figure in Hollywood which would have been worth millions of dollars in opportunity for me personally. But I couldn’t shake that Facebook seemed to me to be diabolically intrusive. I read their sign-up agreement and could not accept the data intrusion they were proposing. So I took myself out of that next wave of technology from the start.

In 2012 as I was releasing my new novel Tail of the Dragon, my publisher was telling me I needed to set up a Facebook page to promote it. Instead of setting one up myself my son-n-law did it for me, because he and my daughter were on Facebook so the damage was already done. It didn’t have any of my contacts in it, which made it pretty worthless, but it fulfilled my contractual obligations with the publisher. As I was doing radio promotion work for the book several of the talk show hosts who knew me well thought it was funny that I had set up a Facebook page, because they knew how I felt about it. But I had managed to do it in a way that kept my privacy under my control and that was just how it was going to stay. People could argue that Twitter and Google are just as bad, and I did make a transition over to those media platforms over time, but I don’t think anything is as bad as Facebook in exposing personal behavior patterns and contacts, then selling that information to companies and governments for all types of vile purposes.

Looking back on it that was quite a time in history. In the summer of 2008 while I was on that film shoot Barack Obama was running for president and those same Hollywood people were excited about him. I wasn’t excited about John McCain, but I certainly wasn’t going to support a Democrat. But the Hollywood people supported any Democrat because like Facebook it was a way to make first contact with the producers around the city. Supporting Democrats was the first requirement for working on any film or television project unless you were a specialist like me, who had a very unique talent. But even then, it only went so far. Turning away from that life by rejecting Facebook it allowed me to work for the Tea Party rebellion that eventually elected Donald Trump. Not having Facebook allowed me to operate incognito for the next decade and do some really good things, politically. The decision was an expensive one, but what good is a lot of money if you don’t have a country. Facebook to me was literally a battleground of ideology that was harmful to the rebellion that had to happen. Even though most everyone used it, including many of my Tea Party friends, and they used it to network with other like-minded people, I needed to operate off the grid, and because of it I was able to do some pretty high-level activity without leaving a crumb trail for the opposition to follow, and that was very important.

It doesn’t surprise me that the stock is tanking for Facebook. The value of the company is in extracting personal data from people and selling it. Now that they have been busted for doing just that and Mark Zuckerberg is trying to repair the public image of Facebook’s major privacy violations, the end is inevitable. Because Facebook cannot make everyone happy. They cannot give privacy to their users without making their investors angry. And they can’t give their investors what they want without violating their users, so Facebook can’t win, and they are on the decline. There is no way they can recover.

Who knows what social media platform will replace Facebook. Of course, something will but whatever it is, it won’t be like Facebook. Facebook took people by storm during an era of naiveté that will never come again. What people thought was just a free way to speak to family and friends over vast distances turned out to be a window into every part of our lives, and people will never let their guard down in quite the same way ever again. Many people are perfectly willing to trade privacy for enrichment at first glance, but it doesn’t take long for resentment to build. I was against it from the beginning and I could have made great use of it at the cutting edge, but if I had, my life would have been quite different. It is often better to operate off the grid than on it, especially when tactical reasons mandate social camouflage. So it doesn’t hurt my feelings to see Facebook going downhill. I think it’s a really good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump Wins Re-election on November 4th 2020: An admission from The New York Times

The Great Game of Poker: Lucky for us, President Trump knows how to make other countries fold

I am not what I’d consider to be a gambler. I’ve never lost once cent in a casino and I don’t put any faith in “fate” to provide any financial enrichment. But I have of late had quite an obsession with the card game of poker, for a lot of reasons. I suppose you could say that I’m at a juncture in my life that is inevitably linked with the popular gambler’s game that originated out of New Orleans just prior to westward expansion and became the modified representation of American capitalism. Poker is essentially a game of playing the cards you are dealt and making the most of them while forcing those around you to do things to your advantage. Poker is not about the cards, it’s about controlling the people who are playing the game. The chips that are bet in poker are currency which often become representative of actual cash, so the emergence of the game in America is a unique attribute that I have found myself studying of late because it fits my present lifestyle. We all play poker to some degree or another. The game just represents a frame of reference for casual play. Some are better at the game than others and it is to my great relief that we finally have a president who knows how to play it to win it all, when all the chips are on the table—he knows how to play the cards.

If you are in business of any kind the game of poker is being played, you have to use whatever cards you have to manage value against the marketplace. You are either getting played by the system or you play the system, and that’s the reality of capitalism. The by-product is worth it, but the process can be brutal. Wimpy soft minded people obviously are drawn to socialism because they don’t have the heart for that kind of game and those were the types of critics that were angry at President Trump for invoking his trade tariffs against the world markets. Yet when it came time to go all in with Europe Trump did it without blinking and the European Union blinked, and now we are suddenly talking about working toward zero tariffs in our trade with Europe starting with pharmaceuticals, medical products and soybeans—as announced by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. This was enormous news and it shows that Trump knows what he’s doing in regard to trade.

I think if more people in America understood the great game of poker they’d understand why President Trump is poised to win all these trade wars. The economics of the situation declares that all trade between nations be free and open, which is what conservatives have always wanted. The tariffs as they have been established through other administrations has been to leverage favoritism toward China, the EU and many other oversea markets to give them a shot at global dominance. But only free trade can truly do that when the value of the product traded sets the competitive circumstances of the exchange. The game between nations really isn’t any different from the game of poker, the values and strategies are the same, and Trump knows how to play it. So it is quite a relief that we finally have an American president who knows how to not only play the game, but to win it.

The aim of these tariff negotiations is to achieve a tariff free world where products can flow globally without modified value trying to shift favoritism to one country or another. If the value of the product is good, then the country trading it will benefit, naturally. Just as in poker, the values on the chips are universal throughout the game. But a $10,000 chip from one player can’t become a $100,000 chip when it comes in possession of another player and that is essentially what is happening under the present tariff system. Trump has been essentially calling the bets from the other players who clearly don’t have a hand better than what the President has, and the entire game is being reset.

What I find interesting about any game that human beings invent I find that most of them were created to fulfill a psychological relationship that the players have with the world they are living in. Such as poker emerged to play with the basic concept of capitalism as inherited from the Europeans during the 13th century where kings, queens and jokers were part of that Dark Ages world. On the river boats of the Mississippi in 1840 through 1950 the old European game evolved to incorporate American ideas about private property and having the ability to generate value and to use that value to push competitors into situations that the winner of the game desires. The trading of values through betting one value against another is what poker is all about and it’s the backbone of American business.

Politicians play poker all the time, and while they know the rules of the game, they don’t seem to be able to connect the game to real life largely because as government employees they don’t have to work very hard to generate value in their lives. When they bet something, they didn’t have to work very hard to earn it, so they don’t apply much risk to the game. For them smoking cigars and sipping on mixed drinks and talking with friends is what the game of poker is. They really don’t care who wins or loses because they are not personally invested in any of the values represented in the chips. That is essentially why traditional politicians are not good at doing what America needs done on the world stage and why we’ve been getting played more than we’ve played. Our presidents just didn’t understand the game that was being played against them so we ended up with all these terrible tariffs that other countries had placed on us and we’ve been getting short-changed when all along we have had the best cards at the table.

It took someone like Trump to know how to play our good cards, which is why Jean-Claude Juncker from the European Union is now leveraging toward a no tariff system. China isn’t far behind this decision and to understand the why and how, reporters and political commentators really need to understand the game of poker. My obsession with it is in recognizing the patterns and history of the game and how it applies to current events. That’s the reason we have games like this so that we can use leisure activity to inform us of the truly important things in the world. But when it comes to a high stakes game, whether it is for millions of dollars in a casino or a big business deal with even more value at stake, or its international political negotiations that Trump is conducting, the efforts and motions are all the same. And knowing how to win those engagements is more important than just the fun of casual play. If you are going to play, you should always play to win, and it is such a relief to find that Donald Trump is finally an American president who gets it and knows how to play poker. When the European Union folded yesterday, China is right behind them. Trump knows he has the cards to win, it’s just a matter of time before China has to reveal that they’ve been bluffing and will have to fold as well. It’s really that simple.

Rich Hoffman

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