Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 269

Lakota Throwing Away Money on Overpaid Teachers: New LEA union contract compensates the average teacher at over $100,000 per year–they are not worth it

There is of course a lot more to the story when we talk about what teachers cost, especially in overly paid districts like Lakota in Ohio. Lakota schools is one of the largest and most wealthy districts in the state with an average teacher salary climbing up to $73,000 per year now that the LEA union there has just extracted a massive pay increase for themselves with a new three-year contract. The costs of course don’t end there, unionized teachers, especially at Lakota have some of the greatest health insurance benefits that are available on the market, and they are expensive. Each teacher at Lakota on average now costs the district approximately $100,000—EACH for only working 180 days a year. The average private sector employee works around 50 weeks per years (250 days a year.) These government school employees cry about not making enough money—there isn’t enough money in the world to make them happy. I can say this, these employees aren’t worth that much money to me for essentially providing a glorified babysitting service, because what kids are learning today in the public education and the college system is not what I’d call a quality education. They sure as hell aren’t worth $100K each.

I watched the video of the Lakota LEA contract vote because I was interested in what would happen next. My hope was that the two conservatives on the board would hold, but one of them wavered and now the three liberals just signed up Lakota to exceed their 100-million-dollar budget. A decade ago roughly when I was giving Lakota such a hard time about their out of control budget I thought it was a lot that they were at $65 million, and that wasn’t enough because they over spent and needed to pass a property tax levy to pay their bills. Now only 8 years later they are out of control again. The district managed to gain a budget surplus and most of us who worked on the fiscal responsibility side of things got busy with other things, and these idiots took that surplus and just tossed it to a bunch of overpaid, spoiled brat teachers on an inflated contract then clapped themselves on the back for saving the school district from a possible LEA strike. What a dismal situation, no public-school teacher should ever threaten to walk off the job when they are paid to be that babysitting service at a bare minimum by the voters of the district. If you listen to the protestors in West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma recently, which I’m sure the LEA teachers at Lakota were threatening to mimic, we are dealing with a very destructive class of government workers who complain about everything, do very little by way of real work, and have made themselves impossibly expensive to compensate.

Watching the video of the LEA contract approval Julie Shaffer, Brad Lovell, and the ultra-liberal Kelly Casper spoke in favor of throwing endless amounts of money at these teachers. Brad went so far to say that he thought of his property tax spending as an investment into our community’s children. Comments like that really make me sick because there is nothing about throwing over $100K at liberalized propaganda advocates that makes children better prepared to become educated and functioning participants in the world around them. Take a look at today’s youth, they aren’t doing very well—their educations have essentially destroyed their minds, not made them better—and these people expect to sell us this long-proven theory to the contrary that by over paying teachers we are helping our children? Brad and Julie even went so far in their rationalizations to indicate that they had children going to Lakota, or who would go to Lakota and they wanted to make sure there were teachers there to provide them with good educations—which obviously clouded their judgments.

I knew way back when I debated Julie Shaffer on WLW radio when she first ran for school board that I was dealing with one of those panicky mom types who feed these panicky teachers all the fuel they needed to become $100K employees each in the district. The teachers complained at every step having to do homework at night, or to work on the weekends—or to have to think about their jobs over the summer—or their requirements to go back to college to obtain their master’s degrees. The teachers want money for everything and if they don’t get it they threaten to walk off the job—and always there is a parent with a kid going to the government schools like Julie and Brad who think that they can compensate their parenting into a successful experience if they toss their kids into a government school to be raised by these liberal teachers who make way too much money for doing not much at all. Back then I was challenged to run a classroom, and I accepted it. I even offered to run four at the same time. I could teach a thousand kids more in one day than they learn in their entire high school years, so those types of threats don’t work with me. The guilt and insecurities of many parents are what cause all this trouble and we have at least two of them on the Lakota school board.

Taken on their own, all these people are nice. Some of the school board members are really just concerned parents themselves, and the teachers in most cases like being around children and they enjoy the profession of teaching. I have met some teachers at Lakota who are very passionate about their work. Are they worth 100K per year—hell no. Getting paid six figures in the private sector is considered a real appreciation of value. If someone is making six figures, they are doing something important for the companies they work for. But not in government schools—its expected collectively. The people might be nice who are involved in these discussions, but that doesn’t make them worth six figures, especially when it comes out of the tax payer’s pocket directly through their property values. But nobody, especially the school board members with children in the district, considers the real impact that the government schools have on the minds of the children. I watch every day parents dropping their kids off at day care facilities and if you press them in a discussion they’ll reveal that they can’t wait until their children are of age to attend Lakota because they will be free of the expense of paying for pre-school. Most parents don’t want to be bothered with teaching their children anything, so they hope that the government school will do all the education they can’t provide as parents either because they aren’t smart enough, or they are too lazy to do it themselves. And that is really what’s behind the lunacy of Julie, Brad and Kelly on the Lakota school board. They are insecure parents who want the best for their children and they naturally will do anything for their children, except take responsibility for their educations on their own as parents. They are relying on liberalized institutions to do the job instead, and that is a danger all its own.

There is no evidence that public schools are good for kids. We loosely talk about how children need to spend time with other peers their age and learn about life. But the way government schools have evolved make them cesspools of liberalism where kids learn to hate the Second Amendment, they don’t learn about American history to the extent they should, and they are having their minds turned off, not on. Ask an 8th grader about global warming and they’ll tell you how America is destroying the world, and they know so because their teachers at school taught them that. Ask that same child to give an opinion on capitalism and American business and they they’ll go on a tirade of how the 1% run everything and that society needs to put more focus on equal rights—which is a fancy way of saying the dumb and lazy need to be equal to the ambitious and productive. As those kids look around at their teachers who make $100K per year and have paid summers off—those students are surprised to learn that the world was never the way it was presented to them in their government schools—and they aren’t prepared for that disappointment. So how is paying all this money into the government school system worth it? It’s not!

Just saying something doesn’t make it true and paying teachers at Lakota over $100,000 a year each doesn’t magically produce a good child. As much as Brad wants to believe in the system, the system of public education destroys far more lives than it helps and is simply a very expensive baby-sitting service for the adults who are too busy with their careers, or not intellectual enough themselves to teach their children the things they need to learn in life. Instead they drop their kids off at a government school, which is like dumping them at a public park with supervision and expect good results no matter what the cost—so long as the whole community is willing to help pay for it. Most of those panicky parent types like Julie Shaffer don’t mind paying a $8000 tax bill on their properties each year because it would cost them a lot more than that to send their kids to a private school. they pay the higher taxes happily because it also coaxes their neighbors who no longer have kids in the school to also pay for their child—and that’s where things get nasty. The communities of Liberty Township and West Chester have given Lakota an extraordinarily high budget to work with, and the school board couldn’t even stay within those parameters—even with declining enrollment! It’s all very embarrassing to Lakota. Nobody sympathizes with teachers who make over $100K in compensation under any conditions—especially when they are really only babysitters for busy parents. That is not a good situation at all, the people involved should be very ashamed of themselves for wasting so much money on an emotional issue that defies logic.

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota’s School Board Approves a Reckless LEA Contract: The new average teacher salary will be $73,000!

It’s a very hard thing to do, to sit in front of a person, or a group of people when you are an employer and tell someone they are not worth as much money in employment as they think they are. I would say it is one of the hardest things in the world, and most managers aren’t good at it. Yet in the private sector managers must do it every day to keep books balanced in relation to the income they are dealing with. But in government seldom if ever does an elected manager push themselves to endure the ridicule of such a situation and that’s what happened at Lakota schools on Monday April 23rd 2018. A radical teacher’s union sat in front of the school board hoping for an approval of their LEA contract which provided raises of 3.5% for the first year, 3.25 for year two and 3.25 for year three—this after they had received a 1.9% cost of living increase plus bonuses. Surely the recent teacher uprisings in Kentucky were on the minds of the board and they had no stomach for a strike—which should never happen when children are involved, yet the threat had been made by the Lakota teachers under the whispers of insurrection. Lakota had been operating with a nice budget surplus, and they are actively looking for ways to compete with other districts for a limited number of teaching positions—no doubt all that played out when the deciding vote from the conservative Todd Parnell cast in favor of the contract. Yet the massive irresponsibility that transpired could be applied to every government position in America, what was happening at Lakota was happening in every city and county and is a trend that must be stopped, otherwise everything will come to a terrible end soon.

At first glance the conditions of this Lakota teacher’s contract seem reasonable. After all, roughly 3% in raises is on par for most cost of living projections. The problem is a little deeper than that when we find out 3% of what? 3.5% of $45,000 a year would be reasonable for a public-school teacher which is essentially a glorified babysitter these days. It could easily be argued, and it should, that teachers in the modern age are doing more damage to children with liberalized educations than they help because children will have to undo all that mess at some point in their adulthoods. But for the babysitting service for busy parents, $45,000 per year to hold 26 children in a classroom environment may be worth the cost. But that’s not what we are talking about in the case of Lakota. Currently the average cost of teachers within the Lakota district is $70,000 per year. While some teachers may be worth that much money the number is likely under 5%. The other 95% of all employees at Lakota are likely worth a figure under $50,000 per year based on the value of the teaching profession to the world at large. Market value considerations should be applied, but because we are talking about government schools, no such value is ever applied. Instead, teacher unions collectively bargain to rack up huge cost impositions against property tax payers of those schools in the district of their residence and as a result, these parasitic labor unions destroy any sense of reality when it comes to labor negotiations. The only negotiating they do is demand more money as teachers, or they walk off the job leaving kids to fend for themselves while those busy parents seek some way to have someone watch their children while the teachers are demanding more money. Not a good system by any measure.

The net result of the Todd Parnell vote is that the average wage for Lakota teachers went up from $70,000 per year to $73,000 by the end of the contract and that is just reprehensible. As I have said, probably only 5% of the teachers are worth that much money. An even fewer percentage are probably worth more, but a vast majority likely aren’t even worth $50,000 and they only make that because of the radicalized collective bargaining negotiations that take place due to the government unions that have infested all these government schools. Parnell should have voted against the contract but as he looked out at all those teachers in the audience, it is hard to stand against such a tide. After all those employees don’t really care about the students because they threaten at every turn to walk off a job if they don’t get their collective bargaining. At best such tactics by the unions are terrorism and obviously Parnell as a school board member didn’t want to be responsible for setting off a labor incident at Lakota. I’ll have to give credit to Lynda O’Connor, she did hold strong on the school board, but she was the only one.

Obviously to pay for those raises Lakota is eyeing a tax levy because once you give union employees something they never go backwards and will continue to ask for more and more until the entire system is bankrupt. When Lakota does ask for the next levy I will use this incident to explain why the government school doesn’t deserve it. Very few voters can sympathize with a bunch of government employees upset about a levy passage when they make over $73,000 per year on average. That is a ridiculously high wage rate for job positions that are simply glorified babysitters. In the past when school board members like Julie Shafer have attacked me for standing against school levies what they really are mad at are the bad decisions they made in the past that required levy passage to sustain a budget—because they want to throw money at teachers and be the good guys with their peers instead of doing the hard work of management and telling those employees that they aren’t worth the money. Let those unhappy teachers go to some other district and lower the payroll of the Lakota budget. Hire fresh teachers right out of college who only make $45K per year. If they want to make more, leave and let Lakota hire some new fresh faces. That is what you do in management. But if you don’t know what you are doing with people and employees, you think that experience is worth the money. Often it isn’t. Youth and vigor are often what children need to learn new things, not some old over paid coffee sipping teacher just milking the system because the union protects their lack of ambition behind collective bargaining. I would bet that most of the teachers in the Lakota school system fall in this mediocre category, and it is the responsibility of the school board to do the hard job when they can to keep those costs down by pushing those old budget busters away.

The problem of budget busting happens when nobody wants to be the bad guy and tell employees that they aren’t worth what they think they are. Schools need to operate more like the private sector does because after all that is what we are supposed to be preparing kids for. The goal isn’t to prepare kids for some socialist indoctrination center called college any more. That scam has been fully revealed to be extremely destructive to the education process. Most kids would be better off not going to college so to keep their minds intact—and reluctantly voters are starting to admit that to themselves—as hard has it is to come to terms with. Many parents save for a long time to send their children to college with life savings that would be better spent elsewhere—so it is hard to acknowledge that colleges are only indoctrination centers and the prep work happens in public schools paid for through a socialist practice of taxing private property. Even knowing all that nobody wants the public school to fail in their community because the schools attach themselves to businesses and homes in an unhealthy way, and until that changes school board members like Todd Parnell will find themselves split. Parents don’t want to lose that free baby-sitting service while they are out in the world doing what they think is important stuff—to pay for their kids to go to college. That whole problem is far too philosophically challenging for them. But I know this, in Lakota there are a lot more residents with kids out of the schools than in them, so if Lakota wants an embarrassing bloodbath at the ballot box, I suppose that’s what they’ll get due to their poor management of tax payer resources.

Rich Hoffman

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Wayne LaPierre gets it Right Again: The trend of returning to the state of the primitive

I continue to be impressed with Wayne LaPierre’s columns in American Rifleman, one of the official magazines of the NRA. In his latest, “We Won’t Waver Despite Media Attacks” LaPierre identifies correctly the vast influence of socialism in American culture and how it has seeped into our education system and created a media environment that is predictably anti-American, and more specifically, anti-gun. This of course didn’t happen overnight—it has occurred essentially from the 1930s and has now culminated into a culture that is clashing with traditional American values which is in essence the cause of this modern civil war. The media are overwhelmingly liberal because those are the types of people who survive the vetting process, the years of college and pre-interviews which get young people into media careers. If they aren’t detectably liberal, they won’t get work in the publishing and television industry. Liberalism is one of the key ingredients that prospective employers look for in new media applicants and this has been going on for decades, so it should come as no surprise that we find a liberalized media establishment that is now coming after NRA members, and conservatism in general. The difference is that now we are starting to talk about it.

https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2018/4/23/standing-guard-nra-will-not-waver-despite-media-attacks/

The first thing I thought when the troubled 29-year-old Travis Reinking shot up four people at a Waffle House in Nashville was that someone should have shot the kid on the spot so police wouldn’t have had to waste two days looking for him. There was a good Samaritan on the scene who challenged Reinking but there wasn’t anybody there to put the kid down saving countless manhours of investigation. As it turned out Reinking was a troubled kid who found his guns confiscated for being in a danger zone recently at the White House, so the signs were there well in advance that Reinking was going to snap at some point and do something stupid which he did late on a Saturday night at a Waffle House. There are probably thousands of people like Rainking running around out there in the world and when they show up to terrorize us, we need to have the ability to defend ourselves.

That liberalized media baulks at those types of proclamations. They’ll say that this isn’t the Wild Wild West and that we are a more civilized society now and shouldn’t need guns. They say this as the current crop of youth springing from the public-school system is desiring to return to primitive exhibitions of adulthood that were practiced in Neolithic times, body piercings and tattoos to show that they have left childhood and should now be considered adults. Those type of rituals are innate and part of human biological intellect. I know several very young women in their 20s who are extremely well-educated. At first glance they look like typical young ladies fresh out of college who have access to the best fashion of our day and they have the money to buy them. They live upper middle class lifestyles with their peers. Yet upon a closer look they have tattoos behind their ears and all over their backs and chests. They have the common tramp stamps on their lower backs as well which are intended to show people they are intimate with that they are a little wild and crazy which is part of their ritualistic sex practices. They demonstrate orthodox behavior professionally, but raw savagery privately. This is a relatively new phenomenon and that I have asked them about which of course they answer like I’m 2000 years old out of touch with laughs. But they are young people still fresh from their liberalized educations, and it was there that they learned this type of behavior.

The tattoo story is important because young ladies like that just a few decades ago wouldn’t behave in that fashion. They’d be concerned that once they found a husband and started having babies that they might not be able to explain such wildness to their future families. Those instincts have been taught out of them resulting in the product of youth that we see today. The same tragedy could be said to have occurred in young men—especially young men with poor intellect and rotten family histories. For instance, it could be easily established that if a young woman has a good relationship with her father, she probably isn’t going to be easy to sleep with by a predatory male looking for a quick trip to the bed. That is because she will likely have traditional self-confidence and won’t be prone to whimsical seductions by young men looking to paint themselves on her blank sheet of paper. Young girls who don’t have good relationships with their fathers tend to be sleep arounds and dress wildly because they are seeking the attention they didn’t get from a father figure. In a similar way young men like Travis Reinking act out in a similar way when they don’t get the proper male attention in their lives from an elderly figure—and this can make them very dangerous. The primitive instinct of young males is to prove themselves in battle even to the point of killing another human being—so as our liberal society craves more primitive foundation values, young males are becoming more and more dangerous socially. Travis Reinking is just the latest, there are many more like him out there looking for something to latch onto so to prove they are great warriors—whether it be ISIS, the Neo Nazis, the latest ANTIFA socialist protests, or even a college football game—young people more than ever are struggling to show their adulthood, and for a certain percentage they are turning to violence to earn their respect as grown-ups. Most of the gang violence that we are dealing with in America can be reduced to that very simple human need.

It will take years after admitting that this is the fundamental problem in America to solve it—likely five or six decades. Liberalism has destroyed the lives of many young people, in many cases irreversibly—yet our society must still continue to function. That means that the only way to contain the violence that is coming at us so rapidly these days, is with personal firearm protection and quick resolutions when some stupid kid like Travis Reinking does go into future Waffle Houses and shoot up the place, that we can end the attempt there on the spot within seconds. The institutions of liberalism have created this problem and once again it is up to regular traditional Americans to fix it, which is why the NRA is such a valuable organization. They stand pretty much alone these days to offering real solutions to these classic problems. In this case, liberalism has taken young people back to the needs of a more primitive time and it is the philosophic value behind personal firearms which stands as leverage against that social incursion.

Without the NRA the process of transforming America into just another European colony would have taken place. Because of the NRA the liberalized media has not shaped American society into something unrecognizable to our traditional values. And because of personal firearms there aren’t those thousands of Travis Reinkings out there shooting everyone up ever five seconds. Even without a firearm, killers like Reinking could still drive a rented van into groups of people to conduct their primitive need for public malice. But because of the way American society is, there are more often than not heroes lurking in every Waffle House, in every shopping mall and camped outside every church ready to take action, because they have the personal protection of firearms, which has been the game changer on the world stage in America. And it’s about time we appreciate it more for what it has always

Rich Hoffman

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Han Solo’s New Landspeeder: The reason young men have for racing, risking their lives, and proving themselves

That’s a wrap on post production! #Solo @HanSoloStory #SkywalkerRanch Wow. What a movie-making adventure it’s been! Thanks to a terrific cast & extraordinary folks behind the camera as well. You’ve worked so hard to fully realize this cool story. Hope fans have a blast! #May25 pic.twitter.com/SeSSXZirBZ

— Ron Howard (@RealRonHoward) April 22, 2018

Institutionalism has been on my mind a lot lately. It has always bees something I was concerned with—it’s a huge part of culture building and there is need for some of it to keep an orderly society organized and effective. But all too often it is a destructive device that robs individuality from the human race which limits the output of potential available to mankind. Obviously the Comey situation with the current FBI is the most clear-cut case of institutional failure at so many levels and that is exactly what was on my mind as I went to Target as a 50-year-old man and bought the new Han Solo Landspeeder toy from Hasbro that I have been looking forward to being released. As I write often my favorite Star Wars character is Han Solo and I continue to think that the entire franchise under Disney ownership will depend on the quality of this new Solo: A Star Wars Story movie coming up on May 25th. For the movie to work, it has to tell the story of a young man who is so rebellious against institutionalism that he drives that inner need for the audience to yearn for individual freedom. It’s a tough game for Disney because they are an institution all on their own, and it has been a real challenge for the filmmakers to capture that proper “Han Solo” spirit produced by such an institutionalized production company. But they have worked hard at it and I think the selection of Ron Howard to be the final director was crucial to making this upcoming film positioned to be the best product possible. To get Han Solo right, the filmmakers must understand that he is a person fighting the mundane clutches of institutionalism which is the key to understanding what makes Star Wars different from other science fiction, and additionally makes it one of the most valuable elements for shaping modern society. It’s a very delicate balance and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on that toy car so I could get up and close to it to get some questions answered.

Much to my delight it exceeded my expectations. Most young men—not girls—but boys, desire to obtain a car, customize it to some degree to represent their personalities and to apply that effort to the world so that they might come out on top. Girls typically think of wedding dresses, getting invited to prom and play with toys that lead them to domestic lives as young married women. No matter how much we tamper with that basic human yearning, those fundamental differences between boys and girls are obvious. Boys have that pressure to rebel from what they’ve known so that they can launch themselves into a position to acquire a wife, build a family, and live life on their own terms for that family—and a car is that first big step. So in a movie that deals with a younger version of Han Solo, a guy who has to acquire all the things that led him to a marriage to Princess Leia, The Millennium Falcon, his DL-44 gun, his years of experience at getting out of dangerous situations, what would his very first car look like? Getting that right would go a long way to telling me that these modern filmmakers understood the character of Han Solo well enough to not screw up the movie.

Ever since I saw the footage from the filming of the Solo movie I have been curious about this car. It’s square in design and looks pretty junkie for what you might expect from Han Solo. But then the Millennium Falcon was pretty beat up by the time the original movies were made—so this is a theme for Han Solo. He is a character not limited to the designs of the original manufacturer of his vehicles, some institutional engineer who works for a big company and rigidly gets all their drawings approved for production. Han Solo as a young man would acquire a speeder like this vehicle probably used because that’s all he could afford and he’d make it into something of his own design—to imprint his character on it. He would then use that vehicle to make a name for himself out in the world. This is very important to young men—really important. So getting Han Solo’s car right in a design tells me that they would also get it right in the movie and that this thing was going to be good.

When I was a young guy, 16 to 20 years of age I raced everyone everywhere. I seldom ever drove at speeds less than 100 MPH and I was in trouble with the police most of the time. I think it is safe to say that I was the fastest driver in the city of Cincinnati during that time frame who lived to talk about it. I know a lot of people I knew back then who died in car wrecks or ended up in jail for the rest of their lives so I can understand the background of a young Han Solo who was addicted to speed and competition. Young men must have some way to prove themselves because only the best have access to the best females. The way we all work biologically is that the most attractive females usually like the guys who are the most daring and ambitious acquiring the most wealth. Of course, the reason is so that a young female can build a family using the guy to give her children and financial resources. Having young men run around racing each other for the opportunity to make a lot of money so they can have access to the best females is a very primal sentiment. It’s not the way political progressives want things to be, and Disney has become a very progressive company so that makes the stakes of this Solo Star Wars film very high. Progressives would like to erase masculinity from the face of the earth yet Han Solo is a very masculine figure which makes him very popular among young males looking to make their mark in the world. I’ve been very skeptical especially the way The Last Jedi embraced so many progressive values. I didn’t think it hurt the value of Star Wars culturally, but it was noticeable. The same kind of anti-male sentiment won’t work in a movie starring Han Solo. I am happy to say from what I have seen by reading the latest Han Solo book Last Shot and going through some of the toy releases, I think they have nailed Han Solo in this new film. We’ll have to see how it is, but so far, the hot rod speeders are there, the souped-up star ships, the guns and the attitude are all there, so I am excited, more so than I was even a month ago.

I was in England for a good part of the Han Solo filming at Pinewood and I read all the news I could from the set as it was happening. It was exciting for me to be that close to the movie. One of my methods of stress management is to play a lot, whether it is video games, toys with my grandkids, or just roaming around at the store looking at new toys coming out. I particularly like the Star Wars section and the Lego sections of toy stores. Playing with ideas and massaging my imagination helps me solve complicated problems in real life, so there is a method I use to make those experiences productive in the real world. The Han Solo Landspeeder was very exciting for me personally because it has a lot of design in it that reflects the Han Solo character in all the ways that I enjoy. While everyone doesn’t get as excited about toys and Star Wars that as I do, the people who do are often those who advance human civilization in positive ways, engineers, creative people, and authors. Star Wars is such a major contributor to modern literature and the sciences that I get excited with each new film because of the cultural impacts that naturally spawn off them. Solo: A Star Wars Story however has more pressure on it than any movie yet has. How this one goes will determine the future of Star Wars forever, so there is a lot on the table. From what I have seen so far, I don’t think anybody will be disappointed.

Rich Hoffman

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While on CNN I Was Right About James Comey: When top law enforcment officials forget that laws don’t protect institutions, they protect individuals

Remember when I was on CNN and said that Comey lied about Trump https://t.co/gJpyBhIyD6 via @YouTube Knowing what we know now, I was pretty right, wasn't I? LOL

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) April 21, 2018

Each time there is more news revealed about the nature of how James Comey handled himself as an activist against Donald Trump I become even more proud of my comments on CNN about Comey himself very early on in the process. Now that Comey has released his book and put forth interviews and excerpts of some very damning evidence against himself, good reporters like Sharyl Attkisson and Judge Jeanine Pirro have captured the essence of the illegality of the situation. It has made me reflect back to that CNN interview which I was a part of that was one of the first in the country after the Comey hearing against Trump that took place nearly a year ago. My comments about Comey were remarkably accurate given the limited evidence that was available at the time so I feel it is worth a little celebration to provide my readers with evidence of my prediction accuracy. This wasn’t the first time by a long shot that I’ve been right, but it is one of the most obvious when the tide of the entire nation was turning the other way. That particular day during that CNN filming of that Anderson Cooper segment the sentiment was that Trump was going to have problems—serious problems that were going to lead to impeachment. But only a year later, it looks like it’s the FBI that will be going to jail, and to watch Comey’s testimony and proclaim what I did on national television to millions of people should put many people’s minds to ease regarding advice I give them. If you listen to me dear reader, you’ll be a lot better off in life. For the proof which we now have in hindsight, here is the summation of the Comey case.

.@JudgeJeanine: "Jim, it's so obvious; you're fired and you're mad. You're a liar and you're a leaker. You're pompous, you're egotistical, you're condescending, and you violate the very laws that you're sworn to uphold because you want to make news." pic.twitter.com/9j0mPDPz6R

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 22, 2018

Additionally, Sharyl Attkisson’s Twitter analysis spotlighted the corruption and partisan bias at the upper levels of the FBI, which is still stacked with countless Obama holdovers who hate Trump and have been actively working to undermine him. After a year the “Deep State” investigating the new President Trump in a desperate attempt to hold on to the old has not managed to slow him down. And now that momentum is lost in ways they never could have predicted. Even though I expect it out of myself, I am happy to show my readers that when I do go on national television to say something, that they can damn well trust it, even if it does appear outlandish at the time. Comey was so dirty and now he’s in some serious trouble, which he fully deserves, as framed by Sharyl Attkinssen:

He’s scared off all the Democrats he usually debates on this show, so tonight Dan Bongino joins me solo to talk the most outrageous comments we’ve heard this week. pic.twitter.com/Wh7un2XjZN

— Jeanine Pirro (@JudgeJeanine) April 22, 2018

1. Comey memos have been reviewed by several Repub members of Congress: Judiciary Comm Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), House Oversight and Government Reform Comm Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), and House Permanent Select Comm on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Ca.).

2. Statement from Republican chairmen: “These [Comey] memos are significant for both what is in them and what is not…[They] show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated.”

3. “The [Comey] memos also made clear the “cloud” President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier.”

4. “The memos also show former Director Comey never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened… he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation.”

5. “[Comey] chose not to memorialize conversations with President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, Secretary Clinton, Andrew McCabe or others, but he immediately began to memorialize conversations with President Trump

6. “It is significant former Director Comey made no effort to memorialize conversations w/ former Attorney General Lynch despite concerns apparently significant enough to warrant his unprecedented appropriation of the charging decision away from her and the [Justice Dept]”

7. The memos show Comey was blind to biases within the FBI and had terrible judgment with respect to his deputy Andrew McCabe. On multiple occasions he, in his own words, defended the character of McCabe after President Trump questioned McCabe.”

8. “[Comey] leaked at least one of these memos for the stated purpose of spurring the appointment of Special Counsel, yet he took no steps to spur the appointment of Special Counsel when he had significant concerns about the objectivity of… Attorney General Loretta Lynch.”

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2018/04/20/sharyl-attkisson-sums-up-what-the-comey-memos-mean-in-a-concise-tidy-package-and-wow-626063

Even though I never had any doubts that Trump would be the next president back in 2016, even to the point where I considered stopping this blog site, because the mission had been accomplished, it is pretty scary to see just how corrupt all the people attached to the Clinton case was from the very top—even President Obama. I know I reported it all for many years but the reality of those observations was just too much for most people to accept. People needed to believe in something and they love their institutions and in many ways needed to trust them. That made it hard for them to see the truth which was always right in front of them. I’m able to quickly see these types of things because I am free of institutional constraints. The Trump presidency can be said to be a lot of things but in its essence, it’s about revising the basic foundations of our institutional thinking. Voters looked at how things were and they decided they didn’t like the direction so they made a change—and its as simple as that. Yet the institutions themselves couldn’t accept that change so Comey went about breaking the law because he valued institutional protections over the merits of law and order which is quite extraordinary, but it was obvious to me very early in the process.

If politics is a rock, paper, scissors game Comey and his accomplices didn’t understand the definitions of the various components. All of American society is not to fall under the umbrella of institutional protections, the institutions—whether they be the FBI, the Department of Justice or the White House are not part of the greater good as defined by the tapestry of “society.” Institutions are worthless if they don’t serve the individual needs of the American people and that is the hard lesson that Comey and his minions are learning in real-time. The “institution” of the FBI is not “greater” than the merits of individual citizens and that is where Comey went wrong—is in that assumption. How he was caught committing crimes was that he took the law which was supposed to be individually applied and made decisions that he thought were for the greater good in institutionalized protections. In his mind the social sacrifice of putting a woman president into the White House had more merit than the individual laws broken by Hillary Clinton. This is how we got into so much trouble with Obama, we put more value institutionally on the race of the incoming president than the merits of his individual life—the birth certificate issues, the connections to radical communist groups and his general anti-American beliefs that were formed while attending grade school in Indonesia. When people picked Trump over Obama, and Clinton they were choosing to reject the institutional values that had been placed before them and to seek a more individualized direction. People like Comey rejected that premise and circled the wagons to protect institutionalism because they assumed that all law and order fit under that umbrella of thought.

Comey thought that by leaking information to start a special counsel into President Trump that he could be the hero of the Democratic Party’s control over the institutions of Washington D.C. culture. When I watched the senate testimony with CNN that day last year that is what I saw immediately, an institutionalized person who would do anything to protect that institution, whether it be the nature of the FBI or the relationship the three branches of government had with each other as defined by a history of bad decisions. Comey was against the essential change that people had made in the 2016 election and neither he nor his wife could come to grips with that reality. So Comey did what he felt he had to do to appease not just the institution of the FBI itself, but also his relationship within the institution of marriage. Comey wanted to make his wife happy by getting rid of Trump and if he had to abuse the power of the FBI to do it, he was wiling to do so, to protect all the institutions in his life which he believed in more than the merits of individualism. Yet Trump was about individualism from the start and nobody on the other side could see it, and that is how we find ourselves in this mess. Yet it was always quite clear to me, and for my readers, the evidence coming forth is refreshing, because at least we know of one thing in the world that everyone can put their faith in. The written words put on these very pages and the things I have said on national television. Everyone who learns to trust those very things can sleep a little better each night knowing that at least there is one place in the world that makes sense.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Wonderful World of Winning: Eating at Chuy’s and the Democrats suing Trump, WikiLeaks, and the Russians

I had a wonderful lunch the other day at Chuy’s in West Chester, Ohio. It wasn’t my first visit to the popular Tex Mex dinning establishment but this one was better than other times I had been there. It was a business lunch and the subject of discussion was two of my favorite books of strategy, The Art of War by Sun Tzu and The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. Whenever I get a chance to talk about those books people are usually put on their heels a bit with my enthusiasm which is difficult to turn off once things start flowing. But this day was more unique on the subject of those two books simply because the discussion point was in how you can determine who on the other side of an objective is about to fail—which is clearly one of the primary ingredients needed in understanding proper strategy on anything. As I was talking about how you can know who is about to fail and when to pounce on their positions, I received the news that the Democratic Party had filed a lawsuit against President Trump for a conspiracy between the Russian government and WikiLeaks to rob Democrats of the 2016 presidential election. It was pretty stunning stuff, because it essentially announced to the world who knew how to read the tea leaves that the Democratic Party had just announced its end.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-democrats-lawsuit-russia-20180420-story.html

The Democrats have lost the news story of Russian collusion and many of their ranks are about to be pulled into the insane story about James Comey as that former FBI director continues to make an absolute ass of himself on his incriminating book tour. The Mueller investigation for Democrats has sputtered into a big nothing going further nowhere leaving a lot of money spent with nothing to show for it. Trump is having personal success in spite of all the mechanisms of power that have been thrown at him from FBI lying and spying to the entire entertainment industry coming after him. He is still bringing peace to North Korea, something that hasn’t happened in nearly seven decades by lots of supposedly smart people. Trump has accomplished the task in just a matter of months and that’s not all. He has been successful in Syria against Russia and continues to have success in the Middle East. The economy is doing well and the culture in America is changing for the better, and people are starting to feel it.

Fundraising is down for the Democrats and as they come to the primaries and the midterms that come after there just aren’t a lot of “blue” candidates who can win “red” seats in spite of all the Republicans who are retiring from Trump’s control over the GOP. The Democratic Party knows it has no other hope to win anything other than in scoring some major publicity victory which at this point isn’t going to happen. They have just announced that they are suing one of the most sued people in American history—in Donald Trump. If anybody knows how to handle the rigors of court drama its Trump. Trump’s legal team can now counter a lawsuit and depose evidence that the Democrats have long sought to hide, like the DNC server, because you can’t prove anything was hacked without presenting the evidence—and that evidence for the Democrats is very damning and is what got all of them into trouble in the first place.

The entire case that the Democrats are presenting is based on an early 2016 press conference that Trump had where he jokingly asked the Russians to produce Hillary Clinton’s delated emails that she had destroyed obviously to hide crimes she had committed as Secretary of State when she set up her private server to conduct her electronic communications. As a public servant she wasn’t allowed to do that. She ignored the rules and thought she was going to get away with running for another public office when she obviously disregarded the rules of conduct prior to that attempt. It has been amazing to listen to James Comey talk during his book tour because as the head of the FBI it would seem that he’d have better knowledge of how the rest of the country thinks, but what we’ve learned is that he is just a beltway liberal who has very activist objectives. He’s a lot like Hillary Clinton in that he thinks he’s entitled to things, just as she thought she was entitled to the presidency—her lifelong goal as a meal ticket of womanhood. When reality didn’t match up to their expectations they flubbed up—Comey in trying to hide his activism as the head of the FBI, and Clinton in operating her campaign in illegal ways trusting that people like James Comey would run cover for her, and that nobody would challenge them. Trump simply threw the issue on the table joking about Russians which exposed the Clinton campaign and really put pressure on the FBI investigation into her activity as a candidate. Trump had forced both the FBI and the Clinton campaign into a series of mistakes that culminated into an early July 2016 blunder by the FBI once Loretta Lynch had met with former President Clinton to work out a deal to keep Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign alive even though there was a “there” there.

One thing I really like about Chuy’s, as a restaurant experience is that it looks crazy as a fusion mix of Texas enormity and Mexican chaos. Mexican culture is a mash up of Aztecan heritage, Spanish Catholicism and the mixing of two radical cultures into one impoverished Marxist enterprise—color pallets that don’t go together, hubcaps on the ceiling, exotic tropical resorts which give the country some forms of legitimate business to front for all their illegal drug activity. Yet the food underneath all the colorful forms of chaos is all very fresh and you can trust that everything you are eating is nearly right off the farm quality. There’s a lot going on at Chuy’s which I find very stimulating. Not because I like crazy, but that it is metaphorically pleasing to me to immerse myself in those types of environments because they are emblematic toward the many layers of life that is in our present society. On the surface the things we see clash and meet in ways that seem disconnected, but under all those layers is high quality and competency.

Once you understand the chaos on a story like the Hillary Clinton case, you can enjoy the quality that is behind an endeavor, and that was the reason I knew that the Democrats were in serious trouble, which I had been predicting for a long time. As I was eating at Chey’s with some business friends talking about the long history of samurai warfare and the ability to understand victory long before anybody else could—it was obvious that President Trump had punched through into a new good place for the country. And the Democrats had sealed their own fate with that announced lawsuit. For the Democrats, their much-coveted Mueller investigation was imploding and the waters of the swamp had dropped several feet unmasking lots of slimy creatures who had been hiding just under the surface. As I ate my tortillas on a fine spring day in April, I could smell victory for the Republicans in the air and the wonderful understanding what winning for America feels like once again. And it was a grand sensation.

Rich Hoffman

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Support Allegiant Airlines: Don’t let panic driven people ruin everything for the rest of us

Let me just say in defense of Allegiant Airlines that I would have no problem flying on them with my entire family anywhere they are going, be it Las Vegas, Orlando, or anyplace else. As a discount carrier I think they do a fantastic job and provide a wonderful service. Being able to fly to far away destinations for under $100 per seat—in many times much less than that—helps bring down the prices in an industry obsessed with attempting higher and higher costs on the consumer. I was personally disgusted with the hit job 60 Minutes conducted against Allegiant this past week and how it set off a subsequent parade of negative aviation stories—especially after Southwest Airlines actually had a CFM-56 engine blow up at 30,000 feet killing a passenger. Let me tell everyone something, the FFA does not need more regulations for god’s sake, accidents happen, especially in an aging fleet of planes that have been flying for a while. What happened with Southwest Airlines is an extreme rarity, the containment case should have captured that shrapnel from the exploding engine. It certainly doesn’t mean that every exploding engine will produce the same effect as the panicky people on the 60 Minutes episode by Steve Kroft articulated based on their experiences with Allegiant.

https://www.bizjournals.com/tampabay/news/2018/04/17/how-allegiants-woes-could-hit-tourism-in-pinellas.html

What I see happening in general toward Allegiant is a similar hit that CNN did against Sea World—an attempt to bring down a company using the media by competitors. In this case Allegiant puts a lot of pressure to bring down costs in the airline industry, which is desperately needed. The unions and other airlines all have an intense desire to use every excuse to drive up prices, so the safety record of Allegiant is attacked so that it forces them to comply with industry regulations designed to appease the labor unions. It’s no different from when panicky moms and school teachers use “children” as an excuse to raise taxes in a local school district, because it presents an indefensible position that is emotionally driven. Allegiant Airlines is providing a low-cost service using planes that have seen a few miles without all the luxury that other flights might offer to get customers to faraway places without breaking their bank accounts, and I think its wonderful. I don’t care if the planes shake, rattle and roll a bit in flight, they are safe enough to fly reliably. The only thing they are doing wrong in relation to the industry as a whole, is that they are forcing other airlines to lower their own prices.

Listening to those losers on the 60 Minutes segment was utterly disgusting. Flying is supposed to be something of an adventure. The way flight was invented in the United States always had with it a bit of living on the edge where the pioneers of flight endured the many unknown dangers associated with flying with valor and a confidence that anything could be overcome. Passengers had the same type of spirit. A rickety craft over the South Pacific or the jungles of the Amazon carrying some business to faraway lands was a positive experience in every way. The lives of the passengers were never in much danger at the hands of a competent pilot and the ambition that kept aircraft going into the sky by ground crews inventing everything as they went with duct tape and glue.

The larger problem of today isn’t the fault of the airlines, it’s the type of people they are dealing with. There are always a percentage of the population that have been raised on panic television, who watched the Jerry Springer Show entirely too much that are looking for every available lawsuit, and those people ruin life for the rest of us. It is their fault that there are too many regulations, too many stop signs, ridiculously low-speed limits—because they bitch and complain about everything which forces companies to waste money trying to appease them. It made me sick to see that big girl interviewed by Steve Kroft talk about how she feared she wouldn’t see her children again when the engine blew on that Allegiant flight. Let me say that if I had been on that flight I wouldn’t have even stopped reading my book. It is disgusting that such panicky people are out there complaining about every little thing and are so terrified about basic things in life. Just because somebody cries about their fears about something doesn’t mean the entire industry should change what it’s doing for everyone else.

Airlines like Allegiant allow big girls like that 60 Minutes complainer to fly to Vegas and have access to all those bottomless pit buffets because they offer cheap flights. Without those cheap flights most, people wouldn’t be able to afford going to places like Vegas for the weekend. People like that lady want Allegiant to go out and invest in a new fleet of aircraft that aren’t so worn and rickety but they don’t expect to have to pay the higher ticket prices associated with new aircraft investment. It’s just like that idiot Jessie Jackson coming to Cincinnati to protest Kroger for not keeping failing stores open in poor neighborhoods because they were losing their ass due to theft, vandalism, and poor-quality clientele. The expectation is that companies have an altruistic obligation to society to give all their profits to the poor and needy. Well, people who think like that are completely wrong. Go see how that mentality has been working in Cuba, North Korea and Iran. Go visit Africa and tell me how that “profit sharing” is going. The truth is, profit drives ambition, which drives industry. Vegas thrives off cheap flights and buffets. It could be argued that Vegas is a sinful place that brings no good to the moral condition of society. I would say that Vegas is a lot of bad things but it’s also a lot of good—they have great shows in Vegas and great food. We have a better society because there are places like Vegas in the United States and Allegiant does a great job of getting people there who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford to go.

Sea World is still reeling from the hit job CNN did to them way back in 2014. That same hit job media is in full court press attack mode against President Trump. And now it’s after Allegiant for all the same reasons. The competition doesn’t like change or a society that has options, so they use the media to exploit the fears of stupid, panicky people to give them a competitive advantage over a rival. Essentially when something is good these days some parasitic cape rider will seek to jump on for a free ride and use the anxious sentiments of federal regulators to attempt to slow down the best to the cumbersome exploits of the weak—and its utterly disgusting to see. The TSA has been much better under President Trump, but they are still a laborious unionized organization of make work efforts designed to appease a panicky public. Every time someone complains about something like exploding engines—which are facts of life in aviation—or terrorists, or smelly buffet participants fresh from a trip to Vegas, someone writes a new law that slows down the entire industry and that is much more destructive than some occasional mechanical failures. It costs a lot of money to run an airline and people are lucky that there are companies like Allegiant out there. Without them the ticket prices would be so high that few could afford to travel—which wouldn’t be good for anybody. I would encourage everyone to book a ticket on Allegiant and take a weekend vacation to some exotic destination, and to support them in this time of bad publicity. They deserve the support.

Rich Hoffman

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I Don’t Respect the FBI: Until they prosecute their own criminals, they have lost legal authority under Constitutional scope

Well, it’s about time. I wouldn’t call the report from Sara Carter regarding congressional lawmakers who have made a criminal referral to the DOJ on the many illegal activities surrounding James Comey and those directly connected to him partisan. Democrats have no trouble acting on any little rumor, so the GOP took too much time to take the substantial evidence presented and act on it in a meaningful way. I think it should have been done a year ago, but at least now thanks to all the additional information presented in FBI text messages and Comey’s very incriminating book, the case is quite clear. Here is how the report was released according to Sara Carter.

“Congressional lawmakers made a criminal referral to the Department of Justice Attorney General Jeff Sessions against former senior-level Obama administration officials, including workers of the FBI connected with the unverified dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, as well as those involved in the warrants used to spy on a former Trump campaign volunteer, this reporter has learned,” writes Carter.

“The lawmakers also made a criminal referral on former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and threats made by her DOJ against the FBI informant, who provided the bureau with information on the Russian nuclear industry and the approval in 2010 to sell roughly 20 percent of American uranium mining assets to Russia,” she adds.

“House Oversight and Government Reform Committee member Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Florida, along with nine other colleagues sent the letter Wednesday to Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray criminally referring former FBI Director James Comey, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for their involvement in the investigations into President Trump and alleged violations of federal law,” says the reporter.

http://ussanews.com/News1/2018/04/18/report-gop-leaders-file-criminal-referral-against-clinton-comey-lynch/

My position on this is simple, either some of these people go to jail listed above, or the current system of law and order loses my complete respect. That means they better never break down my door looking for evidence of some kind because I will consider them hostile anti-Constitutional agents functioning within America—and I have an obligation to protect that Constitution with force. That’s what the evidence shows them to be—hostile agents–so that is how they will be treated until the legal system can prove to me that they have things under control. I’m not going to put up with a double standard, where the law applied to me is one way, but for Hillary Clinton and James Comey, it’s another. That doesn’t fly, so I am eager to see the legal system do the correct things to rectify the situation. I personally would like to believe in our legal system again, but from what I have witnessed with the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Hillary Clinton campaign during the years of the Obama presidency, there was clearly a double standard which still exists. As Comey continues to conduct his book tour he seems oblivious to the prospect that he could go to jail for how he managed the FBI as a director, leaking documents, lying under oath to congress, and making decisions about serious matters based on partisan sensibilities. He’s admitted as much and put it in his book—and he did so with the assumption that he was above the law. If I had done the same thing I’d be under arrest right now. So until that double standard is resolved, I don’t recognize the authority of the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA or much of local law enforcement. They have a lot of cleaning up to do before they earn back my respect for their authority.

The FBI raid of Trump’s attorney Cohen’s office and personal residence did it for me. The destruction of Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, just for being associated with the Trump presidency has displayed rather grossly that we are all in danger if the power of these government agencies are turned against us. If they can be turned on Trump, they can be turned on all of us, and I’m personally not OK with that. That is not acceptable behavior. If Martha Stewart had to go to jail for lying to the FBI and the rest of these people like Flynn, Manafort and Cohen are in similar trouble for similar reasons, then Hillary Clinton should get the death penalty, as should most of the Democratic Party because they are guilty of far, far worse. They not only lied, but they destroyed evidence and the fact that they are still free and not prosecuted tells us that there is a double standard. Justice isn’t blind, it’s fully awake and it is discriminating in a terrible way between liberals and conservatives. That is not how law and order was supposed to ever be.

For me, the sooner these prosecutions take place, the better. I would like to see our society return to a civil system of respect and order. But we don’t have it now because the government at the highest level attempted to cover up several crimes that they committed to get a criminal candidate elected into the presidency. The FBI was bending the law to pick their new boss and if that goes unchallenged, we essentially will never have law and order in America again. So there isn’t a choice in the matter. One of those names listed in Sara Carter’s report must go to jail—at the very least. Likely, several of them need to go to jail—including Comey. He at least did as bad as Martha Stewart whom he prosecuted for lying to the FBI. Hiding evidence and leaking government property to outside sources is worse than what Stewart had done and we just cannot allow that kind of behavior to go unchecked. Otherwise it will be worse for all of us the next time.

Just to be clear, I do not recognize currently the authority of the FBI or the DOJ and that will last until the bad actors listed on Sara Carter’s report are prosecuted. It’s not a political thing, it’s just about respect for the law. When the people who were hired to be good guys turn out to have abused the system for whatever reason, they must be punished to the furthest extent of the law, otherwise we can’t declare to have any laws or agency of enforcement that really matters. A failure to act on obvious evidence by our elected representatives would be to surrender law and order to the chaos of the power-hungry and the insurrectionists of liberal society—and I’m personally not OK with that.

If anybody really wants to fix things for the benefit of America they’ll act appropriately. I watched very carefully the 20/20 interview with James Comey’s wife, the Hillary Clinton activist. Clearly, she was calling out for middle America to join her in impeaching Donald Trump. She was a radical who has bent her husband’s ear in dangerous ways. Sure, she spoke well while doing it, she is a Beltway liberal who is articulate and smart, but she has plans and she used her husband to implement those plans. That in itself wasn’t illegal. It wouldn’t be the first time a man in a powerful position was brought down by a woman—regardless of if the woman was a prostitute or a wife of 40 years. The concept is the same, Comey found himself caught between Loretta Lynch, the White House, the ethics of law and order and a house full of Hillary Clinton supporters. He tried to walk the tight rope as long as he could until Trump was elected, and he was blamed for it at home. Because of pressure from his wife, Comey couldn’t do his job with the president. It didn’t help that all the agents working for him like McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok were already making plans to use the FBI to end the newly elected president. So Comey tried to make everyone happy and it pushed him into breaking the law for which he is the guiltiest of everyone, because if he had done the correct thing in the beginning regarding the Clinton email server, the Democrats could have tried out someone else. Of course, from his point of view he had good intentions. But then again so did Martha Steward, Michael Flynn and many others who have fallen victim to an aggressive FBI. And now its time to pay the price and until that price is paid, I have no respect for the authority of the FBI. They might as well be a club of Girl Scouts selling cookies for as much as I care—they certainly aren’t guardians of law and order.

Rich Hoffman

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Thoughts on the Nature and Value of Geeks: The last hope of a rare few who have not given up on intellect

There are plenty of negative news stories out there but what they all have in common is that most of the participants of those stories, both on the end of generation, and on the receipt, all share crippled minds created for them by institutional restrictions socially mandated on previous historical context. Most of the problems of our society can be traced back to this essential problem. With that in mind I have been exploring over these last couple of weeks the incidents of society where positives are emerging, and I identified the Star Wars franchise as one of those things that create new, imaginative context to a new way at looking at old problems. While I agree that most of our human species is mired in dank, miserable thinking, I would say that roughly 5% are not. I meet a few here and there who are operating outside of the modern limits, who don’t care about baseball statistics and the NBA playoffs, or what’s going on in modern politics. They are seeking to fill their active minds any way possible. Most of the time their net results are that of social misfits whom nobody will ever listen to, and they will have no impact on the social circumstances around them, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any merit in trying, which they appear to be doing.

I was at the Barnes & Noble in West Chester at 9 AM sharp the day that James Comey’s tell nothing book came out. Actually, it told a lot—it said that in the Comey household James does what his wife tells him to do, and she was a Hillary Clinton supporter. So he broke the law to make her happy—its pretty much as simple as that. But I was there to get another book as well, the new Star Wars book Last Shot that was all about Han Solo, which I had been very eager to read. While I was in line at the checkout there were three other people there with me and they all had the Last Shot book in their hands—but none of them had the James Comey book. That told me a lot about the state of the world. I’m sure Comey’s book will sell, but the real interest was in fantasy alternatives to the present reality, and for people daring enough to ask, Star Wars was offering something to think about. All the people holding that book looked to be under 35, two of them were male, one was a female and they reminded me that there are people out there in the cracks of life who haven’t given up on a potential future—and I found that encouraging.

For my birthday last week my kids gave me a little Millennium Falcon Lego set to build with my grandson. While he was over during the weekend we took the time to build it and once we completed it he was very impressed with our work. He wanted to display it prominently on a book cabinet that I have which has a lot of models and trophies on top of it, because to him it meant a lot. As I’ve said before, the Lego Company has been doing some great work for years—both in video games and in toys. Every time I do a model kit of theirs I am always impressed with they way they engineer their products. This particular Millennium Falcon is a simple ten-dollar toy kit that you can get at Target, but I found it remarkably sophisticated in how it went together. After seeing my grandson’s reaction, I immediately considered getting the new Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon set. It has 7500 pieces and costs about $1,200. He probably needs a few years before working on that one, but it did spark my imagination on how productive such an experience could be. That’s when I found this video from the Tested guys, who are part of the Myth Busters television series.

All of the adults in that Tested group reminded me of the kind of people who were with me at Barnes & Nobel at 9 AM sharp to buy the latest Han Solo book. Society from the outside looks at people like these people and thinks they are wasting their time on fantasy, but what I see and have experienced with them is that they are in acts of rebellion against the status quo—they are standing against the tide of lackluster thinking that is so prevalent in modern society. Yes they are geeks, but that is to say that they are people who have not yet surrendered their minds to the apathy of modern society. They can’t find what they need in society to fill their minds, so they have turned to fantasy to satisfy their hungry intellects. It makes me very happy to see all those grown adults sit down and tackle that Millennium Falcon Lego build with such unbridled enthusiasm. I would say that there are more people like that in the world now than there were 30 years ago, or even 60, which is important to note.

People don’t spend $1,200 on a Millennium Falcon 1500-piece puzzle essentially because they don’t like to think. As I mentioned earlier this week about the opioid crises, the main cause of drug abuse is an intellect in conflict with their environment. I would dare say that those people in the Tested group probably don’t go out and get drunk very much, and they probably don’t do drugs because their minds are in harmony with their existence. It’s a shame that they had to turn to fantasy to get that harmony, but at least it’s a mechanism they have discovered which allows for such a positive relationship with themselves. And when you visit the toy aisle at Wal-Mart and Target, they have entire sections dedicated to Lego and puzzle games because they obviously are selling. Just as people don’t show up at 9 AM to buy the latest Han Solo book because they want to go out and smoke crack—to turn off their minds. Reading, no matter what it is turns on a mind and is a very positive experience.

Most of what drives our world to evil is the vacancy left when people have surrendered thought to the lazy whims of groupthink. Sports in many ways is a groupthink activity and is very popular with modern civilization. But more and more I am seeing the influence of fantasy elements like Star Wars creating in people a desire to sit down and build Millennium Falcon models and read books about that ship in stories that mean something to those who participate in the task of discovery. I saw in those three-other people in the bookstore line with me that day hope in their eyes. The world around them was letting them down in many ways and they were thoughtful enough to contemplate the issues. But their minds were hungry, and society wasn’t feeding them, so they turned out with me at 9 AM to buy a book they couldn’t wait to get their hands on. And I’m noticing more of these people year by year, and that gives me a lot of hope for tomorrow. They are still in the extreme minority, but maybe, just maybe, they will become the majority in a few hundred years—and that would be a great thing for the human race!

Last Shot was the first Star Wars book that I have read since 2013/14 and I admit I only did it because it featured Han Solo as the primary character. I wanted to see how they were going to deal with Solo ahead of the movie coming out on May 25th. I have said many nice things over the past years about how important I think Star Wars books are to the next generation for all the reasons outlined in this article. But I have been very skeptical about the direction the Disney ownership has taken their acquired Star Wars franchise from a person I greatly admire in George Lucas. I am not happy about the more progressive direction that Star Wars has taken, but I am very happy that it is fueling the imaginations of people like those great Tested guys. I can say that after reading Last Shot I enjoyed it enormously and I will probably go and read the long list of new books that have been published since 2012. There is plenty of good value in those stories that justify the investment and all the fun that a grandpa can have with his grandkids for the next thirty years. And that all by itself is a wonderful attribute. It was a good book, and it made me very happy to have the opportunity to read it—which I did voraciously!

Rich Hoffman

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Comey’s Crime is in Being a “Yes Dear”: The reason for the political divide in America

I had more than a few friends tell me this week that they just can’t take the political divisions in their country anymore, and that they were going to seek more positive things to do with their lives. As they said, the rhetoric is just too divisive to have proper discourse between people, and they were checking out. These are media people who work in the business and it is ironic that we heard pretty much the same thing when James Comey gave his interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s 20/20 Sunday night. As book stores opened today, the day of this writing, I picked up Comey’s book and read it just to make sure my thoughts about the guy were correct—and of course they were. Essentially James Comey is like a lot of my friends in the media who were proclaiming that the world had shifted in a direction they didn’t understand, and they were refusing to participate. Comey after all had thought of himself as a reasonable person even though his wife and kids were rather radical leftists. If it had been Jeb Bush who was running against Hillary Clinton the only division in the Comey household would be whether or not a woman would become president, because institutionally, the two candidates were the same. But since it was Trump, there was nothing in James Comey’s background to prepare him intellectually for what that meant. And many people find themselves in the same quandary at this point of time and they are distressed by it.

James Comey protecting the way things were took it upon himself to alter the political landscape of the 2016 election. He meddled far more than any Russians, or fat slob hacker in the middle of Kansas—as Director of the FBI he tried to walk a fine line of keeping Hillary Clinton in the candidacy for president even though she essentially disqualified himself with the email scandal. Thinking in hindsight, Comey should have suggested prosecution of Hillary Clinton and let the DOJ refuse it. At least the DNC could have put up another candidate before the convention process. That would have been the right thing to do, but then Comey would have been blamed for eliminating the first woman potentially for president, which is what got him into trouble. That pressure likely came mostly from within his own home. Reading what he has said about the matter I am completely convinced that he did all that to make his wife and kids happy. To them, the first female president was far more important than the law, so Comey put himself in a bad spot based on family pressure. But it didn’t help that he was surrounded at the FBI by the same kind of Washington Beltway types who were ideologically far to the political left from the average American. They all thought the game they were playing was a different one from which produced Donald Trump as the head of the Republican Party and James Comey had no way to navigate that reality. That is clear in his book which is devastating for him personally. If these were normal circumstances, he’d be put in jail just for his testimony given in his book. But there is a long line of people who are in that line with him and I don’t know that there are enough jails for all of them, so who knows what will happen.

Comey obviously hated Donald Trump, but not for the reasons he has managed to articulate. After reading Comey’s book it is obvious from a psychological point of view that he resented Trump for not being as pussy whipped as he was, where his wife controlled him too much. Comey views his role in his marriage as a sacrificial sanctuary that takes precedence over his personal desires and here was a Donald Trump who did what he wanted, when he wanted to, who doesn’t appear to answer to anybody—even his wife, and to Comey this was something he just couldn’t get his mind around. So he developed a disdain for Donald Trump from the outset. Of course Trump’s hands were smaller than Comey’s. Comey is around 6’ 8.” But to Comey he had to build up his lack of inferiority to Trump any way he could justify so to preserve his own relationship with his long-time wife. Using his marriage to show moral superiority to Trump was the only way he could protect himself from the reality of Trump’s election and justify his radical behavior to attempt to impeach him. For Comey, that was the only way he could protect the world he understood it to be—even though that is obviously not the reality.

I can say that the palatable anger that my media friends are talking about come from a realization that many have not yet come to terms with—just as James Comey hasn’t. For at least 32 years, through all of Bill Clinton’s presidency, then George Bush, then 8 years of Barack Obama normal Americans quietly sat by and let the system work to the best of its ability. We didn’t protest every little thing. We didn’t seek the impeachment of the president every five seconds. I did take a case for the impeachment of Barack Obama down to John Boehner’s office where his people laughed at it—like it was such an impossibility that it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. So we worked really hard to put a change candidate for conservatism into the White House—after waiting all that time, and once the deed was done we did not receive the same respect for our guy. Now we see the political left pushing so hard against our choice with a constant barrage of disrespectful aggression that we are angry about it. And some Republicans that we thought we could trust have joined the left to preserve the institutions that we have come to hate due to our sudden mistrust.

Facebook is on fire with discontent, Twitter is rhetorically divisive, the comments sections of online newspapers are being shut down everywhere because the discourse is so volatile, and the reason is a good one. Normal Americans, for which I am one, have been lied to, manipulated, and used by people like James Comey for most of our lives and we aren’t happy about it. Jeb Bush and his brother were never our kind of Republican. James Comey was entirely too liberal for us, but we put up with him out of polite discourse and now that we have someone who truly does represent our part of the nation the same respect is not provided to our decision as we gave to the other side for three decades.

I announced on these pages many years ago that America was in a new civil war so none of this is a surprise to me. I think the hatred that is on display toward the political left these days is better than armed insurrection. It took a reality television star to really break down the ultimate reality television show—that which was driving our society politically at every level. Through Trump we have seen behind the scenes all the ugliness that was always there and we don’t like it. We always knew it was there, but we couldn’t be certain until Trump was elected. Then and only then did he metaphorically pull down the curtains, so we could all see the characters hiding there who were running everything we loved essentially into the ground. James Comey was one of the villains—a Boy Scout like figure who used his image to hide his political radicalism—which was largely formed by his “yes dear” relationship with his liberal wife. The same could have been said about the entire Hollywood industry, our favorite stores, and our music industry. Our country was being drug in a direction we didn’t like and when we put a stop to it we really saw the fangs of the other side and now instead of polite discourse, we have a fight. What did anybody really think was going to happen? Were we expected to stand down forever? We believed in the election process and now that appears to be in jeopardy, what are we to do—be happy about it and say, “yes dear?” No, that’s not how things work, especially in my world.

All that’s happening now is that my side is fighting back, they aren’t taking it any more the acceptance that the other side from Comey all the way over to the most radical leftist of the Communist Party USA have been very disrespectful to our part in the great Republic of America. Comey didn’t respect our “democracy” he tried to use his position as head of the FBI to pick his new boss—even if she grossly broke the law. He expected us to be civil about it? If you can’t trust the FBI, who can you trust? As we’ve seen the FBI has been weaponized against normal Americans, just as the IRS has been. Then to make matters worse, we elected our kind of guy into the most powerful position in the world and the FBI was audacious enough to break into the lawyer’s office of the President and steal information, so they could leak it to the press to instigate an impeachment case and we are supposed to be alright with that? If they’ll do it to the president, what would they do to the rest of us? So yes, we are mad, and no, we’re not going to take it anymore. And to those in charge within the media and in politics, you should all be extremely happy that its words and not bullets that we’ve chosen as our vehicles of justice. That could change in an instant if the political left continues to push it—which it seems obvious to me they are intent to attempt. That is their fault, they chose to disrespect us. Respect goes both ways; one side can’t give it all while the other pisses all over it. So they should expect to get everything they are getting and worse, because it’s what the political left chose. Yes, the situation has plenty of room to escalate. The lefties, for which Comey is a part, better decide if they really want to play at this bloodsport. Politeness should have never been identified as weakness. We simply waited for our turn and now that we have it, we aren’t going to put up with getting pushed around and lied to.

Rich Hoffman

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