It’s not just the cosmetics on corporate television; we are seeing some real trends in politics that everyone should take notice of.  What we learned after 2020 was just how much control an invisible sector of a ruling class had over our elections, and in America, we were very far away from a real republic.  It was a kind of dictatorship run by corporate conglomerations who thought that communism China style was the wave of the future and that everyone else should get on board with it.  I read countless books, particularly by people like Ray Dalio, who had already committed to this World Economic Forum view of the world from the power players at Davos early in the last decade, so for them, it was all a done deal.  But as mystified that many are that Trump is headed to be the nominee for the Republican Party and that Ohio was one of the first states to fully endorse him officially, there are a lot of perplexed faces out there from the mainstreamers who thought they had it all figured out.  They didn’t, and the evidence of all that was obvious in a recent Central Committee meeting in Butler County, Ohio, where the actual trends were showing themselves quite obviously.  The mainstream candidates found that they weren’t so mainstream and that the baked-in opposition party approach to mass collectivism, such as the local Sheriff’s commitment to unionized labor, was dramatically out of step with the coming political trends.  No surprise for me, I have watched this evolution since before the Tea Party movement started in 2009, as a direct reaction to the implantation of Barack Obama as a terrorist selection of the Weather Underground party, which many of us pointed out but were not listened to.  It was the same kind of denial that resulted in local politics in 2023 as the Central Committee picked new faces for party endorsements to replace the old ones. Suddenly, the political world took on an entirely new meaning. 

For instance, there has been a lot of talk lately about Sara Carruthers, a state representative for the 47^th district in Ohio who had just been censored for not supporting the Speaker of the House that should have been elected, but instead worked with Democrats to put in place a known RINO, last year.  After the defeat of Lynda O’Conner off the Lakota school board in 2023, Sara expressed her views about extremism in the Republican Party to the Journal News quite explicitly, saying that she found them alarming.  For a long time now people have been frustrated by Sara’s obvious leanings toward the Democrat Party and there has been a desire to purge the party of RINOs, (Republicans in Name Only) and that has most percolated within the Central Committee meetings.  Over the last decade, better people have joined these Central Committees and have sought to reform the Republican Party from the inside out because they were frustrated with the kind of Republicans who were running the party, people like John Kasich and John Boehner.  But there was always a lot of strong-arming and intimidation that went with these meetings, so it has taken a while for many members to find their courage and conduct themselves the way that party politics was designed to best represent the voter base of a community.  So Sara didn’t get an endorsement for the Republican Party this time; instead, it went to Diane Mullins.  Shocking in the traditional way of viewing politics, where those who raise the most money tend to have the most power.  That shift has changed since Trump entered politics. Gradually, the Central Committees have grown the courage to fill their roles appropriately instead of being intimidated into voting a certain way. 

Another emerging trend is in MAGA candidates, like Bernie Moreno, who J.D. Vance has endorsed as a partner over Secretary of State Frank LaRose.  Frank LaRose only received 30% of the vote among the Ohio State GOP Central Committee, whereas Bernie Moreno received 70%.  Remember the story about Sheriff Jones, who went on a personal vendetta against State Rep Thomas Hall? It looked like the young man was done in politics because the powerful sheriff targeted him for destruction, along with several other people as well.  Thomas received 100% of the vote.  But when it came time to endorse the sheriff, he did not come highly recommended, which is a direct result of his activism against the very popular Butler County auditor Roger Reynolds, whom the sheriff falsely prosecuted for purely political power-playing reasons.  At this last meeting, according to those there, the Sheriff was very upset about his weak vote and decided to pull his name from the endorsement process.  I recently had a pleasant conversation with Sheriff Jones about his new car in the parking lot of an event we were both at.  It was a nice car.  We also joked about our hats because we both wear cowboy hats in public.  And we kept the conversation light.  The vice mayor of Hamilton, Ohio, was there, and the meeting was a “lofty” occasion.  I may like the Sheriff personally, but he has not shown himself to be a Republican these last few years since Trump left the White House.  And that exploded at this recent Central Committee meeting.  Without a full-throated endorsement, he decided he was done with the whole political party endorsement process and didn’t need it.  After all, who was going to run against him?  As angry as he was, who else could he blame?  He was using the political party to strong-arm the Central Committee for years, and finally, they stood up to him, and he didn’t like it.  But it was based on his actions, not theirs.  It’s in subtle ways like that which politics is changing all across America, and many have not yet figured out just what kind of impact that will have.  Which I say will be dramatic. 

People are tired of corruption in politics, and many good people have joined the Central Committees in their communities to help root it out.  For too long, powerful political characters and their donor backing imposed their will on Central Committee members without much respect.  But that has changed.  Central Committee members in Ohio endorsed President Trump in these same meetings, so the trend is moving in an obvious direction.  And if I had to bet money on it, I would say that all this has the attention of Jack Smith’s case in Washington, D.C.  He knows his case is going nowhere and now he’s looking to shift the blame to the Supreme Court by accelerating the trial for insurrection.  The goal was to prevent Central Committee members from endorsing Trump ahead of the primaries coming up.  But now that Trump is so far out early, these court cases won’t do what they were intended, so Smith is looking to get out of it and place the blame on the high court to protect his reputation.  I’m also sure that there is a way for Sheriff Jones to get back into everyone’s good graces.  He was good in Butler County when Trump was in the White House for the first time.  And now that Trump is running again, the Sheriff can get behind that effort and people can come together again.  But the days of forcing big labor RINOs who would otherwise be Democrats if they ran anywhere else are over.  Central Committees are doing their jobs, not just rubber-stamping some of these political candidates.  And when they do wrong, such as Sara Carruthers has, they endorse alternatives, which is about time and a sign of good things to come.

Rich Hoffman