Category: Archeology

Government Schools are Like Dirty Public Toilets: If you gotta go, you go

Public Schools are like Public Toilets

I often say about public education that it’s like using a Porta-Potty at an outdoor concert full of drunks after waiting for an hour in a long line in the hot summer sun as opposed to a nice private bathroom in your master bedroom.  I mean, if you gotta go, you use the damn thing.  But optimally, you want the nice one off your bedroom.  Public education is garbage and has been really since its inception.  I try to help make the public school in my district better by electing good people into office. Still, so long as the progressive labor unions run the government schools and a corrupt communist-oriented Department of Education sets the policy, there isn’t much hope for public schools.  And that’s the real point from the government and why the governor race in Virginia is competitive.  Parents after Covid have heard the quiet stuff out loud, and it has scared them.  Your children are not your children, they are possessions of the state, and with that simple revelation, Terry McAuliffe uttered that which was never meant to be said in public.  The true intentions of the entire progressive movement, the micromanagement of every aspect of our lives, and the theft of our children to turn them into communist insurgents.  Thankfully this year, and this 2021 election, we have options.  But the damage is decades old and is nothing new to me. 

I started this blog site over a decade ago to cover the stories our local newspapers wouldn’t cover about gross sexual acts teachers routinely committed against the students of my home district of Lakota.  This latest terror in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a guy dressed up as a girl raped two girls brutally in a bathroom, is not unusual in public education. What’s unique about this one is that it involved the trans bathroom controversy, which is going on in most public schools.  The issue is hot in Lakota, which is in northern Cincinnati.  A majority of the current school board members supported it, which is why there are so many candidates seeking to knock them out during this election.  But this has been going on all over the United States because it comes from the Department of Education essentially and the talking points of the teacher’s unions who are entirely in support of all the Democrat Party platforms.  The trans condition is a new wrinkle to the old problem of school boards covering up this bad behavior from the parents to keep all this bad behavior undercover.  Newspapers and local television will cover the football games and all the feel-good stories but ignore all the vile sex abuse in just about every corner.  A quick search of my blog site will list hundreds of stories that I have covered, and those are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more that goes on that nobody will ever find out about. 

I ran into a lot of trouble with Lakota when I covered a grade school teacher taking naked pictures and sexually abusing students in the classroom.  This was ten years ago, and the school board very much wanted to cover up the whole case.  They thought that I was hurting real estate values in our community by slamming the school by me covering it.  They worried that people wouldn’t move to the neighborhood because everyone knew that schools were the only reason people bought homes.  Most adults in my community didn’t want to hear about the sexual molestation of children by school employees because it might hurt property values.  So the coverups continued.  Ten years later, one of the people running for this year’s school board is Vanessa Wells, who had her daughter threatened with murder in Lakota.  Of course, the school board tried to cover it up and attempted to suppress the story, which was a considerable court case.  Vanessa became tired of being a victim, so she put her name in the ring to become a school board member.  Truthfully, the way to solve the problem is to elect good school board members. Still, until recently, until some of these stories started being talked about because parents realized during Covid shutdowns what was going on in the schools, nobody wanted to discuss it.  Parents were happy to get the free babysitting service, and they didn’t want to know the bad stuff.  People voted for big progressive school board people, and the unions ran all over them.  In that way, government schools became like that public toilet that nobody cleaned, and people pissed all over, then expected good results.  

I’m happy to hear that more and more parents are homeschooling their children.  My kids are homeschooling their kids, and the resources I see there are amazing for them.  When my kids were young, my wife and I homeschooled them at various times.  One issue was when the school demanded we give our kids sex education in the 4th grade.  We had to pull our kids out of school because the political pressure was so great that it became impossible to send them to school.  My kids both spent their senior years of high school in Europe, where they were learning about life in real-time, not just reading about it in some art class where their classmates were plotting all the ways they would get drunk on a Friday night at a football game.  I learned firsthand that public schools were a waste of time and were evil in their social intentions, so I’m not surprised at all at the news stories now. I’m happy that so many people have finally caught on to what I’ve been saying for three decades.  The straw that finally broke the back of public education was the overstep of progressive politics, first with Covid, then by driving the transexual issues of unisex bathrooms. 

I am encouraged by each election, as they are all opportunities for positive changes back to tradition.  But the brand of government schools is forever damaged.  A few years ago, if I had said that public schools were equivalent to a dirty public toilet, many people would come to their defense.  But not today.  Now, most people are just saying, “yeah, you’re right.” Public schools and their government overlords and labor unions have done it to themselves.  But none more than Terry McAuliffe letting the cat out of the bag at a debate with his challenger in Virginia for the governor race.  It’s true; public schools have always sought to steal our children, to use them, to abuse them, to turn them into Anti-American activists. It’s the system itself that is at fault.  It was broken from the start, and the school board’s job was not to manage the district and the money but to lay cover for all the crimes because the value of the school to the community was much more important than the kids themselves.  So great evils were perpetuated, and the expectation was to always cover it up from the parents so they’d keep paying for the higher taxes and keep running on the treadmill to fuel the whole enterprise, never questioning anything.  But times have changed, and I think it’s for the better, as ugly as it is.  It’s about time that everyone admits what the problem has always been.  Public schools are dirty and messy, and if you love your child, you would never send them there.  Ever.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Nature of Power: 35% of voters want to overturn the 2020 election

The Nature of Power

Probably the most misunderstood thing in the world is the nature of power and how you know you have it, and others recognize that you do.  This came to my mind for several reasons, most notably the discussion on the Steve Bannon Warroom podcast recently where it was revealed that 30% of all registered voters want to see the 2020 election overturned.   From my perspective, I feel the United States moved in a new and healthy direction during the last week of October 2021.  Not through our political system, that is a disaster, but I feel that the right people see what’s going on and that Democrats are ruining their brand forever by what they are doing now.  When I heard that 30% number, it caught my attention because I understand power I have and want to share with people.  It is, after all, one of the big themes in my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, who really has power and what can be done with it.  Most everyone gets their understanding of power wrong.  It’s not their fault; it’s just the way we teach ourselves.  Much of the world has sought to mask that misunderstanding by making power a process and not an intellectual attribute, leaving many wholly lost about the nature of power.  It’s not in Democracy, the opinions of the masses that power is acquired, which is the current strategy of globalists, Big Tech, political parties, communist countries, every villain you can think of.  They seek to gain power by a recognized title, saying that Dr. Fauci is powerful because he’s at the front of the NIH and is the highest-paid government employee in America.  But in reality, he’s just a sniveling lier who could be crushed about as quickly as we might swat a fly.  In Dr. Fauci’s case, the power is an accepted system, whereas the real power comes from other measures. 

I often use the example in my book of The Lonely Stranger, who steps into a saloon in the Wild West and moves through a room full of desperate people, prostitutes, gamblers, cutthroats, swindlers, rustlers, robbers, and dealmakers.  The music stops when they enter and step to the bar for a drink with their back to the room.  All the power in the world is in this lonely stranger because the room’s contents are moved to action by the new presence.  Some are thinking about how they might kill the stranger and take all he has.  Others wonder if there is some secret knowledge the stranger has that might enrich the lives of those so desperate.  Perhaps a friendship would be profitable.  Prostitutes might hope for an easy new customer.  Everyone looks at the stranger and wonders who they are and what benefit they might be to the desperate. It’s a classic western theme that was developed in American culture and is unique in the world.  The power, of course, is entirely in the hands of the lonely stranger at the bar, making the room guess how the stranger’s life might benefit them.  Either through crime, friendship, lust, or even intoxication.  Power is when others are moved to action by some instigator.  Understanding that and then manipulating those around the room to your objectives is how good strategy is evoked and utilized correctly. 

Most people in the world want to step into a saloon-like that and be liked by the participants.  In so doing, instantly, all their power is given to the mob, and they lose any leadership prospect.  Leadership is not understood even by those who naturally possess it.  Leadership is in knowing how to use power to move the masses to the desired effect.  A good leader can make the people in the saloon do anything they want, and it doesn’t matter if it’s 100 people or 1 billion people.  The saloon can be as big as you want it to be; people always behave the same for the same reasons no matter what culture we are dealing with.  The leverage always goes to the lonely, unknown stranger alone at the bar with their back to the room until they give away that power by showing a desire for friendship.  Once that weakness is revealed, then the lonely stranger becomes another member of some peer group.  They may influence that peer group, but not the rest of the room.  As a great CEO, Trump came into the presidency understanding this trait of leadership. That’s how the MAGA movement happened and how Trump was even able to control the flow of the media.  They may have hated him, but he had power over them, just like those who wanted to kill the lonely stranger plotted and schemed in the corners behind layers of cigar smoke in how to end the stranger’s life.  So long as the stranger understands what’s going on, he can make it work to his advantage. 

But it’s a lonely realization, leadership.  And we are taught as little kids, and throughout our lives, that friendship is the most important thing.  So we walk into these rooms full of people and seek friendship, not the naturally associated power with our independence.  We all have tremendous power until we give it away under some assumption of winning the hearts of our attempted murders or the schemes of the whores, and gamblers with friendship.  If we just stayed at the bar with our back to the room, letting the various elements simmer on their thoughts, we would maintain power over all of them.  In such a way, one person can influence through leadership many hundreds of people.  Or perhaps thousands.  That is why it was significant to hear that 30% of all people supported turning over the election.  That is way more people than are needed to change society.  A considerable revolution could occur with influential leaders under 5%, which is essentially how the Democrats have made this current power play.  They are playing by the wrong rules and have made several fatal mistakes, and those mistakes are blowing up in their faces as I write this.  President Trump has maintained that 30% during his entire presidency and before and after because those people make up the lonely, stranger aspect of the saloon inhabitants.  And they haven’t turned to the room for friendship but have remained with their back to it, cooly sipping on their drinks and watching all the desperate faces from under the brim of their hat in a mirror hanging behind the bar to show the room and its cutthroats in all its glory.  And that’s more than we need to win the war and the world, which I find very encouraging.  When you understand leadership and how it works, you can then know that the modern political methods of acquiring power, whether Facebook, Twitter, or the Deep State, are all wrong because they seek friendship as their means of manipulation and the schemes of Democracy.  But that’s not how power works, and they are learning all too late that everything they have built their life around has been false, and they will fail as sure as you are reading this, which has presented them with a crisis many of them were never prepared for, and it’s to our benefit to exploit.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How To Bring Down Big Organizations: The United Nations and China have already lost

The Way to Bring Down Large Organizations, like China

One thing I don’t want to see is a bunch of people being scared.  When I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I did it to help people who may want the help of understanding a strategy that could help them through the scariest circumstances.  After all, that is my experience, I’ve seen all the scary stuff any person should ever have to see in a lifetime, and I still have a lot of lifetime to live.  But I’ve never woken up afraid of anything in my life, even under paralyzing circumstances.  And with things being the way they are in the world, it’s a good time to share some of the knowledge with other people who may be so inclined to provide leadership for themselves toward the aim of making a better life.  So increasingly, now that the Biden administration is doing its thing and the global forces against us have shown their intentions, I want those who have a mind for it to rest at ease and think clearly about the matters at hand.  It is essential to understand the true nature of power and how to defeat overwhelming forces because those are the problems of our current time, and I offer in my book a guide on how to get there.  But I’m not just selling the information in a book; I’m happy to tell and teach anybody who wants to learn.  The book puts it all in one place, but I offer openly much of what is in the book because I want to see people win at life, especially when it comes to the MAGA movement and the threat of China and the United Nations in general.  Sure, they are big organizations with many resources behind them. Still, as I point out in the video above, they are easy to bring down, just as most large organizations are for all the reasons discussed in this article. 

The big falsehood that many of us have been taught, and China affirms it during each Olympic season, is that large groups of people who show they can do exactly what they are told are the most critical element of strategy.  China enjoys showing the world at military displays and Olympic events how they can get thousands of people to coordinate perfectly in complicated ways with mass obedience.  Big companies like to teach how “compliant” their workforce is to company memos and compliance audits where instructions are followed to the letter and never strayed from.  Too much of the world and the long span of human history, compliance to orders is the primary concern and measure success.  That is, after all, the fear of most military affairs. “Sir, I was just following orders.” Soldiers are not expected to think; they are expected to comply.  In our schools, we are to follow a teacher’s instructions to do what we are told.  So it should never be a surprise to anybody that when America was attacked by global forces, throughout the last several decades, especially in the previous couple of years, we would be assaulted through our natural compliance to instructions provided to us by centralized authorities.

In many cases, we have been taught this method of value assessing our entire lives.  The dog whistle is something most of us hear when a Covid health official tells us to wear a saliva-covered mask in public and not to take hydroxychloroquine to fight off a bioweapon virus produced in a lab in China to take over the economies of the world under the flag of communism.  We comply because we were taught to, even if we think the concept is stupid.  Most people in the world do.  Likely much of China believes its authority figures are fools, but they follow their instructions because of the way they have been taught to think about their roles in the schemes of things. 

Yet leadership is not in following instructions because the centralized authority issuing the instructions might get it wrong. In so doing, it will put the lives of hundreds, thousands, and millions of people at risk in their error.  I often tell the story of how I worked at five large companies before I ever turned 30 and could never cut a break by any of them staying open.    In spite of any hard work I did, they all managed to close due to bad leadership, bad because they were too centralized in their approach to problem-solving.  I watched many brilliant people destroy great companies. They put all their strategic efforts into the wrong priorities, believing that organizations were great because people followed directions.  Well, at a certain point, I gained the ability to be a leader myself, and my method has always been to teach people how to think so that if a centralized authority gets a strategy wrong, then the people closest to the problem can make a correction and solve the problem right then and there.  I often like to use the football metaphor of calling an audible at the line of scrimmage.  The game plan might be acceptable until you see that the other team has adapted to what you’re doing and you need to make a change.  If a plan isn’t working, players need to change a play to adapt to what works. 

In The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I point out that one of the great strengths of the American way of doing things is our ability to think outside the box, to “shoot from the hip” when needed to approach problems less formalized.   It’s OK to have a plan and a strategy, but decentralizing the problem-solving process is the key to success in any culture, whether it be a company or a country.  Leadership is all about thinking on your feet rather than coming up with a game plan then forcing everyone to stick to it, even if it proves to be the wrong plan.  And that is the dirty little secret that China doesn’t want anybody to know about them.  The United Nations, too, are all too rigid, and even if they were to happen to read this, I have people from China who read here every day, likely censors, they could not correct course because their culture is not flexible enough.  What they value in a good society are all the wrong things.  They can only hide that fault if they can eliminate all their competition from revealing it to the world under pressure. 

This is why I said, especially to some compelling people in Washington D.C. when I first published my book, that The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business could bring down China without destroying the assets and people of the country.  China will lose whenever forced to play the gunfighter game, “shooting from the hip,” decentralizing authority in organizations and governments.  All the socialists that are running the United Nations are in the same condition.  They are compliance-driven, and any centralized authority issuing orders, such as the CDC has now made itself known for, will make mistakes. When they do, they are too slow to adapt to a victory position.  So in that way, prominent centralized authorities will always lead to failure, which is why history tells the stories of communism that they do.  Big companies go out of business for the same reasons.  But success comes not from relying on centralized processes but in teaching people to think as individuals toward a common cause but to make decisions about strategy at the point where the problems present themselves.  Not in the office of some far removed bureaucrat who doesn’t understand all the conditions involved.  And knowing that and the threats in front of us now, perhaps they will look less scary if viewed in this way.  It’s not about compliance; it’s about resolution and performance 100% of the time.  Those who don’t understand these types of things will eventually always lose. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Dr. Fauci is the Most Dangerous Criminal in the World: Yet, our corrupt government wants you to believe its Steve Bannon

Arrest Dr. Fauci

The rules haven’t changed; the release of the Covid-19 virus and its creation in a Wuhan lab is the biggest story in the entire world and its role in election fraud in the United States.  There was nothing more criminal than that story, which, if you believe the Covid death counts used to panic everyone into giving up their freedoms and bending the knee to the virus, actually killed a lot of people.  That makes Dr. Fauci’s lying to congress about the NIH funding of gain of function the most important story of this century.  What role did Dr. Fauci play in creating a bat coronavirus into something excessively transmissible to humans so that a pandemic could be inspired from it?  Who knew what, and when did they know it?  Without question, this is the biggest cover-up involving the most government employees that we have ever had to deal with.  Ohio Governor Mike DeWine asked for emergency powers a year before coronavirus was released from China, so people knew what was coming.  Who was there?  What role did they play?  And who paid for it all?  There aren’t more critical questions than those in the entire world, and really, nothing else should happen until those questions are answered.  Yet on the same day that the NIH revealed that Dr. Fauci had perjured himself to congress on this Covid issue, the same congress that impeached President Trump twice over made-up charges voted to hold Steve Bannon, the former aide to Trump, in contempt of congress for not appearing for testimony on their bogus January 6th commission.  While Dr. Fauci is running around free, Steve Bannon is now a fugitive of the law under the mercy of the Biden administration Department of Justice.  What world do we live in where discrepancies of the law happen like this, which are so obvious, yet accepted as reality?

I can certainly understand the Bannon situation.  He has one of the top podcasts globally that has better ratings than much of the mainstream media daily, and he keeps talking about the election fraud that occurred in the 2020 election. Congress wants desperately to shut him up.  Their role in that election fraud is a subject they want to bury, and Steve won’t let them.  At this point, the Great Reset was supposed to be well underway, and people were not supposed to be thinking about President Trump.  Biden’s America was already supposed to be full socialist, and the demise of our country was well down the path of no return.  People like Steve Bannon were not supposed to have power and influence still, so congress has come up with this phony January 6th commission to try and put everyone’s attention onto the protests of Trump supporters instead of the election fraud they were angered by.   The guilt that much of congress played in accepting election fraud in the 2020 election because it favored them is an issue that must be dealt with.  But that question falls behind the importance of the origins of coronavirus because it had an impact on all people everywhere and assaulted our global economy in ways nobody previously thought possible.  Not only do we have significant casualties from the created pandemic, but many lives have been ruined physically and financially.  How many people out there still can’t taste their food because our bodies never were meant to host a coronavirus that was only transmissible to bats before they altered that trait in a Wuhan lab under NIH funding? 

Just for lying to congress, Dr. Fauci should be in jail.  And that is before we understand the role he played in the gain of function research with the bat virus and his relationship with China in launching it into the world.  It may have been an accident.  China may have stolen NIH work and used it to make a bioweapon to destroy the Trump economy to get rid of him at the voting booth.  But then again, can we trust anything Fauci has said.  He has been caught lying many times.  And to get to the straight story, it will have to start with him.  What role did he play in the creation and unleashing of Covid-19?   And what preplanning occurred before its creation? Did he participate with Bill Gates and many others to apply climate change politics to creating the virus to turn health administrators into political dictators?  Such as why was the gain of function research started once again in 2017 after Trump was inaugurated as President when during the Obama years it was stopped?  Hmmmmm?  Questions, questions, questions.

Instead, we are supposed to think of Steve Bannon as the number one fugitive in America.  Steve Bannon, the private citizen who supported the President and has a successful podcast.  What role could he have had to inspire an insurrection on January 6th, 2021?  The question is, was January 6th even an insurrection?  Or was it a protest to the attempted insurrection of changing our entire way of life with Covid-19?  Who created an insurrection, the government who tampered with a bat virus to terrorize people into accepting United Nations climate change policies and wreck the lives of millions of people around the world?  Or Trump supporters who were hoping that the election results would be questioned properly on January 6th, but the government again didn’t listen to them and rubber-stamped the fraud anyway.  The big criminals, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others, openly coordinated with the government to censor Covid information that might have treated people with hydroxychloroquine and other medicines that could have contained the virus.  Instead, we found out that the Big Tech companies wanted to use the virus to change the nature of the global economy.  And they also funded the election fraud of the American 2020 election as outlined so very well in the Molly Hemingway book, Rigged.  We have evidence of all this activity by big tech and government.  People saw for themselves what was going on.  It wasn’t Steve Bannon who made anybody do anything.  It was anger at what they saw from their government that caused the protest of January 6th.  Steve Bannon was just another observer using the First Amendment to express his opinion.  So was Trump, for that matter.  The crime was in the lap of Dr. Fauci, who was at the head of the entire mess, including what the Big Tech attackers were doing.

Yes, this is the crime of the century.  It happened in China working with our government.  But worse than the crime is the cover-up, which this Congress and DOJ are actively still participating in.  And who could blame them?  They will deny, deny, and deny until they can’t any longer.  Getting to the bottom of it will take citizen journalism to get there because the mainstreamers are in on the whole thing.  They are compromised.  Notice that you don’t hear much about Molly Hemmingway’s new book, which should be the biggest seller of the year because of its content.  No, this is a significant crime, and it will take the people of America to retake their government starting with the obvious questions, who, what, why, when, and where.

We know Dr. Fauci was the who.  We know coronavirus was the what.  We know it happened right after Event 201 in New York, where the whole Covid-19 plan was role-played in front of many people, sponsored by the Gates Foundation.  And we know where it was at the Wuhan lab in China.  What we don’t know is the “why.”  Why did they do it, and why are they working so hard to cover it up.  If it were indeed an accident, somebody likely would have apologized by now.  That would mean that the intention was malicious, like many of us suspect.  And the answer to that question has to come from Dr. Fauci himself, perhaps by torture facing harsh prison sentencing.  He’s an older man, so life in jail won’t mean much to him.  We’ll have to get the truth out of him by some other method.  But then again, the people who are supposed to uphold justice were in on it.   So we have some work to do.  Dr. Fauci is the most dangerous criminal in the world.  Steve Bannon is just a guy asking questions that always should be answered.  And that they think Bannon is the dangerous one tells you everything you need to know.  When the truth is dangerous, you know what kind of world you are living in. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Looking for Justin Nix: The Sheriff is looking for you, lets get this thing resolved

(An update to this story, shortly after the Sheriff made this announcement many 911 calls came in and Justin was picked up in Hamilton on a drug charge. Nice job, and this holds true in Butler County especially, no drugs, no killings, and no other crimes similar in nature. If you see something, say something. And remember, Ohio has Stand your Ground laws now. Keep your neighborhoods safe from criminals.) Its unfortunate that there was a homicide in Hanover Township. Sheriff Jones and the team are trying to get everything figured out. Justin Nix or someone who knows him needs to help out.

Sheriff Jones is looking for Justin Nix

Call the Butler County Sheriff’s Office at (513) 785-1209 with any information.

Rich Hoffman

Failure is Not an Option in America: The Biden administration does not represent our way of life

Biden Tampering and its Costs

My idea of a nice night out would be in the Big Texan Steak House in Amarillo, Texas. I’ve had dinner in some of the finest restaurants in the world, including Chef Ramsey’s premier restaurant in London. I’ve dined in Paris and other exotic places, but what I expect out of service, and this will continue, is the way Americana is on full display at the Big Texan in Amarillo, Texas.  I say that because, under the radical left-leaning communists of this insurgent Biden administration, the trend is to go Europe where some unshaved armpit of a woman gradually gets around to taking your order looking like a tattooed pin cushion from the movie Hellraiser.  As an American, I can promise I will never lower my expectations as the Biden people want and accept failure as an option on anything.  Certainly not food and not work effort.  America is not Europe, thankfully, where they don’t work hard often enough for anything.  In America, it should be expected in my mind to work all you can as much as is needed to do the job at hand, no excuses.  And with that in mind, the supply chain problems that are a direct cause of the Biden administration are not going to cut the cheese.  I expect what you get from any American company at the Big Texan and not the café in Paris.  I don’t care about the history as much as I care about the results. 

So it goes with the Biden vaccine mandates that the tampering of American workforces by the government has already had disastrous results.  I think many of the Marxists in the Democrat party like the results they are seeing.  They love to stop the machine of the world.  I told everyone when Covid first happened that it was like a Pearl Harbor attack from the greenie weenies.  It was never about the virus; it was always about stopping the American economy so that China could catch up or pull ahead.  And the Biden administration is practically stating in blinking lights that they want to help China accomplish that task by continuing to harm the American economy any way they can.  When the gay guy Pete Buttigieg takes on an important job, he is irresponsible to take a few months off for maternity leave.  His dude at home can take care of the baby. He’s Secretary of Transportation, an important job.  You can’t take a few months off if you have an essential job to do. That’s his responsibility to manage his personal affairs so that a job can get done.  But since he’s doing it, his subordinates will do it, and soon nobody is showing up for work, and everyone is taking off for maternity leave, and for Covid and nobody is doing any work. 

That is the reason that container ships are not getting unloaded and are stacking up on the coasts.  There aren’t enough workers to do the work, and the attitude by the big-government types is more European than American. I’ve been all over Europe, and their attitude is always, “what’s the rush.  Take your time.” Every time someone around the world says that to me, it boils my blood.  It’s yet another reason I wrote the book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I’m all about speed and accuracy and getting it done yesterday.  Not whenever someone takes a notion to finish.  Like at the Big Texan, they don’t make you wait forever for your big plate of food served to you by a girl with painted-on jeans and a cowboy hat with a smile on her face.  They get it to you fast and with more food than you could hope to eat.  They work hard to earn a tip.  In Europe, they give it to you when they get around to it, and what they give you is the smallest portion they can get by with, and you even have to ask for ice in your drinks.  Europe has been destroyed with the poison of laziness, and now these progressive losers in the Biden White House want to sell us the same load of crap in America.  Pete takes off for a baby that he biologically can never have with a marriage that most of the nation doesn’t even recognize because marriage is between a man and a woman. We’re supposed to put up with this lazy approach to transportation.

Then to show how stupid they are, beyond their deliberate attacks of capitalism, they lecture us about working the third shift and driving trucks at night when there is less traffic, without ever dealing with the real problems.  The trucks are waiting to pick up commerce at these ports, but the boats aren’t getting unloaded.  People aren’t working three shifts per day, seven days per week.  They take off for every little Covid protocol and take extended paternity leaves to take care of babies when their spouse should be tag-teaming the responsibility.  Everyone is taking advantage of these new progressive rules that are too European from this new administration, and the result is work stoppages.  I come from a background where I worked two full-time jobs throughout the week, and my wife and I had a paper route on the weekends to make ends meet so that she could stay home with our kids.  We managed our life and did what we had to do to make money, and I expect people to do the same.  I have no sympathy for someone like Mayor Pete, who takes off a few months to look at a baby sucking on a pacifier.  If you accept an essential job, do the critical job. 

So when people wonder why we have supply chain problems, it’s because of the fault of the Biden administration.  When he was president, Trump went through an actual shutdown of the entire economy, but somehow the shelves still got stocked.    What changed was that this new, insurgent administration has set labor policy in the fashion of European socialists and communists.  People show up for work when they decide to and take every leave of absence the government gives them an excuse to take.  And the net result is that labor shortages are erupting everywhere.  Most notably recently, the vaccine mandate is pushing people out of the workforce and back into their homes.  I think that’s not a bad idea for the long term.  Much like Covid destroyed the cycle of public schools sending many kids back into the home for their educations, I think we may very well see a return of the housewife in America due to all these government intrusions.  That would help a lot of things.  But in an economy that is counting on every adult to be in the workplace, we will see a significant recession in workplace participation as a result, and the government has only itself to blame.  Speaking for myself, I am not going to accept lackluster performance from anybody in America.  I expect the Big Texan, not some European approach that is slow and ineffective.  Yet, what the Biden administration is selling is a loser mindset.  They are slow, lazy, and looking for reasons not to do work.  That is the administration’s projection, so it is directly their fault that our supply chains have many problems. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester: Mark Welch, the Superstar of Politics

Government is Best when it Gets out of the Way

As I listened to Mark Welch speak at a special fundraiser preview event at the new honky-tonk in West Chester called Lori’s Roadhouse, I couldn’t help but think that government is good, at least in West Chester.  When I say honky-tonk, I’m not talking about the old days of Gilley’s in Pasadena, Texas, where Urban Cowboy took place.  This place in West Chester is more like the modern Gilley’s in Las Vegas, very nicely put together luxuriously.  There is nothing cheap about it; it’s an ample space to host very large national talent for concerts. It’s something special for the Cincinnati area, and it’s great to see it located in West Chester, Ohio.  It’s not by accident.  The endeavor is a combination of great government that pushed out of the way as much nonsense as possible so that the dream of Greg and Lori Fisher could put all their great efforts into creating such a wonderful venue. I’ve been to places like Lori’s Roadhouse in parts of the country far away from Cincinnati.  But the moment I stepped into Mark’s fundraiser and saw what the owners were up to, I was enchanted.  There wasn’t a better way to show why Mark Welch should be re-elected as trustee of West Chester.  It’s not so much what an elected official can do for a project like Lori’s Roadhouse, but what kind of nonsense Mark can remove from the Fishers to let their creative input do the great work of creating such a wonderful place. 

Mark Welch and one of the owners, Lori Fisher herself

I view business as a creative enterprise, and I deeply respect people who go out on a limb and build new things that contribute to an economy.  Something like Lori’s Roadhouse is one of those things that adds to the many other things there are to do in West Chester.  There are so many options, and a lot of the reason is that the government has been small enough not to crush the hopes and dreams of entrepreneurs along the way.  It is hard enough to come up with an idea and then fund it with seed money.  It’s quite another to deal with politicians and other bureaucrats who embed themselves into the system to make a molehill of regulation into mountains for their benefit.  Usually, projects like Lori’s Roadhouse would be crushed before a business plan could ever be conducted because of politics.  I can think of hundreds, if not thousands of places around the country where a place like Lori’s Roadhouse would do well.  But, the politics of those areas would prohibit the dream from becoming a reality. 

Mark Welch and his wife Karen
Mark Welch doing what he does, being a celebrity politician

I had a chance to talk to Lori and her husband Greg Fisher quite a lot which was nice.  It was busy at the fundraiser, and I wasn’t sure if I’d get the chance.  As it turned out, Lori is the perfect front lady for such a place. She’s very friendly and optimistic, a fun personality which a place like that needs.  She told me she usually likes to work behind the scenes, but I can see why her name is on the place.  It deserves to have her name on the place.  Then there is her husband Greg, who had just spent months and months working out every little detail of this spectacular venue.  The food was great.  The bar was full.  The bathrooms are designed to still look good after lots and lots of drinking.  There is plenty of space for the men and women to have their dignity and get back to the action of live country music, a sports bar setting in much of the place, but a vast stage and dance hall area complete with VIP booths.  It was all top class, and the acoustics were fabulous as personally supervised by Greg.  As he ran down the list of all the elements of the place, it was apparent, he had a genuine love for the work, and I was happy to see it. That’s where someone like Mark Welch comes into these kinds of things.  Mark had worked in the background ever so subtly to help take away the burden of government from the Fishers so they could focus on the important stuff. Like securing the millions of dollars a place like that would cost and building a reputation that would bring in the big acts from all over the country.  A modern Gilley’s, but I would say better and with more class.  Something specific to West Chester. 

Lori and her Husband Greg Fisher, a dream come true in West Chester

TC Rogers was there; he is one of the commissioners of Butler County, where some of the legacy zoning issues made the project hard to get moving.  But at least West Chester didn’t do as other places do and compound the problem.  There were a lot of big-name politicians at Mark’s event, which was a good way to open a good American testament to goodness that Lori’s Roadhouse was offering.  It was undoubtedly a place anybody could enjoy, but country music, big leather boots, and cowboy hats draw a certain kind of political flavor, and it was on full display.  I had just returned from Jackson, Wyoming, where they have a similar high-class flair to their country background.  They have some very classy honky-tonk types of places there, but Lori’s Roadhouse was far better.  It looked and felt like something right out of Music City, Nashville.  It was unapologetically American for sure.  It had the kind of swagger that I had just been bragging about that I saw at a Cody, Wyoming rodeo.  They were similar in their boot-kicking display of Americana and a tip of the cowboy hat to great family tradition. 

Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, a super cool place of Americana and family friendly entertainment
Mark Welch Gets It! No Income Tax!!!!!

The community will have an option not just for the concerts but for a place to stop by after work, have a few drinks, and talk to people in the community; Lori’s Roadhouse will be a real treasure.  It’s not fair to give Mark so much credit because the Fishers did all the work along with their crews.  But I have to give Mark and the trustees credit for not getting in the way, and Mark specifically for helping where he could make the process of dealing with the government not such a challenging endeavor.  I had to smile a bit to myself as I listened to Greg and Lori talk about their new place because I have heard so many hundreds of stories over the years from people who never get things like this launched into reality.  And they had managed to do it. Usually, what ends up happening is the life gets sucked out of a project like this by all the rules and regulations of government.  It’s not often where a dream comes close to the original vision, and in the case of Lori’s Roadhouse, it’s easy to see the dream of the owners as they intended it to be, and that is the result of good government that knows when to help and when to get out of the way.  Often the skill of politicians is in knowing when not to be part of the problem, but in being part of the solution.  And when they figure that much out, great things like Lori’s Roadhouse happens.  And I am very excited about the results. 

TC Rogers, Commissioner of Butler County with the Owners of Lori’s Roadhouse

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

LEA Endorses Current School Board: More reasons to vote for Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi

The LEA is wanting to Pick their Own Boss

News flash, the LEA, the Lakota Education Association have endorsed their three picks for the school board.  They endorse Kelley Casper and Michael Pearl, incumbents, and support the Brad Lovell replacement, Doug Horton.  No surprise there, as I’ve always said, those are all the liberals on the school board and why it has never functioned correctly.  The labor union puts its own kind of people on the board, so it’s no wonder that union contracts get approved without a whimper, transexual bathrooms are something to even talk about, and Critical Race Theory is infesting the hallways of all the schools.  When you let the teacher’s union pick their bosses, you naturally get a disaster, which is precisely why public education all across the country right now is in a crisis.  But I think it’s good to see these endorsements because now the union is saying the quiet part out loud.  For so many years, they have hidden their intentions beyond a bipartisan mask that they used to hide the politics of these candidates. This year, because of the pressure, the LEA had to show their cards, and once they did, every voter is now armed with a truth that wasn’t there for them before.  I’ve always said it, but now people can see for themselves.

Two Republican endorsed candidates created the pressure I support emphatically, Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi.  There are other challengers as well, but it was the Republican endorsement that made the faces of the LEA melt and decry how unfair it was for them.  They expected everyone to keep playing by the rules of impartiality. At the same time, they put their people in the office in the background and destroyed the Lakota budget with union nonsense and progressive politics.  If there is ever a hope of fixing government schools, the priority is to get the politics out of them.  And there is nothing about labor unions that isn’t about politics, especially the teacher’s union.  As in the case of Lakota, the LEA is a subsidiary of the OEA, the Ohio Education Association.  Then, of course, the OEA is a subsidiary of the NEA, the National Education Association.  You end up with a massive political action group of members who are soldiers for progressive politics, and the money we pay them off property taxes is taken and used to fuel the Democrat Party.  These unions do not give money to Republicans.  They are purely a radical political arm of the Democrat Party.  And in Butler County, Ohio, where Lakota is located, many people would be surprised to learn that. 

I always thought it was common knowledge of the connection between labor unions and the Democrat party.  A decade or so ago, I dealt with this issue often, but to me, that felt like just yesterday.  There is a whole new generation of parents now who were little kids themselves back then, and they don’t know about these kinds of things.  They want their kids to have a shot at a decent life, and they think by dropping those kids off at a government school, that somehow their kids will get the support and education they need for life.   They’d love it if politics were not such a dividing line, and they glaze over when these kinds of topics come up.  But the truth of the matter is, even if Republicans just sat in a faraway office and did not play the game, the kids in all public schools would continue to be harassed into converts of progressive causes, the kinds of things that Democrats care about.  Just as the gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said in Virginia recently, he didn’t believe parents should be telling schools what to teach. You see the same attitude among the teacher unions across the country.  They think they own your children and that they are a shared resource among us all for consumption as the collective sees fit. 

The game works like this; labor unions need an army to advocate for their future progressive causes.  And teachers specifically use the chaos of liberalism to drive change, making school boards throw endless amounts of money at them, spiking their payrolls to extraordinary levels.  When you hear the stories that teachers don’t make very much money, you hear union nonsense.  Many teachers at Lakota make six figures.  They aren’t going to go hungry in this century or the next.  And of course, their union contracts always get approved because, as you can see in Lakota, they advocate for their people to be on the board, union stooges who will lay down and give them anything they want.  Just as the incumbents at Lakota have over this past year, all three of the names the LEA has endorsed have worked essentially on behalf of the LEA union and not the community in general.  When we elect a school board, we are supposed to be putting in place a management team that will work with all the elements to make a successful school.   As things have been for decades, everything has been tilted away from the families and their children and leveraged toward the power of the labor unions and building up the Democrats as a national party. 

Well, at Lakota, we wanted to change that, and there are several good picks to choose from to replace Kelley Casper, Michael Pearl and keep Doug Horton from becoming a problem in the future.  The Republican endorsed candidates Darbi Boddy, and Issac Adi could work well with the current Republican board member Lynda O’Conner to gain a three-vote majority, and that by itself would dramatically help the situation at Lakota.  But people would have to show up and vote.  There are far more Republicans in Butler County than Democrats.  But on off-year elections with these kinds of races, most of the Republicans stay home.  Usually, there aren’t such good people to pick from, but this year there is.  We know that the union picks will show up to vote; they have their steady stream of supporters who always drink the Kool-Aid.  They will get a lot of votes, as they always do, from pro-union radicalism.  That would mean that many Republicans would have to show up on election night and vote for the school board, who usually would sit home that night.  The LEA is worried about it, and for a good reason.  We want them to worry about it.  They shouldn’t control our school board, and they want to keep it that way.  But for the first time that I can think of, voters finally have a choice. 

We don’t have to accept this premise of the labor unions running our schools and taking endless amounts of money from our tax base to stuff their faces and greedy hearts.  And in a not so indirect way, fueling a Democrat party seeking to destroy our country, starting with our children.  If nothing else got voters to go out into the night and cast a vote for Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi, it would be the chance to right wrongs we can all see.  But for once in our community, to do something about it.  We don’t have to sit around and take it anymore.  For a change, we can change that corrupt system for the better with a simple vote and set an example that the rest of the nation can follow.  We can lead in Butler County, Ohio and take back our schools and our kids, and beat back the power these labor unions have over our lives.  Once and for all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote Todd Minniear for Liberty Township Trustee: Getting to know the candidates in Liberty and West Chester Townships.

Vote for Todd Minniear for Liberty Township Trustee

Like I did for the school board candidates at Lakota for the 2021 election, I have clips of the various candidates to help make decisions.  Like the school board candidates, I support some and recommend changing some of the incumbents in Liberty Township.  These clips deal with trustee candidates in Liberty Township and West Chester, two of the most affluent and great places to live in the United States.  And they are examples of just how great a small government is when you have just three trustees managing things.  So, of course, for this next election, the goal is to keep the government small, effective, and accountable.  I say all that because we do have some significant government types who are running.  Trent Emeneker calls himself a fiscal conservative but had a “meet and greet” at Liberty Center with a known Democrat.  You can see by the video clips that he’s not worth a vote so that I won’t waste much time on him.  In West Chester, the choice is clear.  Mark Welch is a personal friend of mine not because he’s a politician, but because over time, and common ways of looking at things, it just evolved that way. He’s many reasons West Chester has been so successful, and we certainly want to keep things that way.  There are two seats open, so the second should be Lee Wong.  Lee and I have not gotten along over the years, but in this case, he’s working well with Mark and Ann Becker as a trustee, and we want to keep that going.  So the trustee race in West Chester is easy.

However, Liberty Township is more complex; it’s far more complicated.  I live in Liberty Township.  I have lived in Liberty Township for about 45 years of my life.  I spent nearly a decade living in other places worldwide, but my wife and I returned to Liberty Township after the 1990s and loved it very much.  Yet, I have paid a lot more attention to West Chester than Liberty for a good reason.  In West Chester, I was involved in the Tea Party there; Ann Becker was the president of the Cincinnati Tea Party, a pretty big position.  George Lang, a senator now, was a trustee who was getting voted against during every meeting.  We worked hard to put Mark Welch in the second spot to help George get the votes he needed, and it worked very well.  And we went to work to fill the West Chester trustees with all those Tea Party types of candidates.  History will show how smart that was.

Tea Party people are not crazy radicals.  They are fiscal conservatives, small government-minded, and rooted in American traditions.  So I enjoyed the experiment in a small government that was going on in West Chester that has produced magnificent results.  Because of the population density of West Chester, there have been lots of Democrats who have tried to push for a city designation.  The latest is Trent Emeneker.  They want to be a city because it creates more jobs for the government, which drives up costs, bureaucracy, and the overall feel of the community.  Between those three names, George Lang, Mark Welch, and Ann Becker, West Chester has managed to stay lean and sharp, making for a wonderful place to live and work.  Better than just about any other place in the country. 

In Liberty Township, there have always been these Agenda 21 Comprehensive Plans that liberals write and conservative trustees have then followed which has been highly unsatisfying for a guy like me, a long term resident who knows what Liberty Township was like before all the tag-alongs moved in from other places and brought all their big government ideas with them.  And now there is the Agenda 2030 plan that the United Nations has put out, and if you read it and also read the 2020 Comprehensive Plan for Liberty Township, you’ll see that the same person might have as well written them.  Of course, they weren’t, but the ideas are the same.  This is what you get when you hire many kids trained in good, liberal colleges who have been taught that the United Nations would rule the world and that any interpretation of sustainable development must come from those socialists and communists on the world stage.  When any trustees commission a plan like the Comprehensive Plan for 2020 or any previous revisions, you essentially get a bunch of liberals who decide what your community will look like.  I can say that George Lang had quite a challenge when he pushed back against this trend in West Chester.  I know some of the personal stories, and thank goodness George did push back in constructive ways.  But in Liberty Township, even though the trustees are usually what everyone considers “rock-ribbed Republicans,” they get pulled into the Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030 game of serving the United Nations instead of the real history of Liberty Township and the reasons people moved to the area, to begin with.

Every time I have to navigate one of the many dumb roundabouts in Liberty Township, it reminds me what suckers our local government has been toward this United Nations strategy.  I know all of them and have over the years.  They consider themselves conservatives and don’t think of the United Nations game.  Only people who do some research into the matter would know the strategy of how the United Nations embedded itself into all local zoning to lay the groundwork for a future of sidewalks, roundabouts, electric energy, and an eventual carless society.  It was a plan from the United Nations that sought to turn capitalism on its head to implement its objectives. They got away with it because people generally don’t look for the United Nations fingerprints on these kinds of Comprehensive Plans that the trustees follow in their decision-making processes.  Because of this adherence to a United Nations comprehensive plan, I have not been interested in Liberty Township politics at the same level as West Chester.  The frustration with them is just too much a pain in the ass.  They are good people; I like my trustees, two running for November, Tom Ferrall and Buck Rumpke.  But they are big government guys who have philosophies that lean towards development and not personal freedom.  For instance, many local developers want to know that someone is following some comprehensive plan to understand what property to buy and how to invest in the future.  But, to make a good community, there are many more factors to consider, and in Liberty Township, they often don’t come to light. 

To make matters worse, one outstanding trustee that Liberty Township had was David Kern, who recently died.  He was a Tea Party guy, and an influential Republican before the world fell into a tailspin.  But he was old when I was a little kid in Liberty Township, and my brother used to play with their kid at their nursery off Millikan Road.  Once David Kern was no longer a trustee, the government of Liberty Township moved much more toward the United Nations than the personal liberty and sovereignty of the United States.  David used to like to poke sticks in these kinds of comprehensive plans.  He might eventually vote on them, but he at least would argue the matter to see how strong they were.  It was a good balance to have someone like David Kern on the Liberty Township Trustees for many years.  Yet since his death, a guy like him has been missed. 

So when it comes to this election, I was pretty bored with it until I met Todd Minniear at the West Chester Tea Party forum recorded in these videos.  I like Buck Rumpke as a candidate and Republican, but he’s coming over from zoning. As I said, most zoning people have been saturated over the years through their educations with this massive United Nations plot to “Make Europe Great Again.” I have written voluminously that one of the great insecurities of America is the lack of history and culture that we have as a young country, compared to Europe.  So we assume that Europe, the mother country, is the way to emulate, and many of the Liberty Township residents have evolved into thinking the same way.  A wine purchased from Europe has a much higher value than a wine purchased from a vineyard by the Rumpke landfill.  They may be just as good, but it’s the stigma that people care about.  When I hear Buck talk, it’s evident that he’s been saturated with this global way of thinking. He’s a small-town guy who worked hard all his life at the family garbage business, and he wants to show how cultured he is by adopting all these woke, globalists’ points of view. He’s a super nice guy, but he thinks wrong about the big things.  And I would put Tom Ferrall into that same category.  Big government guy who wants to show how cultured he is by supporting all these dumb roundabouts and other European features. I’ll end up voting for one or the other, but my first pick will undoubtedly be Todd Minniear in a two-seat race. 

So Todd and I have met each other on several occasions.  I didn’t know it at the time, but Todd was on the front line protesting against what DeWine was doing during the Covid lockdowns. He’s smart, and he gets it. He’s a Tea Party type which excites me because of the success that we have seen in West Chester.  To have a guy like Todd in Liberty Township might help take things in a more successful direction.  Todd Minniear challenged the DeWine administration in court and won over the Covid lockdowns, and he is extremely intelligent.  Talking to him reminded me of David Kern.  What an excellent opportunity to get a great trustee onto the Liberty board.  People like Todd Minniear do not come along often.  Clearly, by watching the videos included here, you can see my two picks by how well they spoke.   Todd was by far the most articulate of the evening, and he’s willing to do that extra work that is often necessary.  When we talk about “liberty” in Liberty Township, we are not talking about blind compliance to some United Nations Comprehensive Plan or other dumb rules that hold us back.  Sometimes we need people we put into such positions to push back against the rules because the people making the rules may not have our best interests in mind.  That is the case with the United Nations.  They want Liberty Township to look like Europe, not America, and if you follow their ideas, that’s exactly what we’ll get.  Todd has a history of challenging the rules, which is precisely what we need in Liberty Township.

After the forum, I spoke to Todd a bit, along with other very smart people in the room, and had questions for the bright young mind.  I noticed that Todd had the great book that I value quite a lot, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates.  That is a book that describes the moral obligation of leadership lower in the pecking order of life to push back against authoritarian rule.  The book proposes several instances where it is the moral obligation to lash back at a higher authority for corrupt regulations and edicts.  For example, in this case, we should have had more trustees, state reps, and senators who openly fought the unconstitutional vaccine mandate.  For Joe Biden to issue an executive order demanding that all federal employees take medicine or lose their jobs, we needed more local officials to reject the premise.  Instead, most everyone has caved from lawyers to human resource departments for fear of drawing attention to themselves.  When Governor DeWine issued the mask mandates of last year, Butler County’s Sheriff Jones was one of the first in the country to say no, we’re not going to do that.  We need many more politicians in prominent positions who will behave this way when pressed, and Buck Rumpke and Tom Farrell are certainly not those guys.  They will be the first to put on the mask and follow the rules, like good Republicans who care more about adherence to the law than whether the laws are correct and just.  Todd Minniear cares about what’s truly right or wrong, and for me that sets him into a stratosphere all his own. He’s a lot better than the other two guys, and I will be voting for him. 

Like most of them, this election season proposes good things for those with the guts to say yes to them.  It takes courage to try something different, but sometimes it takes courage to stick to what’s working.  In West Chester, it takes guts to keep things solid as they have been.   To resist the tide of corruption that wants to open the door to a bigger government, to loot off the efforts of what made West Chester great, to begin with.  Yet, in Liberty Township, it would take guts to vote for Todd Minniear and take a great community and make it noticeably better.  Liberty Township has enjoyed a cascade effect from West Chester for years.  But now, there is an opportunity to make Liberty Township its unique kind of good truly.  That won’t happen with Buck Rumpke or Tom Farrell by themselves.  It would take a truly smart intellect and a person willing to do the extra work in Todd Minniear to pull it off, which is a fascinating prospect. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Jennifer Edwards Baker Attacks Butler County Republicans: The keyboard assassins of Fox 19 in Cincinnati

How Media Tampers with Elections

Of course all 7 Butler County judges recused themselves from the bologna case in Ohio against the great auditor Roger Reynolds and two other elected officials in the heat of the political season. One thing that I can’t stand is a bully, especially when it comes to media.  It’s pretty clear now why so many in the media hate that many people elected Donald Trump for president.  They get it.  We see it in Joe Biden; a puppet administration ran essentially by media types who project their radical progressive agenda onto a caricature in the White House.  They have been doing it for years, but if we had not elected Trump to disrupt that process, we might never have seen it as clear as we do now.  That much was evident in Stephanie Grisham’s new book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now, just released.  Even though that book was intended to be a hit piece against the Trump family, as a whole, and to show how reckless and dangerous President Trump was, what it revealed was just how much the media wants to be in power and to run politics as unelected radicals who use the power of persuasion from the comfort of a nice, comfy desk to rule the world.  I hate it so much that is the primary reason I run this blog, The Gunfighter’s Guide, and have done so for over ten years and to millions of readers.  I do it to counter all the activism that occurs in the media world. A fine example of just what I’m talking about happened to several politicians in my home township of Liberty in Butler County, Ohio, which involves a lawsuit against Roger Reynolds, and two trustee candidates, Buck Rumpke and incumbent Tom Ferrell. 

Essentially, the lawsuit recently filed by a property owner over a proposed senior type center development project wants more money for their land.  They allege that Roger Reynolds was using politics to hold down the property’s price and keep other buyers away from the purchase process.  All the members of the lawsuit are alleged to be involved in some way or another.  Now on the surface, that sounds pretty nefarious.  But as you dig into the story a bit, you find out that most of the participants know each other from childhood. It affects families, elderly people, and cancer diagnosis with lots of emotion attached.  By the time the smoke clears, there will be hard feelings, there will be resolutions, and there will be a path forward that adults should be able to resolve on their own.  But then comes the media where Jennifer Edwards Baker from Fox 19 in Cincinnati inserted herself into the story as a political activist to take what is a pretty standard property dispute and turned it into a corruption scandal with the headline titled “Corruption-related allegations in lawsuit Against Butler County auditor, Liberty trustee.“ 

I’ve known Roger Reynolds for a long time, many, many years, and he’s always been a good guy.  Does he have some little bit of tyrant in him who would use zoning laws to squeeze a property owner to sell the property to only him and for half the price of its worth?  I would never think so based on what I know of Roger.  But then again, these people have known each other all their lives.  Can you know everything about somebody in every circumstance?  Of course not, so anything is possible.  The problem with the Channel 19 hit piece is the timing.  With the lawsuit filed at the end of September 2021 and Jennifer Edwards Baker putting quite a lot of effort into her article on it plastering the pictures of Roger and Ferrell on the cover rather dramatically, it doesn’t take much deduction to see that the effort is political and not some casual reporting of a legal situation.  Roger, Ferrell, and Buck Rumpke are all big names in the Butler County GOP, and I happen to know that Jennifer is not fond of Republicans. I’ve had to get after her and reporters at Channel 5 before using their media outlets to incite riotous conditions during 2020 as they were trying to lure Black Lives Matters rioters into West Chester to antagonize suburbanites into the fear of big city manipulations.

If Jennifer wanted to do a fair story on corruption, I could point her to dozens and dozens of similar stories all over Cincinnati.  The allegations over this Butler County land deal are common in properties where millions of dollars are involved, and generations of families are a part of the story.  There are many Democrats that are involved in these kinds of scandals.  Heck, we’ve seen a lot of scandals on the national stage, such as the DOJ being weaponized by the Biden administration to go after parents questioning their school boards over critical race theory.  There are such stories right now going on in Lakota. But we have to ask, “where’s Jennifer on those stories? Paging Jennifer Edwards Baker. Paging the Fox 19 News hyphenated activist looking for bottom feeder stories.” There are plenty of stories about corruption that Jennifer could have picked.  But this one targets Republicans right before a big election and pastes the good name that took a lifetime to build by Roger Reynolds all over the cover.  Of course, typically, what happens when a lawsuit is named forces the defenders to lay low and limit their speech to not corrupt their case.  By the time that all the dust settles and the case is over with everyone shaking hands in the end, the damage will already have been done.  When these Republicans should be out campaigning for their official positions, they have to answer corruption questions based on allocations.  Allegations can be made about anything.  Proving them is much harder to do and often falls short in the end. 

People asked me what I thought of the article by Jennifer Edwards Baker, and my reply was that it was typical Channel 19 activism.  A lazy reporter was looking to stir up gossip and trouble for Republicans.  If she cared about corruption, she’d have plenty of stories around Cincinnati to do them on, but she picked on prominent Republicans in Butler County for other reasons.  Allegations are not fact, and trying to play on the emotions of an 87-year-old man who wants to sell his land is not a story.  It’s bait to impede the election process of known and solid Republicans. I’m sure everyone involved in the lawsuit will declare that the timing was not a factor.  But there are a lot of months in a year.  Why now?  And Jennifer should have known better.  She stuck herself and Channel 19 into the story as political activism and nothing more. It’s a way to attempt to tarnish the reputation of Butler County as a whole by going after one of its best politicians and most respected.  It reminds me of the FBI case in going after the Speaker of the House over the FirstEnergy deal in Columbus.  Radical progressives went after an entire energy industry to force FirstEnergy to seek protection.  The FBI calls it bribery. I’d call it the survival of a company trying not to be shut down from political activism by the Obama administration’s energy policies.  The goal of the FBI investigation was to harm the Republican stronghold in the Ohio House.  It’s just another form of election tampering by Democrats, and Jennifer Edwards Baker is essentially doing the same thing in Butler County, Ohio.  During an election season, whenever a reporter puts “corruption” in their lead, they try to steer opinions negatively.  If it’s a conviction, that’s another matter, but when it’s just allegations, its activism, which most mainstream media has become.  They want to rule the world, not as officeholders, but as keyboard terrorists and assassins who operate in the shadows.

Rich Hoffman

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