Category: Art

Defending the Backbone: Why America Must Protect Its Independent Tier 2 Aerospace Suppliers

People often ask me why I’ve chosen to stay involved with CTL Aerospace, especially during a time when the company is facing significant challenges. The truth is, I could be doing a lot of other things—more lucrative work of a much higher profile, more socially visible roles, or ventures with less resistance.  As someone told me this past week, I’m too talented to waste my key income years on hopeless crusades.  But I don’t measure value in dollars alone. I measure it in independence, in impact, and in the preservation of something uniquely American: privately held ownership. CTL Aerospace in West Chester, Ohio is a Tier 2 supplier, and that position in the supply chain is not just operational—it’s strategic. It’s where innovation meets execution, and where long-term thinking still matters. In an industry increasingly dominated by public ownership and institutional investors, CTL represents a rare and vital piece of our national infrastructure that still answers to its owners, not to shareholders chasing quarterly returns.

My involvement is rooted in a belief that private ownership is essential to the health of American aerospace and defense. When companies go public or fall into the hands of investment firms, they often lose their soul. Decisions get made by boards, not builders. Products get rushed to market, not refined through years of R&D. And the personal accountability that comes from direct ownership disappears. In aerospace, where development cycles span decades and reliability is non-negotiable, this shift is dangerous. You can’t trade supply chain integrity like a stock. You can’t outsource stewardship. And you certainly can’t afford to lose the kind of long-term commitment that privately held companies bring to the table. That’s why I fight for Tier 2 suppliers—because it’s where the real work happens, and where the future of American capability is quietly being decided.

This isn’t just about CTL. It’s about a broader economic trend that’s squeezing out private owners across industries—from aerospace to agriculture. Just like family farms are taxed out of existence and sold off to developers, small and mid-sized manufacturers are being pressured to sell to conglomerates and investment firms. The result is a loss of continuity, a dilution of expertise, and a breakdown in the relationships that make supply chains resilient. When you call a privately owned company, you talk to someone who knows your name, your order, and your expectations. When you call a publicly traded one, you get an intern while the investors are off playing golf. That erosion of personal investment is a catastrophe for our market economy. So when people ask me why I associate myself with CTL Aerospace, I tell them it’s because this fight—this defense of Tier 2 suppliers—is one of the most important stories in America today. It’s about protecting the kind of ownership that built this country, and ensuring it still has a place in the industries that will define our future.

In the shadows of America’s aerospace resurgence lies a quiet but critical battle—one that could determine the future of our industrial independence, national security, and economic resilience. At the heart of this fight are the Tier 2 suppliers: the specialized, often family-owned or privately held companies that manufacture the complex, high-precision components essential to modern flight. These firms are now under siege—not by foreign competitors, but by a coordinated squeeze from financial institutions and private equity firms seeking to consolidate, control, and commoditize a sector that was never meant to be run like a hedge fund.

The Strategic Role of Tier 2s

Tier 2 suppliers like CTL Aerospace in West Chester, Ohio are the connective tissue of the aerospace supply chain. They produce composite nacelles, thrust reversers, engine components, and structural assemblies that Tier 1s and OEMs depend on to meet FAA certification standards and delivery schedules. These are not interchangeable parts. They require decades of engineering expertise, proprietary tooling, and a workforce trained in the art of precision manufacturing.

With the FAA mandating lighter, more fuel-efficient aircraft, the demand for advanced composites has surged. Programs like the GE9X and LEAP engines require vast quantities of carbon fiber sandwich structures—components that only a handful of Tier 2s can produce at scale. Yet, despite their strategic importance, these firms are vanishing.

A Shrinking Ecosystem

According to Deloitte and other industry outlooks, independent Tier 2 suppliers now make up less than 15–20% of the mid-tier aerospace pool—a dramatic decline from a decade ago. The rest have been acquired, merged, or shuttered under pressure from banks and consolidators. The pandemic accelerated this trend, exposing the fragility of just-in-time supply chains and the vulnerability of undercapitalized firms.

Private equity firms like Arcline, AE Industrial, and others—have seized on this moment. M&A activity in aerospace surged from $218 billion in 2024 to projections of $382 billion by 2030, with a disproportionate focus on Tier 2s. Their strategy is clear: acquire specialized suppliers, vertically integrate them into larger portfolios, and feed the Boeing and Airbus backlog without the regulatory headaches of organic growth.

The Financial Squeeze Play

The playbook is ruthless but effective. Financial institutions—Wells Fargo among them—tighten liquidity through covenant manipulation, triggering technical defaults or cash flow crises. This artificially depresses the company’s market value, making it ripe for acquisition. Once the target is weakened, PE firms swoop in with lowball offers, often backed by the very banks that created the distress.

Why This Matters to America

This is not just a business story. It’s a national security issue. The United States cannot afford to lose its independent manufacturing base—not when global tensions are rising, supply chains are under strain, and aerospace remains one of our last great industrial strongholds.

If Tier 2s are absorbed into opaque financial structures, we lose visibility, agility, and control. We risk turning our aerospace sector into a brittle, over-leveraged system where decisions are made in boardrooms, not shop floors. The ability to respond to military needs, commercial surges, or technological shifts will be compromised.

A Path Forward: Defense Through Independence

The solution is not to resist change, but to reassert control. Independent Tier 2s must:

  • Form strategic alliances with OEMs or Tier 1s that respect their autonomy.
  • Pursue minority investments from family offices, aerospace-focused VCs, or patriotic capital sources that don’t demand board control.
  • Implement governance defenses like staggered boards or poison pills to deter hostile takeovers.
  • Audit and challenge predatory lending practices, potentially invoking antitrust or shareholder protections.

The Optimistic Case

Despite the pressure, there is reason for hope. The scarcity of capable Tier 2s makes them more valuable than ever. OEMs are desperate for reliable partners who can scale without compromising quality. Investors are beginning to recognize that long-term value lies not in flipping assets, but in building enduring capabilities.

If we can hold the line—if we can resist the short-termism of Wall Street and the opportunism of consolidation—we can emerge stronger. We can preserve the independence, innovation, and integrity that made American aerospace the envy of the world.

A Call to Action

To policymakers, regulators, and industry leaders: this is your moment. Protect the Tier 2s. Investigate the lending practices that are hollowing out our industrial base. Support capital structures that reward stewardship, not speculation.

To investors: look beyond the spreadsheet. Understand the strategic value of independence in a world where resilience is the new ROI.

To our peers in the industry: stand together. Share intelligence, form coalitions, and defend the middle tier. The future of aerospace depends on it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The No Kings Protests Are Going Nowhere: Simon and Garfunkel can no longer save the communist movement from free market needs

The No Kings Protests that were pushed uphill over this past weekend are really quite telling.  It’s the same communist losers from the George Soros side of the fence, the Simon and Garfunkel crowd of old pot-smoking hippies and lazy teacher union types who, like trained seals, look for an easy paycheck, show up with their dumb signs and beg for food like common dogs.  As I have said before, several of the biggest labor unions in the world have buildings just outside the gates of the White House, and they really want to think they have power over the means of production in the United States, and they clearly don’t, and won’t.  They have had a lot of influence in the past because people didn’t know that they were essentially the actions of Karl Marx himself.  On a good day, they wanted European socialism, but what they wish for, policy-wise, is outright communism in the style of China.  Their protests were far from organic as the media tried to shape them.  And as a footnote, most members of the media, primarily on the national level, are members of a labor union, even Sean Hannity, who is a member of SAG-AFTRA (the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio artists, and an AFL-CIO affiliate that represents broadcasters, journalists, and media professionals like radio and TV hosts.)  That is why so many media types are soft on coverage of these kinds of communist activities.  All labor unions are communist organizations, and they seek to rule by the mob and to take out the management of any organization.  And that’s precisely what’s going on here, with Trump.  He’s a strong executive type that union membership hates, and they are seeking to apply Karl Marx to the success America is seeing and to try to turn people against the good management we are witnessing in the White House.

I have to pick on Simon and Garfunkel for a minute because maybe one of the big keys to this new awakening we are enjoying in modern life is the degradation of the music industry.  Generally, I think the transition of contemporary music and entertainment has been a bad thing.  People used to share a favorite movie at least and a favorite song, and with the decentralizing of so many broadcasters and musicians, free markets have destroyed the common experience.  Everyone can have their own YouTube channel, and everyone can make a hit song.  But not everyone will hear it, so the chances of Simon and Garfunkel writing and singing some modern version of a hippie folk song about smoking pot and free love are much less influential. For instance, many people over 50 will know their song “Feelin’ Groovy” and the Bob Dylan song, “Rainy Day Women.”  People under 50, especially closer to 20, will get most of their information from YouTube, and the content likely won’t be repeated because it comes and goes so fast.  A lot of people might enjoy the entertainment experience, but it won’t be shared in the way that Simon and Garfunkel did, and it won’t be passed from generation to generation as a cultural staple.  So the ability for someone like George Soros to capture people’s minds through music has been greatly diminished in this new entertainment generation, which has as much to do with the sudden rise of the MAGA movement as anything.  A kind of spell has been broken from the capture of our entertainment culture over a long period of time.  Music was used to rally the masses toward communism throughout the latter half of the last century, without question.  And now no musical artist has that kind of influence, so people are waking up and away from those detrimental influences.

And that kind of brain-dead numbness was evident at the No Kings rally, which was as mad at Trump as the teacher’s unions are at moms and dads who insist that they run their children’s lives rather than the mob rule of the public school.  Trump has signed a lot of executive orders to undo essentially the progressive agenda.  There is a lot of legislative support that a supportive House and Senate will undoubtedly follow.  But to undo the mess that many of these embedded communists have imposed on our way of government, Trump has had to sign a lot of them.  And that’s what we voted for.  Trump was a successful executive who brought to the White House all the elements that made him great in the private sector.  And he hasn’t disappointed people. Instead, people have had to come to terms with the roots of their own past.  Many people think in the way that MAGA does, the Make America Great Again movement.  But what does that mean when people are listening to songs from Jefferson Airplane about overt free love, which was causing them to tap their feet to the music while going to work and trying to hold together a marriage?  When the common experience of entertainment gives them a contrary thought, they will likely produce in society, contrary values.  But people are waking up from that fog of contradiction and are enjoying the success Trump has brought to our White House.  And the communist labor union types are being lost in the dust as their influence is vanishing like fog on the horizon of a rising sun. 

So the coverage of this communist No Kings movement around the world was biased toward Karl Marx and not the free market influences of a society independent of the previous tyranny.  In America, we look to empower individuals to achieve above and beyond group associations, so leadership is a high-value enterprise.  We like innovative CEOs and entrepreneurs, like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs.  And Trump made his living being a shining example of outstanding business leadership.  That’s why we wanted him in the White House.  We wanted our government to run like one of his businesses.  And we don’t like the stringy-haired bra burners to weaken our society with the kind of communist drivel we have had to endure for many years, which has delivered us to so many global embarrassments.  At the end of his term, Trump will leave and turn everything over to someone else, which is how the American republic was designed.  We are moving away from the tyranny of the masses, where the common losers of society can have equality with the best and brightest.  We want the best to produce wonderful things we can all enjoy.  But without the exceptional, we get a society of the average, and that was never what America was going to be about.  And why the MAGA movement is moving away from influencers like the communist supporting George Soros and his little son, Alex.  Their money has been weaponized to shape our culture through old mechanisms like music and movies.  But not anymore.  That spell has been broken and will continue to be well into the future, as options have given people independence from the unifying communism of artistic control over the entertainment industry.  The labor union movement put out the call for their members to show up and carry signs against Trump, but it’s an old, tired crowd of people going nowhere.  And their communist movement is slipping through their fingers as the success of the Trump White House continues.  And there is nothing they can do about it, which is a joy to see.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Dirty Tricks by the Pro Levy People at Lakota Schools: Trying to sneak their issue under the door at the last minute

Just a few observations about the upcoming Lakota school levy, the biggest and most ridiculous in the state of Ohio, where they essentially want to tear down a bunch of schools and rebuild all new schools, to make the classrooms smaller and drive up payroll by hiring more teachers to teach the same number of students.  It’s expensive and stupid, but what do we expect from these people?  But there is a lot more to notice than just how flat-footed their campaign is.  We always talk about how liberal they are who run and manage the school, and as they are pushing for their levy passage, they look to have taken their entire campaign out of the Kamala Harris playbook.  They have waited until essentially two weeks before the election to put out their signs, and what they have put out is a minimal number.  I’ve been all over the district and was looking for more signs in places more friendly to their position, but they are pretty flat, and where they do have signs, they have tried to appear bigger and more of a mainstream position.  Especially in places where Mark Welch has yard signs, they have been attempting to put the limited amount of signs that they do have next to him to give people the illusion that he supports the Lakota levy, when I know for sure, he does not.  These are not politically savvy people running the Lakota campaign for their massive tax increase, which is fine with me.  I want to see that levy crash and burn more than anybody.  But things have changed a lot over the last ten to twenty years, since I was on the front line of these things, and it’s certainly worth talking about.  Of course, anything can happen in an election; it will all depend on turnout.  But the Lakota people are certainly on their back foot on this one.

The pro tax people are trying to associate with the No More Taxes position of the very popular Mark Welch

It costs a lot of money to run these campaigns, and usually, Lakota schools have plenty of mad moms trying to hide how terrible they are for their kids from the public by supporting the schools that give them a free babysitting service, because they are too lazy to be good parents themselves.  It’s a well-known personality type, the mad and crazy mothers who campaign for tax increases on other people’s property.  And even worse than those neurotic types come their queer eye for a straight guy husbands, who are more interested in doing the dishes, hoping to get laid by their wives’ best friends husbands because they are so progressive themselves, that all traces of manhood have vanished from their cell structure like clowns at an anti-mime rally.  (that’s how you know that I don’t use AI to write my articles, I do everything the old fashioned way)  And watching their campaign this time around, after watching lots of campaigns from the past, it looks like their entire approach to this tax increase is based on that inner firing squad of transgender losers, wife-swapping scandals, and corporate bootlickers too busy to know that their children had their 8th birthday.  They don’t understand the forces against them because they haven’t worked very hard to get to know them, and you can tell by the way they have put out their signs and raised money for the effort.  They are doing what I call the Kamala Harris approach, where they know they have a weak position and their strategy is to surprise everyone at the last minute, before anybody knows what’s really going on.  And where they are present, they are trying to affiliate themselves with well-known politicians, like Mark Welch, who is an obvious frontrunner for the upcoming West Chester trustee race. 

A very weak campaign by the pro tax people

Another thing that I noticed while driving around the district is that there are a lot fewer businesses supporting this levy than there used to be.  The school has always acted like a bunch of mobsters when it came to pushing for business support.  If businesses did not support massive tax increases, those businesses were attacked by that mob of angry moms, and they’d try to inspire a boycott against those businesses.  Lakota schools traditionally has quite a collection agency force that is very aggressive on tax shakedowns, and they have been pretty ruthless.  But things have changed over the years; it’s been a long time since Lakota went for a tax increase because the community has been so hostile toward them.  And the shoe is on the other foot now, for sure.  When the mad moms think they are getting a hook in the water by putting their signs next to Mark Welch, to attempt to trick voters into supporting massive tax increases, hoping to get bleed off votes from low information people, there is an air of desperation looming over the whole effort.  I could tell a lot of stories about the past where the outcome was never obvious.  I have done interviews with some of the big media, a Channel 5 broadcast on prime time television comes to mind, where the pro-Levy people had the streets all lined up with supporters, and they looked like everyone was going to vote for them.  Then they’d put me in a lonely parking lot, trying to make it look like I was on my own and had little support from anybody.  And once the election happened, the silent majority showed up and crushed the visuals in embarrassing ways.  Those were the old days, and these Lakota people are certainly not functioning from that kind of strength. 

I think this says everything about the election of 2025

It costs about $5 per yard sign.  And based on the yard signs, you can tell the strength of the political party because the early investment usually indicates how much community support there is ahead of the election.  On the No More Taxes at Lakota side, the push was to raise about $20K to fight this levy attempt and to be prepared for follow-up attempts after this first one fails.  For Lakota’s side, once the filings get reported, it would not be surprising that their donations are in the six figures, as many schools are these days.  But in Lakota’s case, that money isn’t seen yet, and obviously, they are worried about giving people too much time to learn the facts, so they are doing a last-minute push just like Kamala Harris did, hoping to catch people a little off guard, which doesn’t spell confidence in their position.  They don’t have many signs out really late in the campaign.  The No More Taxes campaign has had its signs out since the last week of September.  So, impressions by the public who didn’t already have a strong opinion on the matter were being made during October.  But early voting has already been going on, so the Lakota effort has been noticeably flat-footed.  And where they hoped to win over people, they are trying to give the illusion that a popular local trustee, Mark Welch, is on their side, which he most certainly isn’t.  But those are the strategies of the desperate, and not very smart.  And a group of people who think that everyone is with them when they are only talking among themselves, with a couple of cats and dogs to greet them at the door.  When it comes to the community as a whole, I think they are in for quite a shock when the reality of the vote totals comes in.  They don’t seem to know just how bad people have come to hate them.  But they will, the election is near.  And for all the normal people out there, those who are not dysfunctional misfits hoping to hide in society through an overly liberal education built on a foundation of DEI hires, make sure to vote NO on the Lakota Levy, and do it in a big way.  These losers need to learn a lesson. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Destroy Your Enemies: Let God sort out the mess

I have a lot to say about Peter Navarro’s new book, I went to Prison so You Won’t Have To.  But before going down that rabbit hole, let me say that it’s good to have enemies.  I was talking about that this past week, and my love of destroying enemies and the many Christian people who are always around me reminded me that my attitude was not the way of Christ, and that if Erika Kirk could forgive her enemies, why couldn’t I?  I said to them that I had no plans to hang around on a cross crucified by those same enemies for the concept of sacrifice to an evil power of timeless tyranny.  And their faces melted.  I continued to tell them that the Christ story in the Bible was told four different ways, from the perspective of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  And that it is my thought that the Romans were looking for compliant citizens for their empire, so they told the Christ story as a way to shape a nice and compliant society.   And to emphasize the point, the Romans stopped talking about God being mad at the Israelites for making peace with the enemy and started talking about forgiveness to the death.  I like Jesus Christ.  But I have no desire to hang on a cross and to forgive sins.  If God wants to do that, have at it.  That won’t be me.  I’m with Trump on the forgiveness of enemies. I don’t think it’s a good idea, and it usually ends in your own personal crucifixion.  If God has a problem with it, he can let me know.  But so far in my life, God seems to enjoy it when I punish my enemies.  I would say I was built for it.  To go even further, I think God made me to defeat evil in a very Old Testament way.  So I’m not real keen on the hippie Jesus talk. 

And to that point, I think the value of a person is in the enemies they have.  It’s good to have enemies and to seek to destroy them.  Not to make peace with them.  But to kill them.  And I think that the destruction of God’s enemies is God’s work on earth.  So if you have a lot of enemies, you are doing a good job in the world.  If you don’t have enemies, then you aren’t doing enough to make the world a better place.  And I say all that because I knew I would be enraged by Peter’s book when he wrote it.  I wasn’t sure how much it would make me angry, but I knew it would.  So I wasn’t exactly looking forward to reading it.  I really like Peter Navarro and several of the old White House senior advisors of the first Trump administration, and I never liked what the bad guys did to him and Steve Bannon of the WarRoom.  We walked an excellent line in the days of Trump’s exile, playing by the rules just enough to last, so that the enemies could have those same rules turned around on them and be punished for what they did.  Things could have turned violent, and I’ll have to admit, I was very close to going full mercenary during the years of 2020 to 2024, many times when people would say to me, as they still do, what would Jesus do.  I would reply that he would be crucified at a terribly young age as a political prisoner and hung on a cross as a warning of non-compliance.  And that evil needed to be punished for that, not forgiven.

I would not have been able to do what Peter did that day; he and his girlfriend were arrested while getting on a plane at Reagan International Airport as they were traveling to Nashville to be on Mike Huckabee’s Fox News show.  The humiliation of it would have been enough to make me fight back.  They waited for him to be separated from the terminal and the crowd there so they could take him out the door just before entering the plane.  They were toying with him to embarrass him in front of a public scared of what could happen to them.  If a senior White House staff member could be put in leg irons and strip-searched the way Peter Navarro was, after they had let him through security, it could happen to anyone.  And that kind of evil in the world, which is the same personality of evil that hung Christ on the cross, I’m not going to play nice with.  So I consider it very valuable to have enemies in the world.  I love them.  And I love to destroy them.  If God doesn’t like it, he can let me know.  If he wants me to go to Hell, then that would be great.  Because there would be a lot of enemies there to destroy, and it would be Heaven for me.  It’s great to have enemies because it’s fun to destroy them.  And I say that for context, for all the enemies who must now be punished for what they have done.  That’s the Nancy Pelosis, the Jim Comey types.  John Bolton.  I want to see Clapper, Brennan, Pencil Neck, Big Tish, Fanny, and George Soros all punished. I want to rake them all over the coals and punish them to the point of them crying for mercy.  And I want to shower in their tears.  I hate them and want to see them utterly destroyed. 

And I think that is the right way to think about it.  I don’t know that I even want to pray for our enemies, as they like to say on the WarRoom.  As I said, I think history reads the Jesus story wrong.  Evil wants to be forgiven so they can sacrifice the innocent to their schemes of doom, which is why I am not a big supporter of organized religion.  Religion isn’t strict enough for me in fighting the nature of evil.  I like a God who says to destroy every one of your enemies completely, and utterly.  But before you can do that, you have to have enemies; the more the better.  And to destroy them as much as you can.  And I won’t be praying for their pathetic souls, or for hopes of redemption in the afterworld.  Once they are enemies, I would offer that you go into eternity, continuing to destroy them and punish them for their misdeeds.  And never to seek to make peace with them.  Peace is a really dumb idea when it means compromising with evil.  And Jesus even questioned it in the end, “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”  I think Jesus should have cut the throats of all his captors in the middle of the night and led a revolt against the tyrannical establishment’s at the time, and not played into the game of sacrifice that has always been the assumption of the political left, to sacrifice to the forces of evil in the world, and feed their hungry spirits with the blood of the innocent.  No, I think evil needs to be punished, and with Trump’s second term, everyone who did him wrong, and all the rest of us, wrong, need to be punished viciously.  Even people who do the day-to-day things that are knowingly wrong and make themselves our enemies should all be punished and never forgiven.  And in the aftermath, we’ll let God sort it all out.  But it’s good to have enemies and to destroy them when they make themselves known. It’s not good to be hung on a cross to feed their unworthy souls with your life, expelled to their great joy.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Why People Play on the Smartphones: Proper methods of modern communication

I’m only sharing this because it was pretty helpful for others to hear what I had to say to an astute young professional who has a problem playing on his phone during important meetings and discussions with high-level people.  I understand the mystery of why people play on their cell phones all the time, and, in all honesty, I don’t blame them.  I also have grandchildren who are entering that teenage phase, and, of course, kids would rather lose themselves in their phones than talk to someone at a kitchen table.  It’s a relatively new phenomenon, and it has social psychologists pretty upset because of what it says about human behavior.  But I get it.  I understand.  However, just as with many of the things I have been talking about lately —back-of-the-train people and the essential leadership needs that only a human being can provide —we have to use all the tools available to us.  And in my example to the young professional, I explained that I love to wear sunglasses in public, but I consciously don’t when I know I’ll have to talk to a lot of people.  By choice, I avoid wearing sunglasses because I want to engage with others and use my eyes to express myself.  Even with all that’s going on, I chose to do videos with all my articles to show people that it’s not AI producing the material, but a living person walking with them and talking.  People can see my eye contact even though I look all over the place.  People can at least see my eyes, and AI programs can’t communicate like I can in a public presentation.  I purposely, even though I’d rather not, speak to people without sunglasses so that people can see and trust what I’m telling them.

And that’s why it’s a good idea not to retreat to your cell phones when you are in a group, talking to a lot of people.  But why do people do it? Why would they rather communicate with the smartphone than speak to a perfectly good person right in front of them?  If you go to a business meeting, half of the people, if the meeting is long, spend a lot of time checking their phones rather than talking to the real people who are present.  But why?  Well, it goes back to my sunglasses example, and a lot of the things I have been saying lately about social engagement and value, which have been on purpose for my audience.  I like to keep noisy people out of my life, who I call time eaters.  And when I go out in public, I almost always bump into people I know, or who want to talk to me for one reason or another.  So I wear sunglasses in public so that people can’t lock eyes with me and drag me into a conversation I don’t want to be in, because I’m always busy thinking about something important.  I don’t ever have leisure time to talk to other people about nothing.  So to avoid getting sucked into meaningless conversation, I wear sunglasses to protect myself from making eye contact with anyone who might use their eyes to get my attention and lock me into a conversation.  It’s the same reason that you can go to a crowded movie theater and nobody wants to sit next to each other if they can avoid it.  People, if they have a choice, no matter where in the world they are, especially in America, where there is an assumption of personal freedom, will choose to have their own thoughts rather than be captured by others’ concerns. 

This translates into the new technology of smartphones, which can give you all kinds of interesting information that you can choose to consume or not.  When people scroll through their text messages rather than listening to the person in front of them, they select information they control rather than deal with the randomness of another person outside their control.  It’s all about personal autonomy with cell phones.  People want to maintain their personal space rather than surrender it to other people.  This is why teenagers, not yet fully responsible for their own lives, want to lose themselves in smartphone interaction.  They can’t yet make all their own decisions in life, so the smartphone gives them that illusion, just as the video game experience does.  People prefer to think about what they want to think about, when they want to, even if the text message they are reading is just simple information that doesn’t lead to anything significant.  And the live person in front of them might be much more critical and say things infinitely more lofty than anything happening on someone’s smartphone.  But the freedom of choice is what people like and why they would rather interact with a smartphone than a real person. People, more than anything, want the freedom of choice.  And if given the option, from teenagers to high-powered business executives, will choose choice over a forced engagement with another human being they may not care much for, or want to interact with, such as in my sunglasses story.  To protect their own thoughts and keep the world at bay, they look for control over what they think through their smartphones, which are always there to provide a nice distraction. 

But as I told the young hotshot executive, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.  If you want to be an effective communicator, put the cell phone down when you want to express yourself to other people.  Don’t let them know that there are other things more important to you than what they are saying.  If you want to be an effective communicator, you have to use everything, even your nonverbal expressions, to sell your ideas.  Otherwise, they will tune you out because if you are busy on your phone, you break that one-on-one interaction.  Put your phone down and don’t play with it so you can make other people listen to you when you have something important to say.  But don’t be surprised if people tune you out for their own protection if you give them an excuse to break social engagement.  For the same reason I provide videos for all my written articles, modern technology, especially AI, has made it so people never know if a real person is actually saying things.  And in my case, I let people see my eyes while I’m talking, and I even walk rather than sit in a chair for a podcast, because people can see my hands and my pace of walking with a moving background going by, which is very hard for AI to replicate. And once people know that all that information is something they can trust, they can listen to what I am saying in a way they can believe in.  And if you are hiding behind technology yourself, you can’t win over that trust to communicate what you need to.  So that is why playing on your smartphone while in conversation with others is not a good idea.  And it’s also why people do it.  I don’t take it personally.  I get it.  I actually like that about the human race: they seek their own space over shared space with others when given a choice.  But if you want to be a good communicator, you can’t hide behind sunglasses or your smartphone.  You have to actually look people in the eye and make them interact with you. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Beware of the “Time Eaters: Ways of attacking leadership in the world

As we talk about people who live in the back of the train and are not the leadership type, using Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality, there are sure ways to detect their destructive attributes.  I call them “time eaters”: people who are afraid to do things in the world and disguise their impact by consuming time, hiding their lack of leadership.  Because they are too timid to live life in front of the train, they make a lot of noise to seem helpful in a fast-moving world.  They are the kind of people who want to consume your time with small talk or discussions about small things that are not important to the task.  And when you are doing important things in life, they seek to take up your time to associate themselves with some level of success without committing to fulfilling the endeavor.  And the really insulting thing about it is that when they want to waste your time, they fail to recognize that, as a fellow human being, you must be suffering from the same ailment as they are.  When people don’t know what to do, they seek means to disguise it with nonsense and waste time trying to look productive, but only with meaningless chatter.  A good example of this is the occasional salesperson who tries to sell you something in a shopping complex and stops you with “can I have a moment of your time?” as if that moment were not infinitely valuable.  The assumption is that, as two fellow human beings, you have some obligation to waste time on someone else just because they request it.  And in so doing, a lot of unproductive output occurs.  Being nice and accommodating will often leave you feeling empty because these people seek to drain you of your effort to fill up what’s empty inside them.

Using the metaphor of the speeding train, the people in life at the back of the train are always trying to bleed you of information when you are the leader type at the front.  So they are always trying to get you to come to the back, where they are, so that they can feel part of the process.  They, of course, wait for you to do something meaningful, then try to associate themselves with the success.  But because they are the back of the train types, they need to eat your time to gain something they didn’t earn.   And when you take the time to give it to them, trying to be nice, they fill the time of the exchange with nonsense, hoping to blend in and to look helpful.  They talk about sports, about the lottery, about wine, donuts, and college football teams.  But they never have the guts to talk about the things that really matter because they are in the back of the train and are only trying to appear as if they are part of a team.  When we talk about teams, there are usually leaders.  Then there are the people who like to spend time talking about silly things, trying to associate with success in the exchange.  I find wasting time with people in the back of the train talking about nonsense is a sure path to failure, because leadership is about being on the cutting edge, seeing things as they come, and dealing with them there.  Not talking about cutting the grass and what your neighbor is doing.  If it doesn’t involve life on the cutting edge, it’s mostly about wasting time. 

And in that way, I see a different kind of tyranny in the modern world designed by people who live in the back of the train.  They want you to always read their terms of service agreements for every little thing.  They want you to waste time figuring out a new software update for your smart TV that adds all-new control features to your remote.  They want to drag you into meaningless states for baseball stats and sports while the world outside burns away.  There is an evil in these time eaters that tries to keep you from getting to them by trying to trap you in the back of the train and away from the front so that they can work their malicious schemes.  And before you know it, on any given day, you have wasted 24 hours of your life and achieved very little.  Because your day was filled with “time eaters” who took away precious time to be on the leading edge with analysis from the back, trivial nonsense that are observations, not leadership-led.  And even in that sentiment is the notion that success should never be achieved at the cost of our humanity, of not communicating effectively, or of volunteering to waste time with people in the back of the train out of compassion for their position.  And that no achievement matters more than talking to another human being.  Even if what everyone is saying to each other is meaningless in the scheme of things.  The point of communication is to validate the lack of leadership that the other parties are terrified of, and the point of existence is to make them feel better about it. Not to actually achieve things. 

So beware of the “time eaters.”  I avoid them as I would any disease.  There is a real menace in their actions that intends to destroy the world, and I don’t like it at all.  And I say all this not to be mean, but to explain why I don’t allow myself to get stuck in projects or circumstances that are “time eaters.”  When I see and hear that the people I’m dealing with are “time eaters,” I remove myself from their company quickly and move on to something much more interesting.  If I feel what I’m doing isn’t important, then I don’t do it for long.  And people do take offense to it, but that’s OK.  I see value in the back of the train only in the analysis it provides.  But it only helps in a kind of future state, as leadership is fast and furious, and is not a team exercise.  The concept of teamwork is designed to be a time-eater of shared consumption of resources to appear busy and proactive.  When, in reality, it’s just intended to keep leaders from the front of the train and to trap them in the back with all the other slugs.  And the more time they waste keeping essential things from happening, the worse the world is.  Whether the issue is a discussion about a meaningless topic or wasting time with the TV remote, “time eaters” are a real problem imposed on us by an evil that lurks just beyond our senses.  And the war they have against us is a very real terror against the human race.  The lure is in compassion, wasting time with people who can’t contribute to success because they lack the ability.  And in that effort, the whole ship sinks, and this is by design.  So, to prevent that eventuality, beware of the time-eaters.  They will seek to destroy the world with nonsense and sell it as a value because of the human need to feel wanted by other human beings.  And in that exchange, vast evils are expressed and injected into society to undo all thoughts of goodness.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Real Way to Get Peace in the Middle East: Going door to door where evil lives and thrives

I think it’s nice that Trump did a deal to get the hostages back in Israel.  But the cause of the trouble between the Palestinian’s and Israel was not present at that peace negotiation.  The politicians are not the cause of the conflict, and if we really want to solve the problem and bring peace to the Middle East, then the source of that trouble will have to be eliminated.  I recommend performing that task without any state involvement.  The United States doesn’t need to commit ground troops toward lasting peace.  All it needs to do is step aside and give contractors a “get out of jail free card.”  To allow contractors to go into the Gaza Strip and go door to door, eliminating the perpetrators of violence.  When you travel through the area, you can learn a lot about a culture, and one of the most dominant influences in their bookstores is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  The people who order those books to be sold, and the publishers who knowingly try to keep that kind of anger alive by blowing on the embers of evil, are the cause of the trouble, and they’ll have to be eliminated.  And until we are willing to play that game, there will be no peace, anywhere, not in the Middle East, nor on American college campuses.  The enemy lives in the minds of the vacant, empty souls of evil who want people to fight in a bloody conflict for all kinds of terrible reasons.  Everyone may clap that some tortured souls who managed to live through that captivity were returned to their families.  But the problem is far from solved.  Nobody could blame Trump for trying.  Yet the solution is still lingering in the tunnels and back rooms of the Gaza Strip, and many other places around Israel, and they are planting the demise of the Jewish country as we speak. 

Hamas had its money dry up after the bombing of Iran, and Trump has put everyone on their heels, including Qatar, who are the primary sponsors of terror in the region, and they want Israel wiped from the face of the earth.  I have a unique understanding of this problem from the science side, and the battle over the Temple Mount is the key to it.  The Arabs are never going to get over what the British did to them over Sykes-Picot after World War I, and how they felt double-crossed at the end of World War II, when the United Nations decided to give the Jewish people their own country, and Israel was created in what the Palestinians considered their land.  But this fight, as Trump said, goes back many thousands of years to when Yahweh encouraged the Hebrew people, the Jews, to raid the land of Canaan and resettle the land righteously for them.  And all that went well beyond 4000 years ago, even further to the land dispute that God was clearly very aggressive about.  And since that time —the First Temple period, especially with Solomon and King David’s threshing floor —the dispute has continued, with no end in sight.  The Jewish people were constantly attacked and removed from the land and dispersed as exiles all over the world.  Until the United Nations came along and imposed a Jewish state, and everyone had to get along with the idea, which has caused all the wars there for all these years.  Looming always in the background is the hostile views of the Muslim community toward all outsiders, which feeds the anger of pitting the Quran against the Holy Bible as a source document for understanding eternity. 

Knowing Trump had everyone pegged down for destruction, the Palestinian movement is going back underground while the politicians save themselves from financial destruction and give Trump what he wants.  Visible peace in the Middle East so that they aren’t crushed by the aggression of a much stronger enemy, the United States.  They only made a deal because Iran has fallen apart, the Marxism of the area behind the teachings of the Quran is being challenged by populism, so they are, for their own preservation, making a show of peace for the cameras.  The real solution will be to eliminate the leaders of discontent, as in the United States.  There are a lot of voices hiding behind what they think are Constitutional protections of free speech, who are outright anti-American terrorists, and they will stop at nothing to destroy those they don’t like.  Look at the youth movement behind the killing of Charlie Kirk.  Those kids didn’t come up with those thoughts on their own. Instead, they received their thinking from influences who are still very much at work and just holding their nose through Trump’s terms in office.  That same radicalism showed itself on ABC News when George Stephonopolis cut off Vice President J.D. Vance during a Sunday show recently.  They are all united behind a curtain of discontent and just waiting for Trump to be removed from the world stage.  And a future president was treated like a rag doll by those same elements, disrespectfully cutting him off to show him disrespect purposely.  That’s the kind of evil that puts those books in the book stores of the Middle East, from Egypt to Turkey, and everything to the East, all the way over to India. 

The best way to deal with these terrorists who hide behind polite society is to hire contractors to eliminate them, $100K per head.  Cut off the enemy’s head and put it in a bag for payment by an independent contributor.  Keep the states out of it and fight this battle away from the borders of nations, but door to door, where the bad guys really live, and create so much purposeful, strategic hate, to destabilize society to the liking of evil.  I would volunteer for that kind of thing, and many people could get very rich as privateers, much as it was in the golden age of piracy.  There are plenty of ways to do it, and all that would be needed from a country like America is to leave the process alone.  Let contractors go into Gaza and collect the heads of the terrorists.  Everyone knows where they live; go in and get them.  Take the terror to their doorsteps and save the ink on the peace deals.  Because as long as they are allowed to live, they will seek to bring evil into the world.  And that goes for areas outside of the Middle East as well.  Even in New York City or Chicago.  The Antifa terrorists of Portland.  They are being crushed now by a Trump administration willing to perform the task.  But the evil is still lingering, going underground.  And it’s there where evil must be hunted, door to door, and with soldiers of fortune carrying around pillow bags to carry the heads of their trophies.  Turn those kinds of people loose, pay them well under the table, and attack the rats where they live.  Don’t let them continue to publish books like Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Or even to burn down churches in Paris in the name of the Quran.  That hatred even found expression in the creation of the Quran in 610 AD by Muhammad, which sought to displace the emerging Christian movement that had united the Roman Empire in 313 AD.  These were not religious pursuits intended to gain entry into the gates of heaven, but rather to destabilize the governments of the world through military raids.  And that same youth is being corrupted everywhere in the world at the point of learning.  And it’s a real threat to any potential peace efforts.  That is, unless you physically remove the perpetrators with door-to-door contractors.  And speak the only language those kinds of enemies understand, ruthless violence, mercifully applied to the root cause of evil itself.  And nothing less.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Under New Management: Why companies fail and how leadership works

All over my town of West Chester, Ohio, there are signs everywhere indicating that new management is running a business.  Most of them are restaurants and bars, but they have been unusually placed in front of all kinds of companies, even manufacturing facilities.  Which was another thing I said would happen as a result of the catastrophic stupidity of COVID, where a global Marxist strategy of micromanaging how people were going to do work was imposed on all of us through the ridiculous means of a doctor’s office.  White coat losers in the form of health professionals were trying to scare us into open socialism, and it was always going to be a disaster.  And now, five years later, the world has turned to populism, specifically to capitalism.  If you really want to get philosophical about the Trump administration at this particular time, it’s because the human race knows what’s good for it, and all forms of Marxism have not been it.  There was never a plan for Trump to be in any authority position.  The plan was to take over mass society and make people afraid of a virus that was made in a Chinese lab, by people who wanted to make a bioweapon to use against the world, to steal elections, and take over economies.  People saw this happening, and they put Trump in office as the rest of the world has been supporting their own version of pro-capitalist populism.  Its not because they were that great of a candidate, but because people didn’t like the direction the world was turning, which brought about out of desperation, the Covid year of 2020 and the complete collapse of the global economy that was so tragic that most people didn’t even want to discuss what happened because they wanted so badly to put it out of their minds. 

So the mindset of the economic shutdowns has taken a few years to recover from, and it has taken a while for people to get their feet under them again.  And what we’re talking about are all the DEI hires and the work-from-home mentality that has been socially disastrous—social policy cooked up in a lab, with everyone’s books open to Karl Marx’s literature.  Even Microsoft was in on the gag, trying to push everyone into Teams meetings from home in their pajamas.  Nobody was betting on a complete economic recovery in those dark months of 2021, as Biden took office, Trump was forced into exile, and Covid protocols were imposing themselves on every one of us.  People should have been more intelligent to see the obvious.  We were under attack by an extensively laid plan of a complete Marxist takeover of the world.  And I said it at the time, and said all this was going to happen.  Nobody listened until it was too late.  And I would go around town and talk about all the businesses that were working from home, and how they were going to fail, and all the fast food places that closed their dining rooms because they didn’t have enough staff to stay open.  I told everyone what was going to happen, and now it is.  And I saw it clearly because of the way I live my life, in front of the train. At the same time, most of the world lives in the back, where it’s safe.  We’re talking about Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality as he talked about it in the great book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  It’s a very popular book, though largely misunderstood.  Its sequel, Lila, has not been read by millions, but by a very select few in the world who are audacious rarities. 

The metaphysics of quality, as I explained in my video with a train roaring by, is essentially a perspective on leadership and decision-making. Outstanding leadership is done at the front of a metaphorical train, where you can see what’s coming as it approaches.  You can turn the train, slow it down, tell people what you see coming.  But most people don’t dare to lead from the front.  So they have built an administrative bureaucracy in the back of the train to provide analysis, which is useful.  But it’s not leadership because by the time the moving train reaches the point of decision, the caboose has passed it entirely too late.  Decisions have to be made at the front to ensure the quality people expect.  That is why great generals who lead from the front are great.   Great business leaders are so rare.  And why political efforts succeed or fail.  If leadership is at the back of the train, a management effort will likely fail every time.  If, under scarce circumstances, an organizational leader is at the front of the train —where few people dare to be —then great success is possible.  Success that is often beyond people’s wildest dreams.  So when a business is failing and wants the public to know they are making changes, they put up signs saying they are under new management, hoping people will give them a second chance in the economy, implying that their leadership change will be different.  After COVID, a lot of companies got suckered and put their leaders all in the back of the train, where it was safe, and it was a disaster for the world’s economy under a hostile takeover. 

Karl Marx was always an idiot and a coward.  He died broke because he was a back-of-the-train theorist.  The world is full of them.  But because there were a lot of cowards in the world who ended up in government, health care, and were second-generation titans of industry who didn’t have the same guts their previous generation had, they adopted Marxism to hide what losers they were.  But in a marketplace where free will is expected, that kind of back-of-the-train micromanagement was never going to work.  And I said so all along.  And now that the money is flowing again and Trump is back in the White House, leading from the front, it has exposed this plan for the fraud it was.  And now everyone is scrambling to find people at the front of the train, and their “under new management” signs are hopes that people will assume that there is leadership at the front of the train instead of everyone functioning from the back, where all the wimps hang out.  And that’s why there are suddenly so many signs.  At least the owners of these businesses are trying.  But it shows clearly the danger that arises when we micromanage society, with back-of-the-train personalities who are not equipped to lead.  Even in a bar or nightclub, where leadership isn’t even considered.  People expect the lights to work and the beer to be cold.  And when everyone is hiding in the back of the train, they often order those things too late to arrive for a Friday night gathering that nobody thought would happen because of COVID social distancing rules.  Only people in the front of the train were ready, because they saw well in advance what a dumb idea everything was.  And most businesses that lacked those unique personalities failed, are now trying to recover, and want the world to know they are looking for front-of-the-train management.  And even if they haven’t yet found them, they are at least looking.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Big Tish James Needs to Do Big Time in the Big House: Destroying the communists in our courts

Don’t forget how Big Tish James, the New York Attorney General, looked at President Trump every day in court when she was purposely trying to bankrupt him over some evaluation prosecution in his company, the Trump Organization.  Big Tish went for blood—and then some—eventually fining over $ 515 million in penalties against Trump, which, through the appeals process, was just relieved this past month as excessive.  But for a grueling several years, the case dragged on, and if Trump had not been a billionaire, too big to drain financially like she was trying to do, he would not have survived the process.  Lucky for him, during this year of 2024 Truth Social went public and Trump essentially made back all the money he had lost in these court cases, in fees and legal costs, and it essentially put the case James was trying to form out of reach and it was a miserable loss for her and the corrupt New York judge Arthur Engoron, on all fronts.  But don’t forget what she tried to do, because this happens way too often.  The communists of our culture feel they have control of the courts, and essentially, they do.  We have trusted the courts too much without oversight, and the situation has gotten out of control.  We had been wondering about it, but this case against Trump by Tish James made it clear to everyone, and she really thought she was going to get away with it.  So it was more than a little satisfying that with all the charges she was trying to impose against Trump, like most Democrats who conduct social policy where they try to deflect from things they are actually guilty of, we learned that the Attorney General was guilty of far worse.  And now that we know, there can’t be any mercy for her.  She has to be made an example of.

So in that context, I think we can all root for the worst possible to happen to that corrupt communist, Big Tish James, and that she will do big time in the big house for her audacious crimes.  Audacious because she had tried to blame Trump for manipulating the values of his properties for better bank interest rates, which she indicated was a form of fraud.  She set the bar where it is now, and from which she is now judged.  Because now she is being prosecuted for much more obvious fraud, which she undoubtedly knew.  It’s so audacious that mistakes are impossible; she knew what she was doing, and that was to deceive the public and lenders to get benefits on real estate she owned.  As the Attorney General of New York, she can’t say she was ignorant of the law.  She had just tried to prosecute the President of the United States using the same logic.  She clearly knew where to look because she was guilty of the same thing, so this is an easy case being led by prosecutor Lindsey Halligan, one of Trump’s personal lawyers, formally.  Big Tish is being prosecuted for bank fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1344: knowingly misrepresenting the property’s use to obtain a favorable loan and making false statements to a financial institution.  Specifically, James signed a “second home rider” on a Fannie Mae-backed mortgage, certifying that a three-bedroom house would serve as her second residence and qualifying her for a lower fixed interest rate of 3%.  The loan terms, which she openly violated, prohibited renting it out as an investment.  And according to the court documents, Big Tish was clearly trying to save $18,933 over the life of the loan. 

These people were always communists, these kinds of Democrats, so it’s appropriate to indicate who they really are and what the movement intends.  Just as is reflected in this mayor race in New York, all this communist sentiment has snuck up on many people, biting them now that it’s too late.  Big Tish was elected by people who called themselves Democrats in an America that doesn’t like communists.  So they just changed their name so that people would vote for them.   But ideologically, they are all capitalist-hating communists, and they meant to gain control over our institutions, which has obviously happened in our court system, at all levels.  Most lawyers, even though they might not identify as communists by name, have beliefs about the world that are very much from the pages of Karl Marx.  And with the strength of that assumption, Leticia James thought she would get away with destroying the financial life of one of New York City’s most famous people and richest, and make an example of him with a different kind of execution.  It might have left him alive, but the case intended to destroy the Trump Organization so that the President wouldn’t have any wealth to defend himself.  She meant to personally bankrupt a former and future president of the United States, and enough people in New York who identify as communists supported her in that effort of destruction.  So let’s not kid ourselves here.  The communists who linger in this country in the background are looking for blood and to advance their party more deeply into power with fear.  Big Tish was showing the world that she controlled the courts and could destroy anyone in the legal process.  And she put everything she had into the effort regarding state power.  Trump was not supposed to survive. 

So when we talk about the grace of God in this case, I say let him do what he wants with her eternal soul.   I would recommend her destruction and to make it as public as possible.  Show absolutely no compassion for her in any way.  I would like to see her publicly humiliated to the utmost extent that the law will allow, and to see her permanently ruined for her efforts.  Because this is more than just a war of ideas, this is a communist invasion that has resided behind a kind of curtain that the Democrat Party put up to let these people gain hold of important public offices.  And their purpose was the destruction of the American way of life.  And they meant to control all of us by scaring people with what they did to popular people with a lot of money, like Trump.  The case with Trump, as I said in the very early days, was never going to stick.  Big Tish thought the courts were corrupt enough to make anything stick.  But legally, they had all kinds of problems.  But when that same prosecution by the New York Attorney General gets caught actually committing the crimes she was trying to paint on Trump, well, you have to throw the book at her.  And the kitchen sink as well.  She deserves destruction and no mercy.  For what she and her supporters tried to do to Trump and this country, we have to view it as treasonous, and nothing less.  This was no accident or a meaningless banking transaction.  No, this is the intent to gain control of a legal system to destroy political opponents personally.  And now the shoe is on the other foot, and Trump has a chance to take action that will be meaningful for centuries.  And I’m thrilled to see him do it.  There are many people who need to be punished for what they did.  And Big Tish James is just the start of it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Meet the Candidates for Butler County Commissioner: Why Michael Ryan is the best

So, why Michael Ryan over the other two people running for the same Butler County Commissioner seat?  Well, a nice walk down High Street in Hamilton, Ohio, makes it all very clear.  Cindy Carpenter is the incumbent in this race, and she has held that seat for about 15 years.  The other is Roger Reynolds, who used to be the auditor of Butler County.  Before getting into any of the negative stuff, let’s just say that Michael Ryan is a good fresh start for the Butler County Republican Party, and he is coming into the race highly endorsed by a lot of very important people.  And he has great donors who are supporting him early in this process, which was quite evident at his October fundraiser.  Michael Ryan doesn’t have any baggage; he and his wife are a really good couple, and what he has done as vice-mayor of Hamilton has been very enterprising.  The good job that he and the city council have done for Hamilton is obvious just by walking down the streets of the West Side.  I was born in Hamilton.  I’ve lived in and around it most of my life.  And I have traveled all over the world and have an excellent idea of what good is, and the Hamilton of today is fantastic.  And Michael Ryan has a lot to do with its recovery from a not-so-good place.  Ryan has been optimistic and shown a remarkable ability to work with others to make things that seem impossible happen.  And there really aren’t many people anywhere better for the Butler County Commissioner job than Michael Ryan.  Butler County is lucky to have him, and I think he could do great things for the County over the next decade. I’m very excited to vote for him. 

But why not Cindy Carpenter?  Well, Cindy has always been thought of as a RINO.  Most of the time, she has run unopposed.  She has been a yes vote on police budgets.  But she has essentially been a Democrat socially, and recently proved it by campaigning for the Democrat mayor of Middletown, Ohio, Elizabeth Slamka.  Cindy was caught at a voting location openly pushing for the Democrat, and it was all caught on camera, which was very embarrassing for her.  Of course, when Cindy was caught, there wasn’t much she could say; she was the Republican endorsed candidate openly pushing for a Democrat mayor in a town that needs a lot of help, Middletown.  Simply put, after all these years, that’s the best Cindy can do, and she will never be a spectacular success.  She has had her chance; we know what she is, and we know she supports Democrats and doesn’t respect the endorsement process.  It’s not like the Elizabeth Slamka issue was in the past; it was very recent, and I think it ruined her forever.  She’ll never be able to live it down.  We’re in a period of party politics that wants more MAGA representatives, and Cindy isn’t one of them.  She’s too much of the kind of politics that people want to run away from.  Not to sign up for another term, especially when they openly support Democrats who have proven to be really detrimental to cities and counties where they gain a majority.  Hamilton didn’t improve because of people like Cindy Carpenter.  It improved despite her.  Michael Ryan gets much of the credit, and we want a lot more of his kind of presence.  I’m sure Ryan will support police budgets, even as tax cuts become a higher priority for him.  In a one-for-one comparison, all the positives go to Michael Ryan, and there are none for Cindy Carpenter.  She did her thing, it wasn’t perfect, and she is a closet Democrat.  So let’s dump her and move on to someone better.

The other candidate is someone I’ve supported in the past.  I would have preferred that he not run until he got his life back together after a rough trial he just went through, which cost him well over a million dollars.  I was very supportive of him during all that, so people are wondering why I’m not supporting him for commissioner.  Well, through the trial, I got to know him better.  I’ve known him for a long time, and I like him.  But he tends to get combative with people, and you learn a lot about them by how they handle pressure.  And under pressure, Roger Reynolds showed he’s someone people want to fight.  And that’s how he ended up in court to begin with.  As a commissioner, you need to be able to work with people and build relationships.  And Roger has a hard time with relationships.  So I might like the guy.  But he’s not ready for a public office.  He has had relationship problems with his wives, and in my book, if you can’t handle a marriage, you are going to struggle with a lot of other things in your life.  And after listening to the testimony of the former Lakota treasurer, Jenni Logan, there was a lot of poor judgment that gave early indications of spousal commitments.  Most of those are private problems, but he’s the one who decided to run for office, even though there are a lot of red flags about him personally that have only muddied this race for what I think are really selfish reasons. 

I would have said the same thing about President Trump’s marriages, and it took me a while to start taking him seriously.  I’ve met Trump several times, especially during the early Tea Party and Reform Party years.  And I’ve met Melania Trump, too, and I’ll say she’s been good for Trump and has made him better for the public office he’s now doing so well in.  Maybe Roger will find someone who will help him improve as a person, like Trump did.  But right now, he has a lot of digging to do to get out of a hole he put himself in.  And, unfortunately, he is seeking redemption through public office, even though a much better person is running for the job.  Roger is damaged goods, and he needs to present himself undamaged.  And it’s not just marriages that Roger has destroyed.  He has relationship problems, which raise major red flags for a job like this commissioner position.  Again, Roger has been around for a long time, and everyone knows what they are getting.  He’s not going to do anything significant.  But Michael Ryan has a chance to, so it’s really not a hard decision for voters.  Because of the way the world is changing toward better MAGA options at these positions, Michael Ryan is the only reasonable choice.  That’s why I am happy to support him over these other candidates.  If Roger wants to return to public office, he needs to fix some things about himself first.  Seeking redemption by voter validation isn’t healthy.  And Butler County needs to do good things for itself, not provide a platform for personal growth at the expense of progress.  And that is what anybody but Michael Ryan would be for the Republican Party, Hamilton, Ohio, in general, and Butler County as a whole.  People deserve the best person for the office, and for me, nobody would be better than Michael Ryan.     

Rich Hoffman

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