Category: Book Review

Thank Goodness Kristi Noem Thought to Ask the Question: We don’t have to take our shoes off at the airport anymore

Thank goodness Kristi Noem thought to ask the question, because many things in government are just like this.  Someone comes up with a stupid rule, and we end up following it for the rest of our lives without question, even though it was dumb to begin with.  And that was certainly the case when it came to the security measures that were implemented after 9/11.  Our FBI and CIA didn’t do a very good job in detecting a terrorist cell within the United States training to fly planes in Florida, but not caring to land them, and our security got caught napping, so those terrorists were able to get onto commercial planes and use them as weapons of war.  And the crises of that moment made people clamor for corrective action, which human beings most often overreact to.  And the Department of Homeland Security was created, giving us the TSA, and the dumb policy of removing shoes at the airport while going through security.  Now, over twenty years later, it hasn’t saved anyone anything, but it has certainly cost a lot of time and misery.  And until Kristi Noem was put in charge of Homeland Security and asked everyone working there why we were still taking off our shoes at security checks, nobody had an answer.  The only thing they could say was that we were doing it because we had always done it.  Never was the question asked whether we should be doing it at all.  Thankfully, Kristi Noem, due to the weak reaction to that question, changed the policy, and we no longer have to remove our shoes at airport security checkpoints.  It’s a significant step toward addressing many issues that amusement parks have already identified.  An overreaction to security to cover the impediment of actually doing the job the first time is a dumb idea, and it’s good to see that policy go.

It has been terrible to deal with the security procedures since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The entire creation of the unionized TSA has been a disaster, making traveling by plane a miserable experience.  I try not to do it unless I have to travel overseas, because essentially it takes all day to travel.  I never feel comfortable arriving at the airport less than two hours before a flight because many things can go wrong, especially at security.  Nobody is saying that we don’t want security on flights.  However, it’s the kind of overcompensation that we see with the TSA that’s the problem.  Private security would be much better than unionized labor, which often fails to perform effectively in any field.  There is plenty of technology these days that can detect bomb making equipment just through a quick scan.  We don’t need to take off half our clothes through the demeaning process of vulnerability in front of hundreds of other people.  This idea of stripping away your identity into a near locker room vulnerability is just dumb and lazy.  And it never made us a safer society.  It just made us feel that way.  If people just did their jobs the first time, many of the well-known terrorist attempts that we know of on airplanes wouldn’t have happened.  However, these days, the technology is so advanced and intrusive that there’s no need to take off all your clothes to board an airplane.  With domestic flights, and I fly out of Cincinnati, if the destination is east of the Mississippi River, it’s much better and faster to drive.  And because of that, think of how much money airlines lose because of the TSA rules.

People don’t talk about it as much as they should. Think how much money Homeland Security has cost airline companies by being such a pain in the neck that people don’t buy plane tickets.  It’s a massive opportunity cost.  Before the creation of Homeland Security and the introduction of the TSA’s overly restrictive rules, many airlines had significantly larger hubs.  Delta operated a central hub that served numerous destinations from Cincinnati well into the 1990s.  Because flying was easy and not so intrusive, people chose to do it.  Once they turned the experience into essentially a locker room at the YMCA, it has cost airlines a lot of money in lost opportunity cost.  Some of the low-cost carriers have found a way to adapt somewhat.  However, the experience of flying has deteriorated significantly.  If you want to dress up and go somewhere to show the best version of you to the world, you don’t fly in a plane.  Because it’s such a demeaning experience.  And for a long time, amusement parks were just as bad.  However, they have recently upgraded their scanners, and as a result, they wave everyone through much faster.  The scanners can practically see through your clothing, leaving nothing to the imagination.  But at least you don’t have to strip down almost naked to go through security.  We live in a society that needs to do things faster, not slower, or safer.  We need people to do their jobs better the first time, and everything would work so much better.  And to Kristi Noem’s point, nobody had even thought to ask the question, “Why are we doing this dumb thing?” all this time.  When the answer was, “because we have always done it.” 

The convenience of flying and getting somewhere far away quickly has become a ridiculous compromise of personal merit, and it never should have been.  The airport’s safety policies have ruined the experience of traveling with others because people often show up in their pajamas, knowing that their travel day is going to be intrusive and demeaning. When you pay that much money for something, it shouldn’t feel the way it does.  It should be fun and rewarding.  People should dress nicely when going to the airport.  By default, due to excessive regulations, airports have become unpleasant places with excessive security, ineffective communication systems, and dirty and uncomfortable seats.  And the staff treat the whole experience like you’re lucky to be there, rather than being grateful that you bought a ticket that funded all their jobs.  The concept of prioritizing safety over profits, when in reality it was always laziness that was the real problem, has made owning an airline too complicated and a draining experience for customers.  And if not for Homeland Security and the TSA specifically, we’d have many more consumer options in airports that are much better for us than what we currently have.  And most of the time, it always starts with asking the right questions from leadership. “Why are we doing this dumb thing?”  And when nobody can answer it, you eliminate the policy.  Thank goodness, because of Kristi Noem, we no longer have to take our shoes off at the airport.  And hopefully, we can roll back many other misguided ideas that were implemented in haste to make people feel safe, when the reality was far from the case.  In all things economic, whether it’s amusement parks or airports, faster is better, and more options are always preferred.  And we don’t want dumb, mindless rules to ruin economic activity that should bring us joy and opportunity.  Just because lazy security guards don’t take their jobs very seriously and have to be turned into a union-led monstrosity to give an illusion of effectiveness, the truth is very far from it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Showing Courage on Ohio Property Taxation: It was always a socialist game that should have never started

It takes a lot of guts to try to override a governor’s veto, and that is just what Matt Huffman and the House Republicans are poised to do on July 21st, 2025, in Columbus, Ohio.  They have been trying to reform property taxes in House Bill 96 in three key areas, eliminating replacement levies, which often lead to tax increases.  Republicans want to phase them out.  The second thing is that they wish to implement county-level cuts, giving county budget commissions the authority to lower property taxes if the local governments or schools collect more than they need.  Then the third thing is to adjust the 20-mill floor, changing how the formula is calculated to reduce school funding as property values continue to rise, potentially.  DeWine vetoed these parts of the bill, arguing that they’d create enormous problems for schools by disrupting funding stability.  It takes a lot of guts for Huffman and other Republicans, including the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, to stand behind these reforms and push for a 60-vote majority.  It will be close.  If the House can get it over to the Senate, the Senate has the votes, so it really will come down to whether Republicans dare to part with DeWine and override him as they should.  Many people talk tough on the campaign trail, and this is one of those times when real courage is needed.  It would be beneficial if Republicans could step up and take the lead at this critical juncture.  Many people would take pride in a good government headed in the right direction.  Because what DeWine is protecting is loaded with bad government misery that is headed for reform regardless.  There is no stopping the reforms to private property that are going to take place. 

I feel like everywhere these days, I have to say it, and there are a lot of people who don’t think about these things very much who don’t want to hear it.  However, I’ve been pointing it out for years, so the road to this July 21st vote is a very long one.  And it’s just the start of many things to come.  The next governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, whom I had the chance to discuss this very topic with just a few weeks ago, is looking at major reforms on private property taxation.   President Trump is discussing the same concept, namely, the elimination of private property taxation all together.  It will take several years to get there, but that’s where the current sentiment is headed.  And people like Mike DeWine, who have been a part of building that old system, know that it will disrupt the way they envisioned funding for government and services.  However, those old trends are what have put us in our current budgetary situation.  We are going to have some tough discussions, just as we are currently with the Federal Reserve.  A group of independent bankers can’t be allowed to strangle billions of dollars of opportunity cost out of our economy just to protect lenders’ profit margins, when the growth potential of reform could generate so much more than the old static measures.  For those who think that punishing property ownership is the way to fund the level of government we may want as a society, it essentially comes down to choice: do you trust the free market, or the minds of humanity to impose burdens to pay for government services, such as school funding?  For DeWine, he’s just never going to be ready to admit that years and years of socialism are behind the creation of property tax penalties to pay for public education.  And, of course, the teachers’ unions control that entire industry, leading to cost overruns that our out-of-control local governments must deal with, leaving behind expensive chaos.

So you can’t help but talk about socialism, communism, and Marxism in general when we discuss how taxation against private property came into our culture to begin with, because we have gone through a period where Democrats and soft shelled Republicans didn’t want to believe to what level Karl Marx influenced legislative policy making going back to the beginning of the last century.  Much of the American expansion period, from 1850 on, saw a significant influx of European socialists who entered the country and introduced their Karl Marx-inspired ideas, which ultimately infected our free enterprise system with penalties against private property.  And it has gone on for so long that we just assumed that’s the way it has to be.  However, this has led to runaway costs, as we have seen in public schools currently, and penalties against those who own property, as they pay more for the same services than, say, an apartment dweller who requires far more tax services, far more than they pay.  It’s a very unfair system that undermines the premise of private property, destroying the American idea, and it was baked into all the progressive taxation policies that came with the creation of the Fed in 1913, a mistake at its inception that has only worsened over time.  There are old politicians, like DeWine, who have carried these mistaken ideas throughout their entire political life, and they are trying to preserve them for all kinds of unhealthy reasons.  However, the temperament lies in reforming that basic concept. 

Of course, what would replace these revenue devices would be a use tax of some kind, as well as sales tax in general.  However, that relies on the market’s growth mechanisms, similar to Trump’s tariffs.  People were against those for the same reason, and only now, a few months into his second term, are people beginning to see the logic, fruitfully.  After a few years of Trump, many significant economic developments will become a reality that people cannot see now.  Yet, as with the trend on private property, we should incentivize people to own as much private property as possible.  The taxes on it are part of a socialist scheme from the beginning that was always part of the plan to grow government.  There is no way to determine the correct funding model for public schools if property owners bear the burden for the benefit of those who can’t afford property.  It’s a wealth redistribution scam that’s baked into the policy of collecting taxes to grow government in ways that nobody can reliably control, because it’s a tax against the few for the needs of the many.  And it takes away the incentive to invest and create.  What we know now is that encouraging growth would generate significantly more revenue through optimism, as opposed to the current system of oppression.  In short, take the socialism, communism, and Marxism out of the legislative process, and the economy works far better, and at that point, you can see what your actual revenue stream would be, and can make much better decisions for how to construct society, such as elements of school funding and per-pupil budget needs.  With the system as it is, we can’t even have the discussion.  There is a significant chance for the Ohio House to take a bold, Trump-like action.  However, the trend, regardless, is working against old politicians like DeWine and is moving away from penalizing private property ownership.  Whether that happens on July 21st, 2025, or at a later time, the taxation of private property is headed for significant reform and disruption of the current methods.  It would be better sooner if people could find the courage.  But eventually, it’s happening anyway, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.  Because it never should have been created in the first place.

Rich Hoffman

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

Bernie Moreno is Doing Great as a Senator: The Fed interest rate should be at 2%, not 4

I am pleased with the work that my new Senator, Bernie Moreno, is doing in Washington, D.C. It’s almost a shame that Trump is doing such a good job that great people like Bernie Moreno are being overlooked amidst all the goodness.  But that’s a good problem to have.  Bernie, in particular, has been great at keeping up the pressure on the Fed, and specifically, Jerome Powell.  So, let’s answer a common question first: No, our Federal Reserve doesn’t need to be independent of politics.  That is the dumbest thing perhaps ever said.  That our political system needs to be separate from our fiscal policy is an entirely dumb idea that needs to be destroyed in our era.  The Fed’s independence is only suitable for one entity, and that is the banks.  It’s there for their protection and nothing else. And because of that assumption, banks and all financial institutions have gained way too much power in the world, and they need their teeth knocked out in substantial ways.  Old man Jerome Powell and all the rest who came before him at the Federal Reserve need a reality check, and I’m more than happy to see that Bernie Moreno has been leading the charge to reform.  Warren Davidson, my congressman, has also been excellent on this issue.  Criticism of the Fed is a very good thing, and here’s why.  I have recently received more education than I ever wanted regarding banking practices, and the more you learn, the more obvious it becomes that many of these banking types have been influenced by comfortable terms that have inspired very anti-American activity.  The way the Fed was created was outside our Constitution, and the belief over the years that it should be separate from other social concerns has only benefited banks by providing a stable environment for them, even if harm is being inflicted on the people who are voting. 

This idea that our elected government would not have direct control over fiscal policy is an absolute joke, but that has been the assumption.  When people say that Bernie Moreno, Warren Davidson, or President Trump should respect an independent Fed, they are smoking crack.  Currently, the economy is humming along nicely, with excellent job reports, energy costs coming down, and a significant amount of money being generated from tariffs. However, this activity has not had the intended effect of raising fears of inflation, as the Fed had anticipated.  Inflation, generally speaking, is when you have too much money chasing too few goods.  The Fed has been accused of printing too much money, which causes inflation to saturate the market.  The Biden administration had too many rules, which constricted market saturation for desired goods and services, leading to inflation.  Inflation is usually caused by standing in the way of human enthusiasm.  Price breaks occur due to market saturation, revealing the actual price that a person is willing to pay for a product or service.  You can usually figure that out if you have four fast food restaurants selling their version of a hamburger.  If you have only one, they can charge whatever they want for a hamburger.  However, if you have four places to choose from, then they must compete for your attention.  Therefore, when a government effectively removes barriers to market entry, a tangible value can be expressed.  However, when a government creates obstacles, we can say that we witness inflated values due to the restriction of that enthusiasm.  And that is precisely what the Fed is currently guilty of doing. 

Currently, the rates set by the Federal Open Market Committee, FOMC, are in the range of 4.25% to 4.5% which equates to about $600 billion of money generated for lenders.  Nobody is saying that banks and other financial institutions shouldn’t pay a fair wage.  Credit card companies make it extremely easy to spend money with the swiping machines and chips that we have today, where nearly every transaction for a mature adult is monitored by their computer systems, making it easy for all of us to spend money.  That is a valuable service, but it is currently being done at an artificially high rate because the Fed policy protects lenders at the expense of the public, the voters.  As Trump and Bernie Moreno have been saying, we are probably sitting on at least two interest rate points too high for what this Red-Hot American economy should be, holding back over a trillion dollars from money flowing into our financial system.  The excuse from Jerome Powell for keeping interest rates as high as they are is to keep inflation in check.  However, as it stands, the Fed has been contributing to inflation, rather than preventing it.  And that has been grotesquely obvious with their sinful relationship with BlackRock.  The Fed printed too much money, which was then distributed through Wall Street, as seen through people like Larry Fink, and this money was used to acquire companies, effectively taking away private ownership and control, which is why I have been discussing this issue so intensely.  The foundation of communism is to abolish the concept of private property, and the Fed has been facilitating the subversion of this foundation at the bank level in very detrimental ways.  And when we have tried to address it, we keep hearing that the Fed needs to be independent of political theater.  No, that’s only good for one party, the banks.

Trump’s approach to the economy has been brilliant.  Usually, we rarely find political figures who understand fiscal policy as well as banks do, so there is always an unfair advantage.  But in Bernie’s case, and Trump’s, they have had to slug it out with banks in the past and understand the games as opposed to the typical loser politician who has done nothing else in their life but get elected to a public position.  And once you know that the name of the game is to take away as much risk as possible from banks and to give them enormous power in the process, then the errors become very obvious.  If we got rid of Jerome Powell at the Fed and put in someone who truly represented the Trump administration, and would bring down interest rates into the 2% range, we would see wealth creation beyond the scope of what anybody thought previously to be possible.  And everyone would make a lot of money in the process, including the banks.  However, this 4.5% approach is excessively restrictive and primarily focuses on exerting power over the political process and securing international financing.  And no, the Fed doesn’t have to be independent of our elected representatives.  We need a monetary policy in America that is representative of the people, who seek representatives to run their government on their behalf.  And the Fed is only suitable for shielding international banks from the whims of political sentiment.  The only people profiting from these high interest rates are the banks.  However, in the process, they restrict economic output, such as having only one place to buy a hamburger, as opposed to four.  And if Powell wants to fight it out to hold his term to its close, he should feel the pressure that people hate him for artificially restricting their options.  Interest rates should be at 2%, not 4%.  And when that happens, the grip that socialism and communism around the world have on all this centralized banking will lose control over mass populations, and a real era of prosperity can begin.  And Bernie Moreno gets it, and I’m proud that he does.  The Fed stronghold is breaking, as it should.  And we are seeing the light on the other side, perhaps for the first time in all human history.

Rich Hoffman

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

I Would Have Shot Them: No protestor has a right to throw rocks, under any conditions

I would have shot them, the protestors who were throwing rocks at the ICE vehicles leaving the illegal immigration raid on the pot farm in California.  Rocks are considered a deadly weapon, and any federal agent who is hit by a rock is no different than having some lunatic lunge at them with a knife, or to fire a shot from a gun.  And throwing rocks into the driver’s side window of a Federal vehicle, shatter-resistant or not, is solid enough ground to use deadly force to stop.  With shatterproof glass, once a window starts to become compromised, and some of those vehicles were, continued impacts in the same area could allow the rocks to get through, and those could have been deadly.  The ICE agents did not have an obligation to flee, which they were trained to do, and that is part of the problem.  We are a stand-and-fight country, especially when it comes to law enforcement.   Those agents were just doing their jobs, and those rock-throwing ICE protestors were crossing the line with encouraged violence.  And part of that encouragement was that they did not think that the ICE agents would fight back, which encouraged the violence in the first place.  The reason many of these protests are so violent and dangerous is that there has grown an expectation that all government employees have been trained to flee rather than fight, and this has caused unwarranted aggression to grow with the expectation that violence would only flow one way.  And it would be far healthier for society to understand that impeding government operations with deadly force opens the door for a deadly response.  And as hard as those protestors were throwing those rocks at those fleeing vehicles, their deadly motivations couldn’t have been presented more obviously. 

I know it’s a pain in the neck to fill out the forms when you do shoot someone, but this California case called for it.  And it would have made future protestors think twice before doing it again.  All they would have had to do upon a rock impact striking the driver’s side window was to get out of the car and open fire into the nearest perpetrator, shooting to kill.  The paperwork processing would have been fine.  I know that the bosses of the ICE agents, trained under years of progressive understanding, have been taught to use non-lethal force and to play patty cake with these kinds of people, and none of them want to kill protestors on their watch.  So they put these ICE agents out knowing that the environment is more dangerous because of their policy decisions, because they encourage violence by not meeting it when it presents itself.  And now an entire generation of protestor types believe they can exert deadly force without having it turn back on them, and nobody takes it seriously any longer.  Nobody should think that throwing a rock at anybody is appropriate under any condition.  And at some point, ICE agents need to fight back.  Rubber bullets and stun guns just aren’t enough to use against stringy-haired socialists and radical left-wing America haters.  Before a protester arrives on the scene to throw a rock, they need to be aware of the potential consequences.  And these kids in California had no such fear, even to the point of running right up to the passenger’s side window of fleeing vehicles and tossing big rocks with all their force into windows they didn’t know were shatter-resistant or not.  At the least, they cause a lot of property damage that taxpayers are on the hook for, and the preservation of their mangy lives wasn’t worth it.  Once they decided to throw a rock, all consideration for their preservation was no longer relevant.

And is this what we’re talking about preserving, as far as the jobs illegal immigration performs, to work as underage pot pickers on a farm that provides marijuana to an already sketchy market?  I love the work ethic of immigrant labor.  I always appreciate hard workers.  But we’re supposed to believe that we have to accept tens of millions of illegal immigrants to cover jobs like this pot farm in California?  These are the kinds of jobs that I find personally useless, and if that’s what it takes to bring down the price of pot in legal states, then let the prices fall off the rocker.  Clean operations that are financially solid wouldn’t need illegal immigration to perform basic tasks.  And now watching some of the ridiculous comments from some of these ICE protestors, such as the current L.A. Mayor, are grotesquely overstated.  Even going so far as to say that we won’t be able to get our cars washed if we deport all these illegals.  If we deported tens of millions of illegals, it’s evident that legitimate businesses would be just fine, and people would not notice.  But what would be impacted are all the illegitimate businesses that are operating under the table, and that sounds like a good thing, not a bad thing.  Eliminating under-the-table labor would force many companies to clean up their current employment practices, which the California facility was found to be guilty of.  And defending that way of life was why rocks were justified in being thrown?  I don’t think so.  This isn’t a free speech issue; it’s an insistence on breaking the law issue, and ultimately comes down to law enforcement and whether everyone respects the basic premise of law and order. 

So I would have shot those protestors on the spot after the first rock had been thrown.  Granted, my profile type would likely keep me from any kind of federal employment.  I am a very aggressive concealed carry individual.  I openly walk around ready for violence all the time, and everyone knows it.  I would prefer not to shoot people, but I am always prepared to do so as soon as danger presents itself.  And my thinking on that is to call a spade what it is, and not to feed the perpetuation of violence with passive presentation of my livelihood.  And if everyone had that attitude, there would be a lot more respect for federal agents than we currently have.  However, the kind of administrative personnel we put in these jobs do not hire people like me; they have made a lot of DEI hires who would prefer not to blame people when bad things happen.  So that’s certainly part of the problem.  But until we do start seeing people shot for perpetuating violence into an otherwise peaceful society, we’ll see increases in violence that we just can’t tolerate, such as in the ICE raid on that California pot farm, a place of business that shouldn’t have been operating on a good day.  To keep a company like that alive is only making society worse upstream by producing the product it does.  So it would have been good for the government ICE agents to stand and fight, rather than flee and retreat as rocks were being thrown at their vehicles.  The moment a rock struck a car, the entire engagement changed, and deadly force should have been used.  We have to stop playing nice with these anti-American forces.  I would even go so far to say that lethal force should be used upon the burning of the American flag because such a jesture isn’t a free speech right, it’s a purposeful display that the laws of America are being cast aside, which makes the people doing so very dangerous, and in need of removal to maintain the peace.  And those are the discussions we need to be having.  And if I were driving those cars, there would have been less rock throwing, because those protestors would have been shot where they stood.  I would have gladly filled out the paperwork and still been home in time for dinner without a second thought.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Epstein List: People want blood and they won’t rest until they get it

Here are a few of the names that are on the Epstein list, and I doubt most of them were involved in underage sex while traveling to the now-famous pedophilia island.  Jeffery Epstein was being well paid to facilitate relationships within the structure of some social order.  After what we learned about the Diddy trial, pornographic sexual fantasies are common among people, and especially among people who can afford to indulge in the most outrageous of those fantasies.  So I don’t think that Trump’s resistance to releasing the Epstein list is that he’s on it, but because he knows a lot of people who are, and understands that the context of them being on that list doesn’t mean they were engaging in underage sex.  But Trump’s reluctance to open this can of worms has exposed a chink in his armor that now all his enemies will exploit, and he has to understand that this isn’t a topic people are going to put up with in a minimized standard.   People want blood.  They want the heads of the corrupt enemy, the concept of elite social types, and they want them in jail.  People did not vote for the nice guy Trump, who threatened to put Hillary Clinton in jail, then at the last minute, tried to forgive her.  Trump is a very nice guy, much nicer than he lets on.  And this list challenges him on that front, because he likes a lot of people, even if they are wobbly in the bedroom.  Here are just a few of the names:

 • Alan Dershowitz • Leonardo DiCaprio • Al Gore • Richard Branson • Stephen Hawking • Ehud Barak • Marvin Minksy • Kevin Spacey • George Lucas • Jean Luc Brunel • Bill Clinton • Hilary Clinton • Madonna • Joe Biden • Cate Blanchett • Naomi Campbell • Heidi Klum • Sharon Churcher • Bruce Willis • Bianca Jagger • Bill Richardson • Cameron Diaz • Glenn Dubin • Eva Andersson • Noam Chomsky • Tom Pritzker • Chris Tucker • Sarah Ferguson • Robert F Kennedy Jr • James Michael Austrich • Juan and Maria Alessi • Janusz Banasiak • Bella Klein or Klen • Lesley Groff • Victoria Bean • Rebecca Boylan • Dana Burns • Bill Gates • Ron Eppinger • Daniel Estes • Louis Freeh • Frédéric Fekkai • Alexandra Fekkai • Jo Jo Fontanella • Doug Band • Prince Andrew • Eric Gany • Meg Garvin • Sheridan Gibson-Butte • Ross Gow • Fred Graff • Robert Giuffre • Philip Guderyon • Alexandra Hall • Joanna Harrison • Shannon Harrison • Victoria Hazel • Brittany Henderson • Brett Jaffe • Forest Jones • Sarah Kellen • Adriana Ross • Carol Kess • Dr Steven Olson • Stephen Kaufmann • Wendy Leigh • Peter Listerman • Tom Lyons • Nadia Marcinkova • Bob Meister • Jamie Melanson • Donald Morrell • David Mullen • David Norr • Joe Pagano • May Paluga • Stanley Pottinger • Detective Joe Recarey • Chief Michael Reiter • Rinaldo Rizzo • Kimblerley Roberts • Lynn Roberts • Haley Robson • Dave Rodgers • Alfredo Rodriquez • Scott Rothinson • Forest Sawyer • Dough Schoetlle • Cecilia Stein • Marianne Strong • Mark Tafoya • Emmy Taylor • Brent Tindall • KevinIts Thompson • Ed Tuttle • Les Wexner • Abigail Wexner • Cresenda Valdes • Emma Vaghan • Anthony Valladares • Maritza Vazquez • Vicky Ward • Jarred Weisfield • Sharon White • Courtney Wild • Daniel Wilson • Mark Zeff • Kelly Spamm • Alexandra Dixon • Alfredo Rodriguez • Ricardo Legorreta • Sky Roberts

It’s pretty simple, Trump ran on law and order, and they want a Trump DOJ to be ruthless in prosecuting bad guys, and so far, there hasn’t been anybody going to jail for what they did.  This discussion of investigating Jim Comey and John Brennan for their roles in heading up the CIA and FBI, using the power of government to inspire a coup against an elected president, is a good start, but not anywhere near the kind of ruthlessness that people expect.  It’s not enough to have a good life, with a good economy, and to put all this behind us, which is what burned Trump during his first term.  In that final year, the bad guys exploited Trump’s likability, and it’s what led to his removal from office.  Most people in the MAGA movement want revenge for all that, so turning the other cheek isn’t going to do it.  People are going to have to go to jail, and they need to be punished ruthlessly.  And knowing all that, this Epstein list is an easy one.  Trump shouldn’t hold back and expect people to back off; otherwise, he will lose the trust of the people who have backed him most, even if he knows the list by itself doesn’t tell the whole story.

Trump answered the question incorrectly on the Epstein list, which is unusual, as he is usually bullish on the contents; he came off sounding guilty.  It wasn’t the usual Trump bravado, and people picked up on it.  Yes, people are going to continue talking about the Epstein list until people go to jail over it.  If Kash Patel comes out and says there is no conspiracy to the Epstein suicide, it’s not going to help because if people doubt that, they will question the premise on everything else, such as election fraud, the roots of COVID, and even the Steele Dossier.  People know there are problems with the Epstein case and the way that society was organized in elite categories, likely using sex to manipulate the mass population through celebrity status, and they want to see that whole system destroyed, even if Trump wants to negotiate with it to minimize its effects.  Elon Musk hasn’t helped by saying that Trump is on the list, and that’s why the President won’t release it.  I think most celebrities are on the list, which for most of them equates to a free vacation with the who’s who of celebrity society.   And Trump, at that time in his life, certainly would have accepted a free vacation with other celebrities to a remote island full of women, just to be seen with other celebrities.  While that might be embarrassing, being tough on all other issues but this one is even worse, because it exposes a chink in the armor that people will not forgive with inaction.

Sexual impropriety is part of the corruption that runs in the background of our entire society, and people want reform of that system, not a cover-up of its perpetuation.  And until people associated with Jeffrey Epstein are prosecuted and exposed, people aren’t going to let off the gas.  They might like to see James Comey and John Brennan prosecuted for their abuse of power, but people need a lot more than those two to be held accountable.  I don’t think we are talking about French Revolution mob rule here, but we aren’t looking at a civilization that will forgive and forget.  If Trump believes that simply being a good president and providing people with a good life will be enough, he needs to rethink his strategy.  Running cover for the sex rings that have people he likes in them isn’t going to help the cause.  And the story won’t go away.  I think the list begins to tell the story.  But people want to know who’s on it and what they did to be included.  By the time we unpack everything, I think we’ll find that we have a CIA-backed hazing ritual of collecting embarrassing behavior of people in exchange for celebrity status.  Suppose you want to be a celebrity or continue being one. In that case, you have to give up something embarrassing about yourself to members of this group to maintain that status.  One person on that list, George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars and other notable entertainment projects, doesn’t surprise me.  A few years ago, I was working on a series of scripts for movies with a very well-known celebrity who is now one of the main people on Good Morning America.  And while we were working on those projects, she confided in me the sexual lifestyle of the movie mogul, and it made me so sick that I made a clean break from that business, for good.  People and their sexual lifestyles, when they aren’t aligned with the values of the kind of stories they tell, are often very disappointing.  And that is the kind of disappointment that people have with Trump in protecting the type of people who are on that list.  Because Trump likes them, and doesn’t want to see them harmed for some weakness that they have, or had at a particular time in their life.  But people want blood, and until they get it, they will be very skeptical and impossible to please. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Lipstick on a Pig: Is it fair to refer to the Lakota school board as swine?

Since I wrote about the ridiculous levy request from Lakota schools to build a bunch of new schools while tearing down the old ones, to the cost of 500 million dollars, people have been suggesting to me that maybe I was being too hard on the perpetrators, the Lakota school board by referring to them as pigs, that they were no better than swine.  However, I think that is the polite word for them, and the proper way to say it.  People who tend to have moral bankruptcy, as a group, tend to think that cosmetic improvements will hide the horrendous decisions they make in their lives, which often end up costing a lot of money.  This is precisely why Democrats, when elected, tend to run their communities into the ground.  And yes, all these people on the Lakota school board are Democrats.  It will be a lot better for people in the future when school board people have to run through the filter of a political party, so people know who they are voting for.  However, they currently hide behind a façade of neutrality.  Four out of five of the Lakota school board members are very liberal, and they spend money the way that liberals always do.  But that’s not the worst of it.  Now, the fifth school board member, Isaac Adi, I haven’t been too crazy about him, even though he’s considered a Republican.  What he did to Darbi Boddy was unforgivable.   But he and I talked for a long time in Senator Lang’s office, and we can at least work together.  So I’m not surprised that he voted no on this latest Lakota boondoggle.  However, referring to what they want to do as putting lipstick on a pig, because the pig will still be a pig, is the correct way to describe this situation. 

And I wish them luck; I hope they can find voters for their tax increase as effectively as they find their clothes after a night of hard drinking at education conferences.  Everyone knows the stories; there is nothing secret about it.  These aren’t very high-quality people, and that showed itself during the last school superintendent drama, where he got caught offering his wife on Craigslist while they were traveling out of town to music concerts, for group sex parties.  That superintendent had to resign because the community was upset about it, and this school board could only look at those of us who were upset about it and declare that we should have kept it all a secret, so people never found out, for the good of the children, of course.  We went through a lot of drama over that issue because, essentially, the superintendent and his wife talked about sexual fantasies with students who went to Lakota, where he was supposed to be in charge, and that is a major no-no.  And I wouldn’t say that we were getting all this information second-hand through rumors, but from the ex-wife herself.  It was never a question as to whether her husband, the Lakota superintendent, had an overly sexualized lifestyle.  He did.  It was whether or not he was allowed to have such a private life as a public figure.  Like a lot of really radically liberal people, he thought he could be one thing in public and be something completely different in private, but that’s not how things cook in the kitchen.  People in leadership roles are judged based on the entirety of their lives, and even if you are talking about little kids as sexual objects in just “pillow talk,” it still shows intent. 

I did talk to prosecutors about the Lakota case and why there was reluctance to go after him for child endangerment, because the ex-wife was reliable testimony, and there was a police report where he admitted it.  So it was pretty clear-cut.  And the answer I got would melt your face with anger.  Because the truth is, we have a very pornographic society, and this Lakota administrator isn’t the only one doing this kind of stuff.  It’s a common behavior, the overly sexual lives of people who have too much personal income, so that they can indulge in porn addictions.  And Lakota schools, as do most schools with high population densities, have a lot of bored employees who think too much about sex.  And it’s just a dangerous combination to put coming-of-age kids in passive roles with adults thinking way too much about sex.  As it turned out, nobody cared about the former Lakota school superintendent because most people didn’t see that he was doing anything wrong.  Because they were either doing it too, or they were thinking about it. I have never been a big fan of public schools, but after the Lakota school superintendent case and the behavior of this same school board, which tried to cover it all up as best they could, I’m a hard no on anything they propose.  We can’t trust anything they say.  At best, building new schools for these types of people is just putting lipstick on a pig, and in many cases, that pig is already at the slaughterhouse with a severed head, because of the school choice expansion that came out of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.  These same people want to invest this much money in an education system that will have to undergo significant changes in the coming years.

But people will say that all the buildings they want to tear down are old and outdated.  For Lakota to recruit the right kind of future employees, they need better buildings that can accommodate comfortable class sizes.  If Lakota wants to have the best employees, we must provide better buildings for them to work in.  Well, that is the lipstick on the pig talking.  They have no idea what makes education work with kids.  They are teaching kids all the wrong things for a society with changing priorities, and they are way behind the curve, out of touch at best.  On a good day, they are teaching progressive social values, such as transgender bathrooms, and the 1619 Project, which is all over their website.  That isn’t the kind of thing a community that voted for President Trump by overwhelming margins wants its children learning.  The world is changing in ways they don’t like, and now they want to spend half a billion dollars to counteract it.  They are out of their minds.  And at the core of it, knowing many of the school board members personally, I wouldn’t trust a word they said if they were giving me directions to a highway while standing on the on-ramp.  How can we believe them when they say that we need to spend all this money on new schools when they have spent years screwing up the old schools?  I think it is very polite to refer to them as swine, so the lipstick on a pig metaphor is the right one for people of such low quality.  They think that some fresh paint and new plaster will present them in a more favorable light to the public.  But to accomplish that, a billion dollars wouldn’t be enough.  Because a pig is still a pig, no matter how much lipstick you put on it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Its a Command, not a Request: Smart TVs that aren’t so smart

I don’t think I’m becoming an anti-technology, cruddy old man because the world is leaving me behind as it goes faster and faster and is designed for much younger people.  I expect things to work, and as I have been wrapped up in some severe trouble lately, dealing with bone-crushing topics, at the end of the day, I hope the television at least works.  However, the TV in our bedroom is supposed to be a high-tech, smart TV that is very sophisticated. However, it makes me mad all the time because it is completely wireless, and when my wife walks into the room, she always scrambles the signal.  It’s a long story, but my wife has unusual electromagnetic imprints on the world.  It’s always been a problem, but back in the old days, these televisions were hard-wired into the wall.  But not anymore. These days, everything is wireless, and I’ve found that none of it works as well as the old stuff, which is getting on my nerves.  The other day, I was enjoying a show when my wife came into the room. The TV lost its signal and showed a spinning death icon, saying, “Please wait.”  Then, after a few minutes, it simply stopped and informed me that “it couldn’t process the request at this time.”  I was so mad that I just about threw the whole thing through the nearby window and out into the front yard.  I didn’t “request” anything.  I commanded the television to show me a channel, and it was failing to perform its basic task.  And who did that stupid television think it was?  But what was worse was the message code that framed the operation of the television as a “request,” as if the TV had an option to choose to do what I asked of it.  And that’s part of a much larger problem that I am seeing across all of society, and it’s a significant one.

People were taken advantage of by technology as tech bros tried to capture market share with control mechanisms that suited their needs. The quest to make things easier has only given us things that are too intrusive into our lives, as they are constantly collecting information on us, which can be irritating.  However, the technology never really works, and the by-product of the effort probably should never have been utilized to begin with.  However, we are people who like to put our generational stamp on things, and technology is a means of making a new generation feel better about themselves by gaining market dominance over the previous one.  But at a certain point, coffee is coffee, a phone is a phone, and an elevator does one primary thing.  You might add some fancy buttons that display different colors, but you don’t change their function.  However, in the world of business, we have transitioned from note-taking to computer processing. When systems fail, instead of completing tasks the old-fashioned way, as we have in the past, we have become a culture that accepts failure and waits patiently for resolution.  When you are talking to other businesses out there and trying to process a PO, or manage inventory, or send supporting paperwork with a shipment, most of the time there is a system failure in the chain and the people involved are waiting for IT to resolve it so that the world can resume its business.  This arrangement has simply not been working.  We tried to make it all easier, but it’s ended up being much less effective. 

There are some large companies that I am aware of, which are attempting to move away from their computerized management systems and return to taking notes on paper.  The paper notes don’t give you failure messages like my TV, which assumes that the technology has an option to perform or not.  If we are going to have technology in our lives, we need to let it know who’s boss.  And that when we tell it to do something, it does it, and does it quickly.  All this week, I had heard countless examples of ERP systems that were down, and people were waiting for them to come back up so that parts could be shipped. The kind of geeks who work in IT are about as out of touch as human beings on earth could be.  They would take things more seriously if they were playing the game Fortnite.  However, real-life things are much less interesting to them.  They are the kind of people who sit at a table of 12 but prefer to interact with a computer screen rather than with real people.  And those same personality types are what programming these cause codes in these TVs think are appropriate answers.  I used language a few times this week to them while on the phone with them that I did with that stupid television, and you would have thought I ran over their dog.  They are such pasty people, way too sheltered from reality, and they are in charge of how this technology forms in our society, even down to our TVs.  To me, if the technology doesn’t perform, get rid of it and get something else.  And you could tell that the young people were using technology to hide in the world and to conceal their poor performance behind it.  And it ticked me off.

I’m not against technology.  If something is invented that’s better, great.  However, if it’s not improving our lives, or we’re trying to accommodate technology when we should reject it, as in the case of smart TVs that aren’t so smart, we should discard them.  Because what I see happening is that technology has been used to hide the bad performance of lazy losers who are trying to hide in the background.  And it’s lowering the performance standards of our society as a whole.  I attended a substantial event the other day that included valet parking.  I didn’t feel like dealing with people, but the young fellows doing the valet parking were sharp and ambitious.  And after seeing numerous technological failures throughout the week, it was refreshing to see the competence of ambitious young people trying to earn a few bucks.  And after a hard day, you want to hear Yes, sir, and No, sir, and Here are your keys.  You don’t want to hear from technology that it has lost your keys, requiring you to wait for it to process your request.  Or anything that takes away the performance standard.  It was raining outside, and those kids were working in it, not bumping cars into each other or making guests wait.  They were running to get the cars so people wouldn’t have to wait.  And it was good to see.  Not the kind of service that computers are giving us these days.  And perhaps we should reconsider many aspects of it.  I gave the young men a twenty as a tip just because I appreciated the level of competency, and they were a little shocked.  But they had no idea what kind of week I had just survived and how much technology had made it much more difficult, rather than easier.  I was just happy to deal with hungry human beings who wanted to do a good job.  When you need something done, it’s not a request; it’s a command, and we need to put an end to technology that isn’t respectful enough of our time, especially during our leisure time.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Only Way A New Indiana Jones Movie Would Be Successful: Consultants and corporate looters can’t copy success, it never works

There is a way to do it, to make more Indiana Jones movies.  There have been at least seven different people who have played Indiana Jones at some point in time, everyone from George Hall, to Corey Carrier, to Sean Patrick Flanery—even River Phoenix.  Then, of course, there are all the video games and commercial appearances where an Indiana Jones-like character is seen doing something, from amusement park rides and Coke commercials to cameos in other movies.  Unlike other franchise characters, however, Indiana Jones is different in that Harrison Ford created a particular kind of character with a timeline expectation that society will hold Disney to.  There is a nice period in the character’s timeline, from age 25 to 35, where a new actor who resembles Harrison Ford could tell all-new stories that the public would love.  Most of the best Indiana Jones movies take place within a specific 3-4 year timeline that centers on Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones in the iconic movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film that revolutionized the way stories are told and movies are presented.  I personally think it was the best movie ever made and that changed the value of the character created for the public forever.  The chances of doing something like that again with the same character but a different actor is impossible. I think it’s possible to make more movies after seeing how Disney and Bethesda, the video game maker, produced the latest Indiana Jones video game, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.  It was a great game and a lot of fun, and it didn’t try to “reboot” Indiana Jones; it respected the timeline that people had come to know and trust.  And many actors contributed to that effort, and those are the rules of engagement.  There is a lot of talk now, halfway through 2025, that Disney wants to reboot the Indiana Jones movies.  They own the property and want to make money from it.  However, there are rules they must follow; otherwise, they will cause all kinds of social problems, just as they did with the Star Wars movies.  If they want Indiana Jones to remain valuable to the public, they’ll listen and stay respectful.

But if they think they are going to retell Raiders of the Lost Ark with a woke actor like Pedro Pascal, or even a woman, then they are out of their minds, and another Indiana Jones movie would be a disaster.  Indiana Jones is not something that can be ruined in the way that studios often do with Batman movies or James Bond stories.  There has been over 40 years of story telling from books, television, comics, video games that for that entire time held to a stringent canon timeline, and that trust has been built across many generations of fans, from kids today to their grandparents who saw the movies in the theater when they were kids.  I love the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular in Orlando, Florida, the stunt show that has been performed for years at Hollywood Studios. It has featured several different actors portraying Indiana Jones in that stage play.  However, the difference was that all content creators were very respectful of the original idea.  During the period I mentioned, numerous exciting stories could be told about a younger Indiana Jones as he establishes his excellent and famous reputation, which people would love to see depicted in movies.  However, those movies would require directors, producers, and musical talent as passionate about making the movies as were Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and John Williams, originally.  Disney thought they would get away with a reboot of Star Wars by ignoring the story canon and essentially retelling A New Hope with The Force Awakens, and people have never forgiven them for it.  They might have made some short-term cash, but they destroyed the brand, and that has cost Disney a lot.  

This is important because the character of Indiana Jones has likely been the single most valuable narrative device that has advanced the arts and sciences in the world today.  There are many people who have become scientists because of Indiana Jones and the inspiration they received from him as children, which has been very beneficial.  The value of the Indiana Jones property lies in this social motivation.  And unless Disney respects that sentiment, it will harm them in very detrimental ways, and erode the character it currently holds socially.  Indiana Jones is more than just Harrison Ford, and unless a new production is presented with the same level of commitment as those original films were, it will be rejected at the box office, just as the Star Wars movies have been.  There is an arrogance that comes from the consultant class in society, who often con their way into the motion picture studios, never figuring these things out.  And those are the voices at Disney who think they could make a movie as good as the originals were, without understanding the social consequences of destroying the public’s love of the property.   The Indiana Jones timeline is unique in that it spans from his infancy in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles to his portrayal by a 93-94-year-old man with an eye patch.  Within that timeline, there is room to make movies just as exciting as Temple of Doom and Raiders of the Lost Ark, if the stories deal with the post-college years.  However, suppose they recast and retell the stories for modern audiences with music by different composers, cinematography that fails to capture the spirit, and scripts that don’t adhere to the formula. In that case, the project will be a disaster.

I think Disney should leave it all alone and let it be what it is.  They’ll make more money off Indiana Jones if they allow it to stay valuable in people’s consciousness.  However, Disney is not filled with creative people; it is essentially run by consultants who choose to live by copying what they think is successful and trying to pass it off as their own.  And it never works well, and it certainly won’t work with Indiana Jones.  So, with all the talk about Disney developing another actor to play Indiana Jones in a new movie, I would advise them to proceed with great caution.  I’d see the film if they were respectful to the established timeline.  But if they want to put a minority character in the role instead of a white guy, and change elements of Indiana Jones for a more modern audience, then it will be a disaster.  And I’m only writing this now in the hope of keeping them from making that big mistake.  But I don’t have much faith that they’ll listen, and will destroy this as they have so many other things in life, and the impact of that in the world is very significant. It matters more than people think it does; we’re talking about the way that humans create reality for themselves through story and narrative devices, and Indiana Jones emerged as a necessity for human consciousness that was more than entertaining.  Disney has been warned, so we’ll see what they do.  I’d like to see it work.  I think there is an actor out there who could carry the torch of Indiana Jones during an exciting period that audiences would accept.  However, short of that, it would be best to leave it alone, as the social impact of changing the value with new content would be devastating in ways that most people cannot measure.  What I have said is the only way that it could be done because all other methods would be very destructive and unnecessary. People are pretty forgiving as long as they know they can trust a story not to change on them. And that’s true with everything in life. People can come and go, but people want to know that the story stays the same.

Rich Hoffman

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

Elon Musk’s America Party: Democrats will never recover, Republicans will thrive

You can imagine how it was for Elon Musk. Many believe that he was befriending President Trump to ensure the future of electric cars. However, once Tesla suffered a significant loss in market share because Musk was associated with MAGA, the shareholders became very concerned.  Then, when the Big Beautiful Bill came out, it seemed as though Musk had not influenced Trump at all.  Musk has been a Democrat for years and has even called himself a socialist.  So all this MAGA stuff was new to him, and he was losing employees at his companies because of his political affiliation.  So I understand Musk’s need to distance himself from Trump because it was hurting his companies, and the fun wore off.  I do think he was sincerely a MAGA supporter, but the DOGE effort was much more difficult, and the government spending was much worse than he understood it to be. The criticism that there wasn’t a trillion dollars in savings found in those first couple of months was something he couldn’t deal with.  Tesla dealerships were being bombed by radical Democrats, people who had formerly supported Musk. Not that he felt Trump had abandoned him on the EV mandate.   From his point of view, it was all for nothing, and he lost billions of dollars in the process, with the added consequence of losing market share in his brand.  However, the EV car mandate was never going to be implemented during the Trump administration, and the critics of Musk were never going to let him live it down.  I understand his anger; it costs a lot of money to have values in the world, and that is a price that Musk just isn’t willing to pay.  He was a converted personality who moved from Democrat to MAGA.  So, none of this fighting is in his soul.  And when things got rough, he wavered. 

But with all this fear of a third party being created and that it’s going to rot out the Republican Party, that’s not how it is.  Elon Musk’s America Party is likely to turn out to be another DOGE, an ambitious project that has a lot more political reality to it than will ultimately work in his favor.  The Republican Party has already gone through a renovation period, and it is now the MAGA Party, and that’s how it’s going to emerge over these next four years.  It’s the Democrats that have the problems, and they are now going through what the Republican Party went through during the last thirty years.  I remember it well because I was part of that change in the Republican Party and I can say with confidence that Musk’s America Party will split the Democrat Party in two, and even then, many will not join because their lives will be so good under President Trump, that it will stay a fringe effort that never really gets much traction.  When George H.W. Bush was in the White House, right after Reagan, he wasn’t very effective, and the Reform Party started as a response under Ross Perot.  And I was one of the very first members, and I had a front row seat to how it formed.  And over the next decade, people like Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump joined the party to try to run as kind of independent candidates alongside mainstream Republicans.  As a result, Democrats had a period where they won majorities because Republicans were splitting their votes. 

The Reform Party evolved into the Tea Party, and again, mainstream Republicans attempted to co-opt them and pull them back into the mainstream.  However, it didn’t work, and that effort evolved into the MAGA party with Trump’s announcement that he would run for president in 2015.  And we know how hard that has been.  Up until a few months ago, it was a death blow socially to admit that anybody supported President Trump.  It wasn’t easy, and then some.  So these political parties are not for the faint of heart.  I remember in just the last election, the RINO label hung heavy on mainstream politicians, and most of them have been pushed out of office, people like Thom Tillis and Mitch McConnell, people who used to be political heavyweights, but were washed away by the tide.   Instead, you can see the kind of misfits who are talking about joining Musk in the America Party, people like Mark Cuban and Anthony Scaramucci, all former Trump rejects.  The next thing we’ll hear is that Omarosa is going to join, too, and perhaps even Stormy Daniels.  Putin might be next, and maybe the former country of Iran.  What the America Party is going to look like is the island of misfit toys who have fallen out of Trump’s orbit and are upset about it.  It will turn out to be the crybaby party and will run out of steam relatively quickly as everyone involved realizes how hard it is to accomplish these things.  I used to spend time with the Perot family during the early days of the Reform Party, and let me say, even brilliant people underestimate how difficult it is to beat the two-party system.  Because two parties emerge for a reason, by mathematical necessity, not sentiment, you could have in America many parties, as they do in Europe and elsewhere, but the problem is, nobody ever wins a majority, and those experiments usually fall apart quickly.

But when Musk’s America Party splits the Democrats in two and harms them much more than it will the Republicans, people in the MAGA movement will see the distinct benefit.  As I have been saying, if Trump can get election reform to prevent cheating, Democrats may have a hard time winning everywhere, because they have been counting on election fraud just to stay close for decades.  So I say let Musk have his America Party and bleed away Democrats.  Because the Democrats are destroyed right now as they are turning hard left toward open communism and socialism, they were always Marxist oriented, and now many of them are without a Party, and they aren’t happy about it.  And Musk is one of them.  It was fun to be “Dark MAGA” until he realized the cost of that, and for many people, it’s just too great a burden day to day.  It might be fun during elections, but politics is a rough life, and Musk will find that it takes more than an engineer’s mind to solve the problems, because they are primarily psychological.  I think the America Party, with MAGA, will only get stronger, and there will be greater majorities in Congress during the midterms.  So I think it would be a healthy exercise for the former Democrats to explore, let them fight it out between socialism and communism, and show the world what they have always been.  It won’t be MAGA Republicans who peel away, and the RINOs will stay where the tax burdens are least.  They won’t be joining Musk.  It will only be those who are already considered Democrats, as Musk has been.  His self-interest drove his conversion to the Republican Party, and it didn’t work out the way he had hoped.  So he was always at best a fair-weather fan.  And the creation of another political party only hurts Democrats.  I don’t care what the polling says, because they don’t know how to ask the right questions yet.  This is a new political climate, and the old models are not adequate measures.  With the creation of the America Party, it will destroy the Democrat Party and will leave many little disjointed parties grabbing for power for decades.  By then, Elon Musk will be living on Mars, and history will be blaming him for destroying what was left of the Democrats, because they will never recover. 


Rich Hoffman

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

Lakota Wants A Half A Billion Dollar Tax Increase: All the schools they want to destroy, and rebuild with wasted money–VOTE HELL NO!

This is what you get when you have liberals on a school board. Lakota Schools has decided to put two levies on the ballot in November, totaling half a billion dollars, which will cost most taxpayers at least $465.5 in property taxes.  They are stating that the combined $4.99 million bond issue will have a $0.95 million permanent improvement tax added to it, which will cost around $93.10 per $100,000 of home evaluation, providing $ 506.40 million to be repaid over 37 years.  And all that sounds wonderful until you realize that we’ve heard this all before, such as when the Liberty Junior building was proposed and built back in 1980, and is scheduled as one of the ten schools they want to demolish with this tax increase.  New school buildings can’t hide the fact that the people teaching in them and running them have no idea what they are doing, and that radical teacher union values are what are being taught to these generations of kids.  And, as with these school levies, which have been a while since we’ve had one at Lakota, I will be voting not just ‘no,’ but a resounding ‘hell no’ on this ridiculous proposal.  What it essentially comes down to is a bunch of liberal women on a school board who believe that new shoes worn to a social occasion can make lipstick on a swine look better.  Hey, nobody is looking at your shoes, if you’ve let yourself go, and all these school board members are just that type, new clothes can’t hide what disasters they are to social considerations.  And I say four ladies because Doug Horton acts like one of them, and given the way these big progressive organizations hire people like him, I would not be surprised to learn that he puts she/her as his listed pronouns.  This Lakota school board is a very progressive group, and they all believe that cosmetics can hide the fundamental flaws of the education system in general.

These are the schools Lakota is planning to tear down

They believe that this is the time to do this; they have wanted to for a long time, and we have held it off in our community by having at least a reasonable stopgap on the school board.  For the last couple of years, we (conservatives) had a three-to-two majority.  But the way that everyone behaved, the radical leftists in the background, there was no way to keep conservative members on the board.  When Darbi Boddy was no longer there, any hope of reform on spending vanished.  The idea that the Republican Party could at least appease the radicals with some playing nice was a fantasy.  Before they ran Darbi off, they ran off other conservatives with just as much viciousness.  I determined several years ago that the Lakota school board was beyond hope, and the best course of action was to let them reveal themselves to the community as they are, which is precisely what they are doing.  Talk about bad judgment, the people suggesting that new school buildings will solve their education problems of teaching students are the same people who are well known to strip on table tops at education conventions and end up passed out without their clothes in the bathroom.  So, when I say that for these very pretentious people, who look like people who have let themselves go, and believe that a new outfit worn to a social occasion will keep people from seeing what they are, that is the logic behind this ridiculous half a billion dollar monstrosity.  If it weren’t so outrageously absurd, we might laugh at it, but they are serious. 

Republicans played nice with these radical people as long as they could, and that has largely kept a tax increase off the ballot since 2012.  Declining enrollment has kept the budget afloat, and the wages reflect it, with a majority of the administrators and many of the Lakota teachers earning well into the six figures these days.  Their operating budget is approximately a quarter of a billion dollars, so these failing schools are a real drain on our community.  They are centers of government progressive imposition that are trending out of our society.  These four school board members have been advocates for same sex bathrooms and Critical Race Theory.  They ran off Darbi, who was doing a good job of pointing out those big problems, and a lot of people didn’t like that she wouldn’t play nice to keep Lakota’s board from going completely liberal, as it is now.  However, in the process, they were dragging our community into the gutter, and we needed to take a stand at some point. This levy is it.  I think it’s a 58% to 42% issue, with the majority aligning with the conservative nature of Butler County.  They believe that enough liberal-minded people have moved in from other areas to shift the vote total to something more even, with 50% for them and 49.9% against tax increases.  I don’t think so; I think they live in a social bubble and believe that Lakota residents are all at Cooper’s Hawk at Liberty Center, sipping wine with their pinkies out.  I think the real voters are actually watching the latest Trump speech and are waiting for Vivek Ramaswamy to be governor and to bring School Choice to Ohio on a mass level.  And to create a merit-based teaching system.  Never forget that School Choice was in the Big Beautiful Bill, as I had told everyone it would be.  Lakota is way behind the times, and it shows with this ridiculous levy initiative. 

I remember when Liberty Junior was proposed as the latest technology-driven school back in 1980, when it was built.  It was one of the first schools in the area to have air conditioning.  While that was 45 years ago, it’s still a nice school and could easily be used in a competitive school environment where Lakota will have to compete with other districts for students to attend, as the dollars will not be allocated to the school, but to the child.  By the time these people build the new schools after tearing down the old ones, education in America is likely to change dramatically under Trump’s administration, and with Vivek Ramaswamy as governor of Ohio.  And regarding Liberty Junior, many people attended that school, but nobody exceptional emerged from all that social investment.  It produced average people who grew up to be average, and I think Butler County wants more than that for the next generation.  That’s why they supported Trump.  And that’s why a lot more people these days are saying what I have been saying about education for decades, that government schools don’t do a very good job.  And we don’t like them leeching off our property taxes to instill social values in our kids that we don’t like.  And the people making these decisions aren’t very good.  They live their personal lives as disasters who try to hide that from the public, like an ugly person wearing new shoes to a party.  You can have a whole closet full of new shoes, and those people will never look as good in them as a runway model.  New schools won’t make the ugliness of a failed union model go away, and the bad people who support that structure, as their social conduct well testifies, can’t hide it from the world with more money wasted.  And yes, the cost to the average homeowner in Liberty Township will be $ 465.50 because most homes are valued at $ 500,000.  A little detail that Michael Clark at the Journal News, Julie Shaffer’s lapdog for many years, ignores when he says that the value of a house is still at the 100K range.  You can’t have a doghouse in Liberty Township or West Chester these days for $100,000.  This is an expensive levy for a failing school system, created by failed people who are trying to hide their horrible lives behind innocent children with new and shiny schools, hoping to tear down the mistakes of the past with bricks and mortar that is a lot easier than replacing the garbage that they are. You can’t put lipstick on a swine and expect it not to be a pig, which is precisely what Lakota schools hopes to do with this massive tax increase, unleashed by their tone-deaf grasp on reality.

And just for an update on what former Lakota School Board member Darbi Boddy is doing these days.  Well, I would say she is doing better work for the future than wasting it on that ridiculous school board that is run by the teachers’ union of Lakota, and all their outrageous costs and social desires.  Darbi has been at Mar-a-Lago spending time, doing important things, that will be revealed in this change state for education.  She is also associating with a very good person, Sam Sarbo in promoting educational freedom and school choice.  I would say that Darbi will play a very important role in the future education of Ohio, in a much more potent role than what she ever could have done on the Lakota school board. And very soon, the Lakota board will wish they hadn’t ran off their cover story and exposed themselves in the way they will experience with this school levy.  We tried to warn them.

Rich Hoffman

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