Category: Book Review

God Won’t Leave Me Alone: ‘The Politics of Heaven’

Absolutely, the number one question I get asked every week, without fail, is when I’m going to write another book.  And my answer is that I usually write them every seven or so years, which has been true throughout my adult life.  My two favorite things, reading and writing, are activities I spend a lot of time doing, so it’s natural that writing a book is something I tend to do.  But this one is different, because lately my answer has been that I’m writing one now.  It will take a few years, and I didn’t go into it with a publisher in mind or some means of distribution.  It’s currently in the raw writing stage, which is the most fun and where the quality of a project like this has the most impact.  And this one is different for me, as it’s a big project and will be a pretty big book. It’s called The Politics of Heaven. I feel I have to write it because God won’t leave me alone about it.  He talks to me constantly about writing this book and the urgency was certainly more frequent after a trip my wife and I recently took to Washington D.C.  We were on the fifth floor where they do their big presentations and enjoying the view of the Capitol and Mall in front of us when the urgency from God was nearly as loud as a screaming kid begging for a candy bar.  This project was one of those things I had planned to do in a few years, about on schedule with my usual 7-year pace between projects.  But this one couldn’t wait.  God wanted to express himself, and it just couldn’t linger.  So, we’ll see how things go and what options present themselves along the way.  However, for the sake of what I do, I am shifting my focus to this project, as well as several other urgent matters that have arisen in conjunction with it.

I saw this at the Museum of the Bible and remembered it from an article I read back in 2007.

Strategically speaking, I see an opportunity here that is unique, and it’s something I originally started thinking about heavily while I took my family to the Sainte Chapelle, with its high ceilings and magnificent stained glass windows, obviously mimicking Heaven and the human ascent into it.  Paris had been getting frequent attacks by Muslim radicals, and it was more than just a war going on over religion.  And I had been thinking that someone needs to write a book in a unique way that puts things in perspective with people.  What is excellent about Christian writers is that they produce a lot of material.  Some of the most prolific writers in the world are associated with Christian scholarship and have been in the business of analyzing scripture and its applications.  I enjoy them.  I look forward to every new addition to Biblical Archaeology Review that I get, and I hadn’t been thinking about it too much, just enjoying them.  But the problem is that this is a strategic necessity.  People with Trump in the White House are looking to fill a void that has been put in them, politically, and what I do that most don’t is deal with politics.  To me, politics is like baking a cake.  You make it, people eat it, then everyone sits down and watches a football game and falls asleep on the couch.  But these messages to me, and how do I know they are from God and not some random spiritual stranger like a homeless person begging for money, are urgent and time-driven.  I have some experience in this area, and this isn’t my first time.  And this time he certainly wasn’t shy about it, frustrated by the limited means that there are to communicate across dimensional time and space. 

It will be a very interesting book. Probably nothing like it in the world.

The Bible is selling very well, with a spike in sales directly tied to the expanding economy and the politics behind it.  For what people have witnessed over these last three decades, who could expect otherwise?  People want goodness in their lives, or at least the pursuit of it.  People were hungry to understand how to extract goodness from something, which, in most cases, is a relationship with the most essential piece of literature the world has ever known —the Bible.  But for most, these are very purposeful excursions into the battle for good over evil, and people usually keep it all to themselves.  But the time we’re in now is different; this is a political enterprise, and it involves a spiritual realm at war with each other, and we’re reflections of that war, where individual battles are erupting all over the landscape.  And politics is kind of my unique thing that is different from what anybody else writes.  Specifically I want to deal with the political problem of the spirit world constantly trying to attack God and his creation from the border of the firmament and to chronical the attack vector of many demonic entities as they were captured by the Apocryphal book The Testament of Solomon which I argue should have been one of the Books of the Bible where God gave him a ring to control the demons of earth and force them to build his temple.  I think this is more than a fantasy story by post-Second Temple early Christians.  I believe there is compelling evidence to support this story, which is very relevant to our present time. Many of the evils we have been witnessing can be firmly attributed to the influence of occult magic and the yearning for it, with numerous factions now working against us.  And is best captured in the Bible in Ephesians 6:12. 

It was stunning to see this in person. God was talking to me in a very literal way.

One of my favorite books in the history of the world is Graham Hancock’s “Sign and the Seal,” which is about the purported discovery of the actual Ark of the Covenant, allegedly located in Ethiopia at Axum.  I will have more to say on the recent revelations from the CIA on this topic soon, but needless to say, I think that book is one of the most fantastic adventure books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of them.  However, there is much more to the story, and I believe several steps can be taken beyond the adventure part of these stories. We know enough to peek behind the veil at a real war that has taken place and to understand our role in that war.  And part of that strategy is to enable people to form a relationship with the Bible and to continue gaining perspective on how it can improve their lives by helping them win battles they may not even be aware of.  It is my intention for them to figure it out, which is why this urging from me is so timely.  It’s a project that can’t wait.  Of course, I will continue to do all the other many things that I do.  This will be just another project to add to all the others.  However, due to the timing and necessity, I’m doing it now rather than five or more years from now, when I’ll be well into my sixties.  This is an effort that requires a voice that understands politics and can put it into perspective, so people can fight the battle that needs to be won by the forces of good.  And for that to happen, context is in short supply and needs to be made much more abundant. 

Very big stuff

Rich Hoffman

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

Trump’s Executive Order ‘Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections’: The size of AOC’s caboose

They have no choice, and this is always the case when it comes to unearned merit.  The best way to root out bad behavior is to prevent it from being masked by good conduct.  And that is what the Democrat party has been doing for many years.  People didn’t know what Democrats believed since they hid the Bernie Sanders types behind people like Hillary Clinton, who were every bit as radical, but they knew how to put on a little show to con people into thinking they weren’t what they were.  There have been some alarming concerns that large crowds have been attending Fight the Oligarchy rallies, which Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been holding in various college towns, and whether these gatherings will inspire a similar movement among Democrats.  The answer is no.  They do not have the numbers.  What they are doing is smoke and mirrors by carefully picking sites where lots of broken people and college kids are concentrated with their overtly socialist message.  They couldn’t get those kinds of crowds outside of very specific areas, but it looks good for the cameras.  And it has alarmed some Republicans who keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and for the pendulum to swing the other way.  But that is loser thinking.  The facts of the matter are that Democrats had no choice, and this has only further uncovered them in ways that they have been trying to hide.  Their party is a radical branch of European communism, a left-wing form of populism they tried to hide from the public, just as Republicans tried to hide the pro-capitalism of their party by resisting Trump.  Bernie Sanders was their form of populism, which they wanted to control and conceal, as they needed the illusion to trick voters into supporting them.  But now the cat is out of the bag, and everyday people can see what they have always been, all along.

The only thing I have learned recently regarding these Bernie Sanders rallies is just how big the caboose is for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  I thought she was thinner than that, but she is carrying too many potatoes in her rump, to put it nicely.  And if she is the best that they have, they have some real problems.  But that’s where they find themselves.  When they had a chance, they turned away from Bernie, who had been drawing good crowds during his two recent runs for President, along with Trump.  And the Democrat machine turned away from him and instead invested the party brand behind Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris because they thought sex and skin color were enough to convince people to vote for socialism, that Americans could be guilted into supporting overt communism.  And that turned out to be completely the wrong strategy.  I could have told them otherwise.  I did tell them.  But nobody listened, and they arrogantly did what they did, and Democrats, finding they didn’t have a home any longer, peeled away and joined Trump and the MAGA movement.  I said as much during Bernie’s first run for office when the Democrats rigged the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton and pushed Bernie aside.  Those same disjointed crowds support Bernie, but the problem they have is one of math.  They don’t have the numbers.  If they had stuck with Bernie in 2016 and 2020, they might have done better, but even then, they didn’t have the numbers.  However, what has happened since the 2024 election is party-destroying numbers, which is why there is so much theatrical presentation by them that comes across as so phony.  Because of Trump unifying the Republican party so resoundingly over the last 9 years and essentially three terms as an American President, Democrats had no response, and it has essentially destroyed them as a political party.

What we are seeing in these crowds are the communists and overall Marxists, who have always been there.  College campuses teach Marxism, so there are a lot of confused kids with weak relationships with their parents who are easy to sell socialism, communism, and Marxism to.  Kids are not very confident in their life skills and are prone to being misled by a victimization cycle message.  But one thing that happens to people as they get older is generally, they become much less Marxist and much more Republican because as they work in life and have to run their families with responsibility, their political views come back to reality and they vote more conservatively.  We observe a pattern among school levy supporters in local districts: young parents tend to vote yes for higher taxes because they are uninformed.  They aren’t yet very sophisticated about how the world works, and they want to believe in a massive social safety net, especially since that’s what they were taught in school.  But the older they get, the less that sounds like a good idea, so they peel away and move to the political right with each year that goes by.  And if a community has a large number of people over 50, then school levy issues tend to fail.  That is the same condition with general political sympathies.  The crowds Bernie is attracting are those who have had their safety net disrupted, so they seek the comfort of a crowd to validate their feelings.  Not to show support for a more independent and self-initiating capitalist government, the way it is with the MAGA crowd. 

The solution is straightforward, and President Trump is already addressing it. On March 25, 2025, he signed an executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”  This order aims to overhaul election processes in the United States, focusing on tightening voting regulations through the implementation of Proof of Citizenship, Election Day Ballot Deadlines, Federal Oversight of Funding Conditions, Prosecutions of Election Crimes, and Voting System Standards.  Democrats, especially those embedded in the Bar Association of lawyers, such as Marc Elias and organizations like the ACLU, will try to sue citing this order as an unconstitutional power grab, because they know, as everyone has come to figure out, that Democrats can’t win if they don’t cheat in elections.  Just like Bernie and the gang have had to try and use smoke and mirrors to make their numbers look better with rallies on college campuses.  The truth is, Democrats never had the numbers, and now they have had stripped away from them, polite society they can no longer hide behind.  Reasonably moderate Democrats who could win a few votes to the Marxism of their foundation without scaring people off.  Now they don’t have that, and they can’t hide it from the public.  And Democrats know, because they have been trying to hide it for years, if they can’t create so many opportunities to cheat elections, they will likely never win another one, and their party is done.  So Trump’s executive order gets to the point.  And that is why Democrats are suddenly so desperate, and it will only get worse for them.  They have to put out to the public the best that they have, and for them, that is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, the old man who is a sympathizer of the Soviet Union and a socialist.  And they can’t even hide from the public any longer, the size of AOC’s caboose, because they can’t afford to.

Rich Hoffman

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

Dismantaling the Department of Education: Our current system values all the wrong things

It doesn’t matter what kind of technicality some opposition to the Trump executive order that dismantles the Department of Education hides behind; the reality is that education in the United States needs to change.  And no amount of foot-dragging will change the minds of people tired of a losing product.  When Trump issued his order to initiate the process of eliminating the Department of Education and returning policy to the states, he did something that no Republican had the courage to do since it was created in the first place.  Reagan was supposed to eliminate the DOE in early 1981 or 1982.  Then he was almost killed by an assassin’s bullet and was never quite the same.  And the George Bushes were part of the problem, and made things worse.  So, until Trump came along, nobody had the guts to undo what Jimmy Carter had started, a big government approach to a very intimate concept of education and how society approaches it.  Knowing what we do now, competition is the best and really only method of reform, and the way teacher unions have embedded themselves into the education profession, they have done to the minds of children what unions typically do to everything they touch, whether its steel, car manufacture, or even food production and movie making.  Unions only benefit the losers at the expense of the good, and that brings down the quality of the entire effort.  So, it’s no wonder America is not even in the top ten on most education charts, despite being the wealthiest country.  Public education was a noble concept, but the government’s funding of a subpar product has diminished its appeal and has not served our society well.  When you examine the literacy rate among graduating students, it’s clear that if we continue on our current path, our society will crumble into dust.  And we can’t have that.

And I don’t say what I do in a vacuum.  Even as I write this, people are urging me to run for the school board in my community, because the schools there have received a significant amount of funding, yet they are failing in detrimental ways.  And I know what needs to be done, but I don’t want to help facilitate a failed system. Joining a five-person school board that defends a system I am ready to scrap isn’t a good way to spend my time.  I think a society should have an education system, but I think Dewey was way off in the means of delivery.  I would be in favor of a highly competitive model that is more merit-based, similar to the one Vivek Ramaswamy is proposing in Ohio as a future governor.  Currently, school boards act like a moderator for government money allocation, and that entire system, in my thinking, needs to be scrapped.  And for context, I work with many people who hold PhDs and have multiple advanced degrees, and I do not see them offering a solution for the future.  In my opinion, academia has not been very effective and has never been in the history of the human race.  While specific knowledge is honorable, it often comes at the expense of general knowledge, which is far more useful.  I don’t see people with advanced degrees as any different from the geeks at Comic Con who gain particular knowledge about a topic and then build their lives around that specificity at the expense of logic.  No matter what it is, when people lose touch with reality and seek to prop themselves up in a social context with the merit of group acceptance, the results are never positive.  And doing that very thing is the goal of our current education system, so in its current form, I see no hope for it.

And Trump doesn’t have the answer either, nor does Vivek Ramaswamy, nor does Mike DeWine; people who are currently in the midst of redefining what public education means in America, and specifically in Ohio.  Achieving a high academic honor only benefits the system that created that honor. For instance, receiving an Academy Award for a movie used to be considered an outstanding achievement, but woke politics have undermined the entire enterprise.  Now, after years of witnessing Hollywood failure and Democrat political positions, the concept of an Academy Award means nothing to anybody.  And the same has happened in all fields, especially the sciences. I was on a phone call just a few days ago with the head of the EPA and a panel of experts who were trying to explain the rules of conduct for a future project.  And there were reasonable people involved until there was that one guy who wanted to make sure everyone knew how smart he was and how he had built his entire life around making rules and then explaining to people how to live their lives around those rules, rather than dealing with the grim reality that the world didn’t want to deal with his dumb rules.  I am not mad at the guy because he was essentially getting in the way of something I needed to do.  But because he was uselessly in the way of things that needed to be done, which he thought had value and merit, when in reality he was the kind of guy who likely had a mom who put a bicycle helmet on him one too many times.  And his wife and kids were probably miserable with his views about life.  They were built on a bad foundation that the rest of the world could have cared less for.  It’s the same kind of people who are always encountered at the patent office.  Or with a new scientific discovery, especially with this new news about what’s under the Giza plateau in the form of tunnels and a Hall of Records potentially at the feet of the Sphinx.  Academia has become a public validation for individuals who rise in these fields, as they protect their status through stonewalling and bureaucratic rules, believing their social standing is respected.  And they are terrified of that status ever changing because, as people, they are timid at the prospect of competition and have built their lives around that insulation, hoping that nobody ever discovers how worthless they are. 

The first thing that people think who build their lives around such a social enterprise is that Trump is acting in an anti-educational way, and they are agitated and even hostile to the idea of removing the Department of Education which sets social policy for the bench marks of education achievement in the far away land of Washington D.C.  And people who have spent their lives chasing those made up standards want that system to continue because they are personally terrified of competition.  As I’ve experienced with high-degree personalities, they are often shocked in a competitive discussion to discover that they are not the most intelligent people in the room.  They have a paper that shows that someone told them they were.  However, reality has other opinions, and those become apparent in a competitive environment.  Every child in America needs a unique set of educational goals to achieve, as the current benchmarks are mainly ineffective.  If our schools were producing students like Elon Musk, I would have a different opinion.  But what we get are kids who think going to a Tayler Swift concert is a great thing and they grow up to become terrors of the world dropping their kids off at child care while they pursue a life on a second marriage and run like bats out of hell to pay their next car payment and achieve a social status to other people who mean absolutely nothing as well.  I want to see an education system that inspires more people to achieve great things in the world at all levels of society.  Because what has been produced so far has not been very good, and it needs to change dramatically in the years to come.  There is nothing anyone in the world can do to make public education work under the current Department of Education priorities.  It can’t be saved, and the sooner everyone realizes that, the sooner we can have an intelligent discussion about what comes next.  But saving garbage is not it.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798: Its all about “predatory incursion” 

District of Columbia Judge Boasberg had no right to dip his toe into the Executive actions of the Trump administration when it came to the deportation of 200 Venezuelan gang members from Tren de Aragua to the El Salvador Terrorism Confinement Center under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.  The whole debate about who has the right to do anything clearly falls on the side of President Trump, and I say that after just spending an entire day at the Supreme Court and being in the main courtroom extensively thinking about these kinds of things in context.  A district judge does not have a check on power for a newly elected representative in the Executive Branch that represents the people who put him there.  I know Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett will want to consider the Supreme Court’s role in cooling the actions of what could be viewed as an out-of-control Executive Branch, which is the traditional role of the Supreme Court.  However, like the election fraud cases and other serious infractions to our legal system over the last few years, real trouble has been written into the strategy itself.  Many enemies of America are trying to take advantage of our legal system and purposely place the Supreme Court in the middle of the fight with an eye toward checks on power by inspiring radical judges like Boasberg to test the legal waters and attempt to win cases against a president that radicals desperately want to stop.  The temptation is to enforce the law in a way that states that no president can enforce the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 because it requires Congress to declare war; a president can’t do so himself.  The win for the President will be under the deportation of any non-citizens deemed dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States with a “predatory incursion.” 

What everyone is missing in this case is that last part: hostile characters from foreign countries do not have First Amendment coverage as noncitizens, and they certainly don’t have the right to predatory incursion meant to overthrow our country.  That’s why the Federalists, with John Adams at the time, pushed to create the act, which continued while Jefferson and Madison were presidents leading up to the War of 1812.  At that time, after the Revolutionary War, the English, the French, and the Spanish were all fighting each other with America in the middle, and many of those foreign countries were working desperately in the background to topple the new nation from the inside out.  The tactics used during this time were very much like what we see today with the efforts of globalism and finance trying always to erode away the ground under our feet. And when it came to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the Federalists wanted to remake America into Great Britain, while the Anti-Federalists were very cozy with the French.  However, the English and French were at perpetual war, and they found that America played a great neutral ground in undermining each other, with both betting that the other would topple and take the new country of America with it.  And the Spanish gambled that they would be nearby to pick up the pieces once everyone else collapsed.  So, for our country to function, foreign influences had to be removed because they intended to weaken our country before it started.  Those same tactics have been learned and used by modern countries and even individuals hostile to our system of government who want to see a one-world rule that erases away the Constitution and reforms American law under a United Nations charter.

But Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela is certainly anti-American and, specifically, the Trump administration.  Always lingering in the background on attacks against immigration fairness is the radical leftist hope that with migration, socialism and communism will seep under the door to immigration policy and destroy the capitalism of America and our economy, which is certainly a fantasy of Maduro who wants to be able to control the price of oil, one of their most significant exports, and using chaos to control those prices.  But he and dozens of other little nations wrapped around the axil of communism would never directly declare war on the United States with its ominous military, instead they would try a much more passive-aggressive strategy by supporting state-sponsored terrorism that couldn’t easily be traced back to the host country, and that’s what Tren de Aragua gang members are, cartel terrorists meant to poison Americans with drugs, and to harass our legal system beyond the controls of our law enforcement, hiding terrorism behind illegal immigrations and the no man’s land enjoyment they fully utilized during the Biden administration to expand their network vastly.  Under the dialogue of law for our young country, our history in dealing with purposeful “predatory incursions” is why laws like this one are still on our books because we have had to use it several times to enforce our border security and to keep the enemy from undermining our society from the inside out, we’ve used it during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, and we have to use it now for what is an attack on the basic infrastructure of our country and the fundamental concept of rule of law. 

The hope is that ambiguity on border policy might swing a few wobbly judges like Roberts and Barratt in the direction of the many hostile representatives operating in our country under a strategic desire to topple our country toward globalism from the inside out.  However, under the President of the United States, border security is a clearly defined obligation of the Executive Branch, and he does not need Congress to declare war.  All he needs is “predatory incursions” that threaten border security, and the drug cartels of Mexico and Central America are intent on doing just that.  And for District Judges, Justice Roberts is wrong on this; those who purposefully test the fences to attempt to erode the powers of the Executive Branch in favor of known hostilities must be punished.  We have trusted judges too much, and we see lots of radical actions by the Bar Associations that have sought to undermine our country as we know it for an order in which they had more power and control.  What Judge Boasberg did was essentially no different than what the socialist tyrant Nicolas Maduro was doing with the Tren de Aragua gang members, and that is to provide a predatory incursion on the daily life of the American people.  They have to be punished for an act of revolt against our country, and in this case, to create instability in enforcement among the Executive Branch.  Globalists in the form of domestic enemies, which is what Judge Boasberg made himself into, are terrorists when they try to attack the sovereignty of a country by saturating it with illegal immigration and then putting those rights onto the newcomers without earning that right with the purposeful intent of allowing our legal system to be overcome with a menace.  This is precisely what Judge Boasberg, appointed by the domestic terrorist Barack Obama, was trying to do to Trump, to tie up his hands in court so that the Maduro strategy through undeclared war through drug cartels could undermine our society in ways that a military never could, by destroying us from the inside out, a “predatory incursion.”  And that by the time we figured it all out, our country would be gone, killed by kindness. 

Rich Hoffman

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

‘Serpent in Eden’: Whats really behind all the foreign meddling and partisan politics

I read a great book while on my recent trip to Washington D.C.  It wasn’t a book specific to Washington politics and history, and it is generally available by Tyson Reeder called Serpent in Eden.  I found it at Mt. Vernon, Washington’s home, and it seemed like something I’d be interested in since it dealt with foreign meddling and partisan politics in James Madison’s America, a kind of not much talked-about period between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.  A lot of political activity during this period got lost in the various wars that essentially shaped America as a new nation that is worth discussing.  I think people assume that they know American history if they know the basics of the Revolutionary War, that the Constitution was signed soon thereafter, and that George Washington was the first president.  But that really doesn’t begin to cover it all.  The Serpent in Eden is a really remarkable, tightly packed book with a lot of detail and would take a general understanding of history before really absorbing it.  It views the world through the eyes of James Madison, the tiny man but brilliant mind who shaped the Constitution and served as the fourth president of the United States.  But he was writing the Constitution as America was trying to figure itself out, and Washington was trying to preside over everything as a country was trying to start from scratch on an idea of individual liberty, which was a completely foreign concept at that time.  In many ways, it is because of one straightforward term: “We the People.”  The world didn’t understand what that meant, so they didn’t have much respect for the new country.  They did respect George Washington, but they didn’t understand the idea of willfully giving up power and returning to the farm after service to the people was completed. 

To understand the problem we have today with foreign meddling, which George Soros would be a good example, and just one of many, this particular period at the start of the country is an interesting story.  Because America had its original 13 colonies that it was trying to make a country out of, but there were still French holdings along the Mississippi River, Spanish in Florida, and England smarting from their Revolutionary loss and plotting to retake its colonies once a few years wore down the rebels hanging out in Canada, where the French were still hostile and had alliances with the many Indian tribes.  All those forces were plotting and scheming to use America to leverage their enemies, specifically the French against the English, and all early politics centered around these factions of Anti-Federalists, who became Republicans against Federalists, the early version of the big government advocates.  The trick was how to have a big enough government to deal with all these hostile countries that weren’t too big to suppress the will of the people it was supposed to serve.  The English and French thought such a concept was hilarious, so they posed a constant threat by looming in the background attempting to tamper with elections to swing policy in a direction of their liking.  There are a lot of lessons in the truly remarkable story of how America survived all this tampering to win the War of 1812 with Madison in the White House and having to escape before the British burnt it from the inside out.  It was a tight walk on a razor’s edge to build the kind of government we see today, and given the ambitions of globalism and not wanting America to exist at all, you can understand the real problems of our day by seeing how people saw things from the very beginning.

I was in the right mood to read Tyson’s new book, as it had just recently come out.  It was available at all the leading book outlets, but Mt. Vernon has a wonderful gift shop, as you would expect, and it was the kind of book you could get as a souvenir that captured the area and circumstances of America’s birth.  I was at Mt. Vernon trying to see the start of the country the way that George Washington would have seen it.  Not the way that historians with a very shallow grasp of history would have.  These were real problems that reside in the hands of our current Supreme Court as they try to keep our country as close to that razor’s edge as possible.  But it’s hard on a good day because America was never respected, and it still isn’t today.  What is respected is our version of capitalism, which produced a lot of wealth, and people around the world wanted a piece of that wealth.  But our system of government for the people was never understood.  Because nations were built around the concept of sovereignty, such as Napoleon Bonapart, who was Emperor of France, he could speak as a representative of the whole French people.  Or King George in England.  If George Washington was going to give power back after two terms in office, then who represented the government?  These fighting politicians in Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and others?  So, of course, in the chaos of all that political contemplation, the nations of the world plotted our demise, as they still do because they don’t understand how a government can serve the people rather than the people serving the government as one people who then dealt with the world.  It was not an easy idea to flush out.

So, the Serpent in the book is all these foreign whispers trying to steer America in a direction beneficial to them, just as the serpent tempted Eve to eat from the apple.  So, too, is the business of foreign lobbying, which is a big problem today and is at the heart of the tariff war Trump puts forth.  But there’s a secret in the background of all that, which really emerged from this period with Madison and the War of 1812.  And the Louisiana Purchase and Westward expansion in general.  The world does not know what to do with free people, who a regional monarch or emperor can’t control.  It hadn’t ever been done in the world, and it’s still perplexing to all nations.  And their only defense against it isn’t armies, but in political narrative.  They had infiltrated both political parties in America. As a result, essentially leaving “We the People” without any accurate representation, violating the Constitutional merits Madison and others worked so hard to perfect and for our Supreme Court to hold so tightly to the vest, as a matter of principle.  The defense against the various serpents in our political system of foreign meddling and influence was that the American concept was too big to alter.  That’s how Jefferson ended up with the Louisiana Purchase.  Napoleon never thought America would survive long enough to do anything with the land, so he thought it was a safe bet.  But he lost power before America fell.  The English were trying to push everyone into decline and never thought a country without a military could win a war against them, but Andrew Jackson ruined all their days, and the Spanish too.  All the hostile elements, including the conspiring Indians, were betting on America to fail, but it survived anyway.  Because the brilliance of the Constitution made us too big as a country to fall into such minor grabs of power.  The idea was more significant than the military plots of conspiring nations, which makes us more important than other nations.  Our ideas for personal freedom are more lofty than any other government on the face of the earth or in human history.  It is extraordinary and a big step for the human race.  And it was a real work of a miracle coming from human minds during a very tumultuous time.  

Rich Hoffman

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

Why the Trump White House is Better: For most, they step up into the famous mansion, for the President, it was a step down

With Trump in the White House, Washington, D.C., is a much different and much better place.  But the reasons why went well beyond my personal preference politically.  The way Trump treated some of these rogue district court judges who were corrupt beyond measure into thinking that they could control the Executive Branch has been long needed.  Even with Trump serving as chairman at the Kennedy Center and complaining about how poorly constructed and managed the place is and how dysfunctional the union rules were some of the next layered attributes that I found personally very refreshing.  I have been thrilled that Trump is in our White House, but to understand how and why, I needed to visit it again.  I’ve been to the White House before, back in the 90s.  And since then, I’ve just driven around it.  But only recently did I take the time to walk around it and spend significant time there, which my wife and I did.  We spent a whole day going to the Visitor’s Center of the White House, getting into the details from a tourist standpoint, and understanding how the White House saw itself.  We walked all around the surrounding area, spent a lot of time at the Mall, and ended up at the end of the day at the McDonald’s just off Pennsylvania Avenue just west of the White House front gates.  I knew that was the McDonald’s that White House aides would go to for Trump, and I wanted to see how it looked and get a feel for even how the guard shack interacted with White House employees and the media as they came and went.  And I think I found the answer I was looking for at the Visitor’s Center with the short 15-minute film they show there, which hadn’t been updated with any of the modern presidents, but it certainly captured the crises as Washington D.C. saw it, and why people like me were happy Trump is now there.

The film had voice reflections of former presidents, such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, and their wives talking about life in the White House, and there was a common theme between them all.  They remembered their time in the White House as a stepping up into a role that they all missed once it was over.  Unlike other leadership positions in the world, the People of America granted power through elections to their Chief Executive, and up until President Trump, those people were put into elevated positions represented by the White House.  However, if you go through the history of the White House, Europeans thought that the President’s residence was too small and not filled with enough grandeur to represent the most powerful country in the world.  After all, just a few months after it had been built and commissioned, Thomas Jefferson was the first to occupy it thoroughly, and he was never entirely comfortable with its presence of power, being an anti-federalist as he was.  The British burnt the White House during the Madison administration, right after Jefferson’s time there, during the War of 1812.  The world did not want America to get its foot into the seat of power, and they were eager to destroy the growing country before it could become too big for itself.  So, the White House was never built to be too lofty and ambitious.  It was a gift from the American people to the person they voted for to run the country on their behalf.  But it was never built to give anybody any fancy ideas of being too assertive or kingly, which was always the point. 

As a self-made billionaire, Trump lives in places much better than the White House.  And we all knew it before we voted for him.  And I think we understood why we wanted that subconsciously.  It’s evident by the White House Visitor’s Center film that the kind of people we have had as President was too enamored by the power of the White House to do what we needed them to do with it genuinely.  They were too caught up in the titles and world respect that came with the office, while Trump had all that before becoming President.  Stepping back into the White House for his second term, it’s a step down for Trump.  When you don’t care about the social aspects of a job, it allows you to be much more critical and practical. What does Trump have to prove to anybody?  He’s already achieved everything, so the White House doesn’t make him anything special.  For him, it’s just an office where he performs executive functions.  He isn’t made by the place the way other presidents were.  It was obvious that the White House Visitor’s Center was unsure how to present Trump’s first term there because their selling point was to present it as luxurious and ceremonial.  And Trump’s attitude is more of a sacrifice in living than being consistent with other past presidents who felt elevated by the power of the office, and once it was gone from them, they missed it forever.  Obama had serious problems, based on his interviews in the short film, with giving power back at the end of his term, which we now know he clung to a third shadow term through Joe Biden.  And it was all very shameful because the office made him who he was.  He wasn’t a very important person without the White House or its status.  Trump, on the other hand, was the same person no matter where he was.

And that’s what I wanted to see, and it was almost funny to watch the human struggle with this strange power arrangement.  There was virtually no reference to Trump near the White House, especially at the Visitor’s Center.  Trump has been affiliated with the White House for at least 8 years, with this new first term being the 9th, so it has been almost a decade.  So everyone has had plenty of time to show the Trumps as part of the Executive Mansion on Visitor’s Center updates.  The way they sold the White House to the public was a story of how ordinary people were made more significant by the title of the Office, and once their term was over, they returned to being the very ordinary people they were before.  However, as voters, we have not been happy with this process, so we wanted to put people of exception and accomplishment in the White House.  And Trump offered himself after living a good and successful life.  So we put him in the office now with three election cycles.  His story and approach do not match the official narrative of past presidents.  But it was their lack of loftiness that we wanted to avoid.  We can’t trust politicians who are made who they are by the efforts we give them.  We want accomplished people who already have all the money in the world and the treasures of living at their disposal so that they can manage our affairs honestly and with the same lack of fear that made them successful in the first place.  Even if for Trump, that means stepping down into the White House to give back to his country.  This is in contrast to all the past presidents who were made valuable because they lived in the White House for a small part of their lives.  For them, that was their most significant accomplishment.  And once it was over, they were sad.  However, the White House was just another day at the office with Trump.  And over the years, he’s had many of those kinds of offices, which were better and more luxurious than the one at the White House.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Michael Ryan Solution: Why its great that he is running for Butler County Commissioner

Out of my most recent articles, the one that has received the most attention is the one I did on sky taxis, specifically the products that Joby Aviation, right up the road in Dayton, Ohio, has ready to go straight from the concept of the Jetsons to practical applications now in 2025.  There are places in the world right now, within a few months of this writing, that will take delivery of these sky cars and make them part of their expanding economy as a new transportation option.  This is not science fiction, but indeed the next generation in personal transportation, and I have proposed that it should be Butler County, Ohio, the home of perhaps two future presidents very shortly, that should be leading the way on this exciting new technology, because honestly, someone in the United States is going to do it, and do it soon leaving everyone else to catch up later.  It is much better to be a leader in something new than to be a come-lately, especially in the way that Butler County, Ohio, is evolving as one of the tremendous technical centers of the world.  I talked to Vivek Ramaswamy recently about his plans as governor, and these eVTOL aircraft concepts will be a natural extension of what he wants to do in the state.  New economies form around new technology, and probably there is nothing newer than these air taxis.  Soon, they will be everywhere; most people will use them just as commonly as people use cell phones, and the world will be much more interesting and faster.  At the State of the State speech from Governor Mike DeWine this year, 2025, even he mentioned what Joby Aviation was doing in Dayton, so this is very much a technical reality waiting for some bold people to be the first, and I have been trying to encourage people in Butler County to be those first bold people.

While I was at a recent fundraiser for Nancy Nix, I was carrying around a plate of food, looking for somewhere to sit down.  I had been talking too much and didn’t have a place to sit as Nancy was trying to prepare everyone for some entertainment she had for the evening.  My wife couldn’t attend that event, so I was alone and didn’t consider taking a seat.  So I was in a pickle now that everyone was sitting down.  So there I was with my plate full of food, needing a seat when Vice Mayor of Hamilton Michael Ryan and his very nice wife Amanda encouraged me to sit with them.  So, I did, and for dinner conversation, we had an excellent talk where I learned that he was planning to run for commissioner of Butler County, which is good because recently, Cindy Carpenter had been caught campaigning for Democrats in Middletown, leaving many people very angry.  So, for the upcoming Republican primary ahead of the 2026 election cycle, people were looking for alternatives, and it sounded like Michael Ryan could be it.  I have come to know him somewhat well; we pass each other at many events, and he has enjoyed my social media over the years. I have seen him stand tough in the pocket on more than one occasion, even for a pretty young person, young to my eyes.  He’s over 40 now, but I have a habit of referring to people in his age group as young, which I do to many people I deal with who are his exact age.  But when it comes to some of these new political positions, I would love to see someone with a good 20 years of work history in front of them, with lots of fresh ideas and ambition to do them.  So it didn’t take me long to get interested in his statement about running for county commissioner.

But he wanted me to sit with them mainly because he was interested in my articles on new transportation methods like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop system, which I proposed should be built in Monroe, Ohio.  Then, this Joby Aviation alliance I was talking about for West Chester, Ohio.  While Michael has been on the Hamilton City Council and has been doing a great job there, which has plenty of challenges, running for commissioner of one of the three seats requires a much larger vision for a community like Butler County, which comes with some lofty expectations.  We have had pretty good commissioners, and I had been thinking for a while that there is great potential if only we could get T.C. Rogers a second vote.  T.C. is a free market advocate, thinks right about many things, and could use a good partner as a commissioner.  Don Dixon has been pretty good, too.  They know how to make the spaghetti in the kitchen but could benefit from a fresh, youthful vibrancy.  Cindy Carpenter is listed as a Republican with the other two, but she behaves like a Democrat and has for a long time, leaving people hungry for an option.  So, Michael Ryan came across to me during this discussion as someone who might fit perfectly into the needs of Butler County.  So, given all the elements, it seemed like an opportunity to talk about some of the exciting things that could be possible if we put someone like Michael Ryan onto the seat of Butler County commissioner.

Michael and I met at a spot I think is the perfect property for a Joby air taxi service port.  There are lots of places in Butler County for something like this as a hub, where people visiting at CVG downtown could fly straight to Butler County to shop at Ikea for the day or to conduct business and stay at one of the many hotels that are within walking distance to this proposed location.  However, even within Butler County’s 400,000 residents, it is a quick way to get to Miami University, downtown Hamilton, and even Butler Regional and Middletown airports.  An air taxi service would see immediate good business and be economically viable right out of the box.  So Michael Ryan and I talked, and I filmed it so people could listen in and get to know him a bit.  It would take investors with vision to make anything happen.  It would take technical expertise to set it all up.  There are plenty of achievable challenges.  However, the most important thing to me is setting up the political infrastructure to achieve it.  Given where the Trump administration is on these kinds of things, I am confident that there would be lots of encouragement at the federal level.  This economic boon could help Middletown a lot, and J.D. Vance would like to see that happen.  His personal friend, Vivek Ramaswamy, will be the next governor of Ohio, and I know he’s excited about it.  The proposed location of Butler County, Ohio is mainly in Senator George Lang’s district, the current Majority Whip at the Statehouse.  I know a friendly trustee in Mark Welch in West Chester who could get on board with something like this.  What was missing was a county commissioner who could connect all the dots and remove the barriers so the business people could make the investments.  And after the talk Michael Ryan and I had, it should be obvious why I’m endorsing him and why I was so happy that he invited me to sit with him and his wife at the Nancy Nix fundraiser.  We had a great discussion that could grow into something truly special, which is very exciting. 

Rich Hoffman

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

George Lang Tried to Tell Them: Woke politics is why Lakota is losing money

To answer the question that was asked at the March 12th special meeting of the Lakota school board, why were they losing around 9 million dollars out of their quarter of a billion dollar budget to Ed Choice vouchers and could they sue the state for money they assumed was guaranteed to them, a little fog has to be removed from the subject.  I was in Columbus for Governor DeWine’s State of the State speech, and there were education protesters in the rotunda making a lot of noise and looking horrible doing it.  Legislators were working on the new budget, and the fear was that public schools would lose money, which is the trend across the country.  Now, I warned everyone this day was coming, that Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education would be dismantled, and education funding would be built in a more competitive direction.  What we have been doing has not been working.  People worried about the future should be happy that Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be the next governor of Ohio, wants to pay teachers more.  He is a lot nicer on the issue than I am.  And for that matter, my personal friend Senator George Lang is too.  They believe that public education can be saved in some way, whereas I do not.  I think institutional learning is beyond help, but that’s why there are debates in government and education. Employees should at least be happy that Vivek and Lang are of like mind and want to preserve public education somehow.  Yet the protesters at the Statehouse were not the kind of people that made you want to dig deep into your pockets and give them more money.  They all looked pretty ragged and as though they needed to skip a few meals.  They sounded like entitled losers demanding more money in the budget from Ohio taxpayers who have not been given a good product that makes society better. 

So I was outside the Representative’s Chamber talking to several of our area politicians of Butler County and they were asking me if I was going to the emergency Lakota meeting where the plan was for them to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit against the state because Lakota was losing funding due to parents choosing to use the voucher programs already in place to give education options to their children.  When they asked me, I was already thinking about it; my phone had been lighting up for the previous 24 hours from people asking me to go because it was an emergency.  Lakota was already trying to build the foundations for a tax increase to pay for a facility project they were planning to vote for soon, for many millions of dollars for what was turning out to be a pretty crappy product.  And the kind of people who plan to work against that tax increase wanted me to see for myself just how ridiculous Lakota schools had become.  I was reluctant; I have not paid much attention to Lakota schools since they ran off just the latest conservative school board member the previous year.  I have worked to give Lakota a school board of reasonable people to deal with the coming education challenges, and their reaction was more radicalism like the idiots I saw in the rotunda, so I wasn’t too keen on the idea.  I was talking to Representative Jennifer Gross and Thomas Hall, among other people who were equally concerned about the invite they had to join in this special meeting.  And as we discussed in Columbus, my comment was that it was a hit job by the school board to set up our representatives so they could have an excuse to blame them for why they had to join the lawsuit.  I will credit them: Senator George Lang, Representative Thomas Hall, and Representative Jennifer Gross all attended the meeting by phone because they were either still in Columbus or, in George’s case, out of the state.  But they lent their voices in surprisingly effective ways.  I decided to return from Columbus and attend the meeting in person because it seemed like a good chance to see the new school board and administrators.  After all the mess over the former superintendent, Matt Miller and a purge of personnel since then my attitude toward public funding of schools was that Trump was going to be re-elected, he was going to dismantled the Department of Education and all education issues were going back to the states where people like Vivek Ramaswamy was going to have to figure out how to compete against other states.  The teacher’s union-run public education system was a thing of the past.  I tried to warn everyone, but they didn’t listen. 

And I was right about the meeting.  Our area representatives did a nice job providing comments about whether or not school vouchers were here to stay in public education or whether it was a fad that would fade away.  After the remarks were given, the school board did what they went there to do: they voted to join the lawsuit to get money from taxpayers they had not earned.  It’s the case that will lose in court a few years down the road because people can’t be compelled to purchase a bad product, and public education has shown itself to be deficient in every way it is measured.  The school board’s plan was to blame the politicians who had not secured funding for their bottomless pit approach to school budgets.  However, the representatives did so well that it wasn’t easy to blame them for the existence of school vouchers such as the Ed Choice program. 

George Lang told them that the cause of parents wanting to leave Lakota schools through a voucher was the fault of the school itself for accepting woke politics that those parents didn’t want their kids exposed to.  It was a blunt statement, but it was given with as much love as could be provided in that circumstance.  And the large audience attending, representing the teacher’s union mentality, the same kind of people protesting at the Statehouse rotunda earlier that day laughed and heckled George with boisterous sentiment.  As Doug Horton wanted to put on a show to fight George, as did another school board member and the new superintendent, the comment was the truth behind the matter.  Increasingly, Lakota schools would have to compete for every kid enrolled there, and their funding approach was dependent on their ability to be an education destination instead of funding attached to the zip code.  And the bottom line was that people who wanted to take their kids out of Lakota schools and drive them across town to another school was because more and more parents didn’t want to share space or time with the kind of people who were giggling at George Lang.  We just watched that same school board run off Darbi Bobby, the previous school board member representing a percentage of the Lakota population.  And she was just the recent.  This has been the practice of Lakota’s school board, to control the message by eliminating dissenting opinions because the system isn’t designed to deal with actual management.  And if only 4 to 12% of the total Lakota population found they didn’t want to deal with transgender politics, or essentially the Democrat party platform which comes with just about all public education enterprises, then given a choice, which is only going to expand under President Trump and future governor Vivek Ramaswamy, parents would take their kids out of Lakota so not to deal with people like Doug Horton and the rest of the school board.  Their desire to fight George Lang over the truth that he tried to give them, bluntly, was the same thing driving away the dollars they thought they were entitled to have in the form of a budget.  Just a preview of that court case: the courts will not favor these collective schools joined under the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit because you can’t compel people, such as taxpayers, to buy a bad product.  And public education has become a lousy product over time with gross mismanagement everywhere.  We also saw examples of bad management at that Lakota school board meeting with clueless people and their very liberal politics.  Parents don’t want to share space with people who don’t share their values, and they are picking up and moving to other options because of woke politics.  The blame for that falls on the people who dug in and retained that system, which never worked—and instead insisted on throwing more money at a failed approach.  Rather than looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for the issue, they tried to blame everyone else for why they were being rejected under a competitive approach.  And that of course, won’t solve the school funding problem.  You can’t pave over the problem with more money.  You have to actually solve the problem, which are the people in public education themselves.  Parents want to reject having to deal with people who don’t share their values.  And if Lakota wants to survive into the future, it is going to have to make itself more competitive in attracting dollars, like everyone else in the world has to.

We have a great senator in Ohio

If you listen to the school board meeting from March 12, 2025, included here, you will hear the audience get into an uproar whenever George Lang spoke, as he became the target of the teacher union types due to his opening statements about wokeness in Lakota schools.  George was speaking his opinion on the matter, and those people in the audience, and some of the school board members themselves, fed into that communication.  So for Doug Horton and the rest of the mystified cast of characters at Lakota schools, that is your answer as to why parents are looking for School Choice options.  Think of the soccer mom who voted for Trump at a Friday night football game. Or a Republican is at an art show for their child at school, and they are interacting with these liberal radicals advocating for transgender bathrooms. Do you think they want to be made fun of like that audience did to George Lang?  Senator Lang is a professional who is used to that kind of thing and likes it. But does the average family attending schools at Lakota want to deal with people like this?  Of course not.  Do they want to fight with people like that?  They saw what they did, including that school board, to Darbi Boddy and other conservative school board members from the past.  Rather than fight those people, they look for a school voucher and take their kid to a school they think is nicer and better for them and their children.  That is why people are fleeing the Lakota district, and George was trying very nicely to tell the Lakota school board that to survive in the future, they need to make it so people want to attend Lakota.  But not that people who have different ideas about things are going to be beat over the head with Democrat politics and that they have to take it because there are no other education options.  Parents want options and don’t want to deal with political radicals who do not share their fundamental social values.  That’s why Lakota lost that 9 million dollars out of their budget and why they are projected to lose a lot more than that.  It’s because they have mismanaged the district with the assumption that the children were theirs and not managed by the parents who want the best opportunity for their children.  And by choice, parents have reasoned that Lakota is not it for them.  It’s Lakota’s job to convince them otherwise. Not to sue for money they did not earn. 

The trend of today, with D.O.G.E. and the massive cuts to the Department of Education, and the election of Trump and others to office positions, George Lang included, as well as the future of Vivek Ramaswamy, are because the employees of government, such as Lakota schools, failed.  Protesting against voters’ choices will not solve the problem of how people came to feel the way they did.  Government employees, including school teachers and administrators, did not provide a good product, and people have come to admit that their service was not worth the money.  That is the environment in which Lakota schools and many other school districts find themselves.  And it won’t get better for them.  They thought that the politics of guilt would last forever and the entire levy structure of using children to acquire more tax revenue to feed greedy, liberal unions would always continue.  But the truth is, as we know it today, public education is a thing of the past, and it’s never coming back.  People, if given a choice, will not choose to spend their time around people who are hostile to them.  The way these radicals shut down opposition at school board meetings in general is why the Trump administration is opening up School Choice options and sending their management back to the states.  The radicals had five decades to figure it out, and what they gave us is embarrassing at best and certainly not worth the money we’ve spent on it.  So, who is to blame?  Attend a school board meeting and witness the quality of the people screaming for more money, and the answer will quickly become apparent.  The current school structure, where money is attached to a zip code rather than the child, is like the Berlin Wall trying to kill people attempting to escape to the West.  The mentality is the same, and the more the teachers’ unions dig in, the more people want to be as far away from them as possible.  And the people they vote for in office are those who will give them options away from those radical government employees.

Rich Hoffman

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

DeWine’s State of the State Speech: Lakota schools plots their own demise

Oddly enough, while I was in Columbus to attend the Governor’s State of the State speech, it was Lakota schools that everyone was talking about, and they wanted to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit.  But in many ways, that wasn’t surprising, and it was confirmed again in Mike DeWine’s speech that day.  Years and years of kicking the can down the road in all these public schools were catching up to them, and the bill was due, and nobody knew what to do about it.  Governors like DeWine have done for decades what they were now doing at Lakota schools around 91 miles to the south in Butler County, Ohio, they were writing tax payer checks for a product and service that fewer and fewer people wanted, and now with Trump in the White House, the warnings I have been giving everyone about what was going to happen are coming true.  Instead of getting out in front of these funding problems, Lakota schools dug in and became more woke.  Senator Lang tried to tell them on a call later that day after the Governor’s speech, but the school system had dug in the opposite direction.  Others and I have tried to give Lakota conservative board members a chance to deal with this issue, and their response as a school board was to run them all off, and that extends beyond Darbi Boddy, the most recent that they found some way to push out of management.  And like things are where liberal types run things, everything costs too much money, and now Trump was cutting back the Department of Education and gubernatorial candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy was talking about significant reforms in education with merit pay, leaving schools like Lakota to join lawsuits with other schools having the same problem, hoping that some sixties flowerchild protest might recover for them a silly little 9 million dollar loss that has come out of their budget due to students utilizing Ed Choice vouchers that are now expanding under the Trump administration and flowing down through the states.  For perspective, Lakota schools in Butler County, Ohio, has a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and that’s still not enough money to fund education the way they want to.

And you know what makes me the angriest about all this? I didn’t get any of Fran’s cookies this year. Fran is Mike DeWine’s long-time and very dedicated wife, who typically gives them out to attendees of her husband’s speech in the rotunda.  This year, activists were there chanting for more money as they felt the pinch from a social disconnect from the standard old traditional funding model of public education.  To avoid the activists, DeWine was ushered away underground to safety, leaving the rest of us to watch their bizarre and out-of-touch rituals with curiosity. The Lakota situation was the topic of conversation because they are one of the largest districts in Ohio, and so went them, so went everyone.  And that was kind of a proper metaphor for DeWine’s State of the State speech.  A do-gooder Governor tosses money at public education and hopes that everything will work well for the kids.  But its these crazy labor unions with woke politics that have screwed up the funding model because people don’t like the product.  And school vouchers, much less restricted these days and growing more so, are giving parents the choice away from their zip code schools where they pay enormous property taxes to fund a political movement they hate essentially.  And Lakota schools were right in the middle of the spectacle leaving DeWine to give just another empty speech about the value of education, and sending books in the mail to students to help with literacy, when the real problem was significant and ominous, and far beyond at this point just passing out cookies in the Statehouse Rotunda to ease tempers.  Legislators were in the middle of the budgeting process for public education at the time of this speech, but the government unions want to cry and protest for money that just isn’t there and aren’t willing to deal with the reality of the coming changes.  And those legislators were mad at what Lakota was thinking of doing then, which they did later that evening.  So it wasn’t a good move by the Lakota School Board.  But I tried to warn everyone, and they didn’t listen.  Much more on that to come.

The main thing in DeWine’s speech was that the Governor came to the speech like an old grandpa that went out to dinner the night before to eat barbeque ribs and still had on a bib from that experience the next day when he thought he was showing up for dinner in a nice suit and tie.  DeWine was out of step and slightly behind the rest of the world for his sixth year in office, most of which had not been very good, especially during the COVID-19 years.  But watching him speak, I thought of him as a nice guy who has been constantly suckered by the same kind of losers who protest education funding, like the people who greeted him upon leaving the State of the State peech.  The old flowerchild strategy of crying like some baby bird until mother government drops a worm in its mouth has long been exhausted, and DeWine never understood it.  He’s a good man from a political generation that caused all these problems and doesn’t know what to do about it.  We have to wait another year or so before we get Vivek Ramaswamy and tackle some of these key issues because just throwing money at problems is not what voters will do in the future. 

The best thing about DeWine’s State of the State speech was the expansion of business enterprise in Ohio, specifically the Andruil factory just south of Columbus and the Intel facility to the north.  There was a lot to talk about, and for DeWine’s credit, many people have been working in the background to make Ohio a much more business-friendly state.  At least DeWine hasn’t stood in the way of those efforts; he’s been willing to tag along.  We’ll get a lot more with Vivek Ramaswamy as Governor, but since DeWine was able to part ways with Amy Acton, the stringy haired hippie who used to be the Health Director during Covid, Ohio has grown more business friendly to make up for their position of lockdown politics that so crippled just about everyone.  Over the last couple of years, DeWine has at least not shut the door to companies like Intel, even though it has largely been members of the Senate that paved the way.  That’s how government works, and it’s very fascinating.  But once the good news was talked about regarding Ohio and DeWine’s speech, the topic went back to the tired old view of the world, and the chants outside could be heard in the chamber, and the reality of places like Lakota schools was coming to fruition.  The days of easy money stolen from taxpayers to fund woke causes were over.  And many people at the State of the State speech in the Ohio Statehouse were struggling with the ramifications of decades of trying to appease the screams of the teacher union types.  But reality has a lot more in store for them than they realize.  The result will be more anger at the people running public education and politicians like Mike DeWine ending their terms dismayed while much more innovative people replace them with reforms that will change all the rules.  The Lakota School Board, in its current form, is just not prepared to deal with it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Capitol Hill is the Most Intelligent Place on Earth: Correcting humanity where they fell short in the Book of Judges

For the first time in my life, I was ready to give Washington D.C. a fair shake, only because Trump was in the White House, and Republicans now controlled the House and the Senate, and the Supreme court has a general 6 to 3 majority toward the thinking I think is necessary in our American Republic.  And I would say at no point before this precise moment would I say otherwise, because there has always been something wrong with our system of government which I affiliate with George Washington himself and his attachment to the Bible’s Book of Judges and the character of Gideon.  With those political conditions fulfilled, I wanted to return to Washington with a fresh perspective and allow myself to see it the way it was designed to be, not to the level that humans failed to live up to the lofty expectations that established the capital of America to begin with.  We typically view these kinds of things by how people fall short of the goals to achieve high honor.  But looking at Washington D.C. from the perspective of centuries, not days, weeks, months, or decades, I saw something coming together with Trump that I think our young nation was designed from the beginning to achieve, and now we have arrived at that moment.  So, with that in mind, my wife and I allowed ourselves to see Washington from a scholarly perspective and to love it.  To come to terms with it.  And to help lead it to this next phase of America’s fascinating story and in what I would say was the purpose all along, to restore to humanity the intention established in the Book of Judges to create the kind of government God wanted for the world, from the beginning. 

So before my wife and I could do what we intended to do, which was go and spend a few days specifically on Capitol Hill in the legislative corridors itself, then the Library of Congress, as well as a whole day at the Supreme Court, I needed a few days at the Museum of the Bible, and a day a George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon.  We spent significant time on the Mall just reading and thinking and getting away from the noise of the current world and dug deep into the Masonic references that were all over the layout of the city that Pierre L’Enfant had intended with all of George Washington’s Master Mason friends from Alexandria just to the south.  To step beyond the conspiracies that have not understood the purpose from the very beginning, which had come into fulfilment through a lot of blood and sacrifice, to what kind of government we now had, with Elon Musk and President Trump up Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, past Ford’s theater where Lincoln was shot, past the Trump hotel that has the steeple of the Old Post Office that points to celestial references on August 12th from the vantage point of the Capitol steps, to the truth of the matter.  And I mention those names, President Trump, and Elon Musk who are new best friends in all sincerity, only America could have produced people like that to do what they are doing now.  To see it, I needed to dive deep into Washington D. C’s history, to walk and touch things myself.  Over a couple days I bought 56 new books and read most of them by the middle of the following week in a fury because I was looking for an answer and upon visiting Capitol Hill with a fresh perspective and the context of 5000 years of human history, I felt I understood it in the way it was always intended.  And I can honestly say that I love the place for all its lofty ambitions. 

I was standing outside Speaker Johnson’s office with Steve Scalise when they recessed due to the disruptions in the Well during the censor of Al Green, for the mess he and other Democrats made of themselves during Trump’s State of the Union speech just a few days prior.  And I was thinking of that even in the context of the history I referenced.  The place itself, Capitol Hill, was dedicated to the best and most intelligent perspective that human beings could strive to unleash, and that was the point of the censor.  It wasn’t political as much as an insistence on a specific level of sincerity as a representative republic.  As I stood there, I thought of the J6 protestors overwhelming the security and what they were rightfully angry about.  The place had failed to live up to the expectations of “The People,” and they were letting the political characters know that they had failed and weren’t entitled to the gifts of Capitol Hill by default.  I had been to Washington D.C. on other occasions, but this was the first time with this perspective. After much research, I could honestly say that I understood it as intended.  To that point, I had never been to the Library of Congress, even though I’ve had a lot of interactions with it over the years.  I was impressed with the Capitol building, but I was astonished at the beauty and splendor of the Library of Congress once we took the tunnel from the Capitol cafeteria after eating some lunch down there with many recognizable characters that are on television all the time, and emerging directly into the basement of the Library of Congress.  My first thought was that this was a place intended to be Heaven on Earth, which is what my idea of Heaven would be.  The foyer was laced with gold and high ceilings of white marble, which was a purposeful statement about lofty American ambitions.  Why isn’t this place promoted more to the outside world? It was every bit as impressive as anything they have in Europe.  I would have to say that the Library of Congress is my favorite place on Earth because I love books so much. It is such a collection of intelligence placed into the context of Heavenly ambitions that seeing it in person, then going into the reading room, was as good as Heaven. I could spend an eternity there and never get tired of it. 

From there, my wife and I spent the day at the Supreme Court, next door.  I asked a lot of questions, so many that we were able to get into places that visitors aren’t typically allowed to go, and of course one of those places was the courtroom itself.  But I wanted to see the world the way members of the Supreme Court did.  Thinking of the Bible and the laws that successfully made their way into the creation of all Western Civilization, and were the foundations of the American Constitution, here was a place in the Supreme Court that was trying to do what the Israelites couldn’t in the Book of Judges, and that is have a prosperous self-governed society without screaming for a king to rule over them.  We sat on the Supreme Court’s steps after much reflection and looked over at the Library of Congress, then the Capitol building right in front of us.  I was thinking of Steve Bannon doing his famous podcast behind me over on A Street and all the intelligence happening on that little hill in Washington D.C., and it was the most intelligent place on Earth.  Many people don’t live up to that expectation, but the place was built to evoke in people the best they could utter.  From my perspective, I could see that it was working, and working better than any place in the world.  And finally, after many years of striving, it is evident that the American experiment in republic government, meant to correct humanity where they had failed in the Book of Judges, was succeeding in ways that were always intended.  But that it had taken a few hundred years to come into bloom.  And it was wonderful to see. 

The spot where Trump gave his Inauguration speech

Rich Hoffman

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